Making Musical Works in Renaissance Spain

Abstract

Why is it that Renaissance musicians (in Spain in this case) could identify as the same work compositions that today might be seen as different? Wherein was the commonality? Current ontologies of music, deeply rooted in modern theories and aesthetics revolve around the notion of musical masterpieces that exist as static monuments of musical art. Not only inadequate from a historical point of view, such a conceptualisation impacts heavily on the way we perform music, how we study it and how we think about it today. Scholars such as Treitler and Strohm have proposed substituting composition over practice to highlight the act of performance over prior creation as a way of shifting the focus in the development of contemporary historiography. In parallel with recent studies on contrapuntal improvisation they have stressed the need to incorporate oral traditions within music history and to stimulate reconsideration conceptualisation of “making musical works” in the Renaissance, and the very nature of the works themselves. Starting with the notion of the Renaissance “musical work” as a group of fluid, dynamic multiplicities, this book explores varied approaches to the “musical work.” It includes lexicological analyses of Renaissance musical terminology, source studies that identify the changing practices and identities of specific works, and broader questions such as interrelationships between music, architecture and rhetoric, o between space and work. The book is further enriched by a study of the 15,000 musical works that resided in the library of Ferdinand Columbus, that survive as indices, never studied or published.