Music and Power in Early Modern Spain

Harmonic Spheres of Influence

Timothy M. Foster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000485196
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book explores the representation of music in early modern Spanish literature and reveals how music was understood within the framework of the Harmony of the Spheres, emanating from cosmic harmony as directed by the creator.

The Harmony of Spheres was not ideologically neutral but rather tied to the earthly power structures of the Church, Crown, and nobility. Music could be "true, " taking the listener closer to the divine, or "false, " leading the listener astray. As such, music was increasingly seen as a potent weapon to be wielded in service of earthly centers of power, which can be observed in works such as vihuela songbooks, the colonial chronicle of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and in the palace theater of Pedro Calderón de la Barca. While music could be a powerful metaphor mapping onto ideological currents of imperial Spain, this volume shows that it also became a contested site where diverse stakeholders challenged the Harmonic Spheres of Influence.

Music and Power in Early Modern Spain is a useful tool for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in musicology, music history, Spanish literature, cultural studies, and transatlantic studies in the early modern period.

1 Songs in the key of Spain Vihuela and the Ideology of Musical Humanism

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197225-2

King David’s legendary musical abilities made him a renowned figure among musicians and theorists in the Renaissance and beyond. According to 1 Samuel, King Saul was plagued by an evil spirit, so he sent for someone skillful at playing the harp (also translated as lyre). A young David was brought in front of the king: “Whenever the spirit from God seized Saul, David would take the harp and play, and Saul would be relieved and feel better, for the evil spirit would leave him” (1 Samuel 16:23). This was no ordinary encounter, for God Himself had placed the evil spirit in Saul, regretting having made him king. David’s skill with the harp formed part of the “tests” (along with his slaying of Goliath) that proved his worthiness to serve as the new king. The providential nature of King David’s rise to power—directly aided by God—adds special weight to the power of stringed instruments in Western tradition. David would go on to be a powerful king—musically and otherwise—composing Psalms, building instruments for the dedication of the temple (Chronicles 7:6), and even forming the lineage of the Messiah, according to Christian interpretation.

In El cortesano [The Courtier], a 1561 narrative depiction of the Valencian court by musician Luis Milán, the author creates a sixteenth-century parallel to this biblical scene. A fictionalized Milán serves as the protagonist, who goes through the narrative picking verbal and musical fights. A rival courtier finishes a story about a possessed dog by referencing other evil spirits prowling about and hinting at Milán’s ability to cast them out:

el mal espíritu, que si don Luis Milan quiere echarle de aquí, taña un poco, que no faltará el demonio de la envidia que alguno terná á su música, y saliéndole del cuerpo, podrá alabar las obras de Dios que el envidioso deshacer quiere.

(287)

[if Don Luis Milán wants to drive the evil spirit out of here, he plays a little, for surely there is no lack of the demon of envy that some have towards his music. Once it leaves his body, he will be able to worship the works of God that the jealous man wants to undo].

To this tongue-in-cheek reference to his powerful music, Milán responds, “Denme la vihuela, que para luégo es tarde, para sanar un envidioso” [“Give me my vihuela, for later is too late to save a jealous man”]. Repeating the providential work of King David, Luis Milán is sure of his ability to drive out the bad spirit of envy, not with the lyre or harp of ancient texts but with the modern Spanish vihuela.

This chapter examines the special role of stringed instruments in musical humanism by investigating the corpus of sixteenth-century vihuela books. Through both front matter and song content, the books demonstrate a conscious cultivation of a Catholic humanist worldview, using stringed music to project contemporary Spain as heir to the classical world. In El cortesano, Luis Milán’s vihuela—like the harp of King David—has the ability to drive out demons. This same vision of music’s power and purpose can be seen in the songbooks written for vihuela by Luis Milán and six other musicians of the sixteenth century. By explicitly engaging both with musical humanist beliefs (as the heirs of Greek tradition) and imperial grandeur of the Spanish Church and Crown (as the heir of Rome), the vihuela books enmesh the Harmony of the Spheres within the hierarchies of sixteenth-century Spain.

These seven books begin with dedications to monarchs and illustrious nobles, woodcuts that conflate ancient Greek and Spanish Renaissance musical culture, and music theory prologues that acknowledge the power of music to move emotions. The books contain Italian sonnets and Catholic liturgical music, evidence of their humanistic and religious milieu, alongside Spanish romances, or traditional ballad poetry. Four types of ballads are present in the vihuela books: ballads of classical antiquity, ballads of Carolingian history, frontier ballads (that tell tales of the Reconquest), and biblical ballads (including ballads from Sephardic tradition; Etzion, “The Spanish” 184). Placed in a musical humanist context, I argue that these songs reflect the imperial attempt to appropriate the lettered traditions of the classical and Carolingian worlds while at the same time channeling the presence of Muslims and Jews from the peninsula into a new Catholic imperial context. The distinction between “true” and “false” music becomes decisive in the Christian attempt at forming artistic hegemony on the peninsula. In both the vihuela songbooks and in El cortesano, the true music bringing the musician and listener closer to the Neoplatonic divine is sung by Christian Spaniards, while false music is sung by foreigners, Muslims, and Jews. Accordingly, the power of music is used to “tune” the dissonant non-Catholic strings of Muslim and Sephardic ballads in the vihuela books, bringing them into greater imperial harmony.

David’s secret chord: The power of stringed instruments in musical humanism

Stringed instruments occupy a salient position in classical and biblical articulations of the power of music. Ancient Greeks credited Pythagoras with the invention of the monochord, an instrument with a single string that proved his providential discovery of the mathematical basis of harmony. The monochord was later expanded to the tetrachord (often called a lyre or a zither), a Greek instrument with four strings. Philosophically, Boethius grants a primal state to the tetrachord, imbuing it with moral value:

In the beginning, Nicomachus reports, music was truly simple, since it was composed of four strings. It continued in this state until the time of Orpheus. […] Indeed, there was nothing discordant in these, in imitation of cosmic music, which consists of the four elements.

(29–30; Book 1)

Likewise, classical mythology is replete with stories of gods and heroes playing stringed instruments, from Apollo, to Mercury, to Orpheus, to Amphion. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates and his interlocutor agree that the only instruments that should be allowed in the ideal state are the cithara and the lyre, two stringed instruments renowned for their ability to encourage military spirit (1036; §399d). In the Homeric Hymns, Hermes was said to have invented the lyre by scooping out the insides of a tortoise and affixing seven strings made of sheep gut (56–7). He bequeathed “lady lyre” to a young Apollo, warning of its power:

If one who knows

skill and wisdom invites her, she’ll teach

all sorts of things, speaking to delight the mind,

singing smoothly with gentle practice,

fleeing painful work. But if one who knows

nothing seeks her first with violence,

then she’ll chatter in vain and off-key.

(71)

Other stories credited the instrument’s power to Apollo, god of music and the sun. In a song contest from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pan played his reeds (pan flute), but Apollo won the laurel playing his lyre, proving the superiority of stringed instruments (Book 11, 146–71). Another Homeric Hymn to the Muses, Apollo, and Zeus established the inheritance of Apollo’s divine lyre: “From the Muses and the skillful archer Apollo/come human bards and lyre players on earth” (97). Thus, earthly string players could trace their instruments to Apollo’s influence.

One such “human bard” was Orpheus, a celebrated poet and singer and son of the muse Calliope. Orpheus was called “Apollo’s poet,” and possessed the power to calm wild beasts with his lyre (Ovid, Book 11, 1–66). Orpheus also used his musical power to save his wife, Eurydice, from death, traveling to the underworld to move the hearts of its rulers, Hades and Persephone (Book 10, 1–85). Another earthly player, Amphion, was said to have used the magical powers of his music to assist in building the walls of the city of Thebes (Book 6, 146–203). The power of stringed instruments to do the will of the player was a well-established trope in classical mythology.

The assimilation of classical mythology into early modern Christian thought is demonstrated in Fray Luis de León’s representation of the music in the highest sphere. There, the soul hears, “el gran maestro,/a aquesta inmensa cítara aplicado” (95) [“the great master,/engrossed in his immense zither”] accompanied by the “apolíneo sacro coro” [“Apollo’s sacred choir”]. It is significant that the music produced by God is not voice, wind, or even organ (Salinas’s instrument that served as inspiration for Fray Luis’s poem) but rather by a stringed instrument, imbued with such power in the biblical and classical tradition. In a similar manner, on the frontispiece of Franchinus Gaffurius’s Practica musicae (1496), Apollo is depicted as a divine string player directing the chorus of muses, each within a heavenly sphere corresponding to one of the Greek modes and a note on the musical scale (see Figure 1.1). Gaffurius—a priest and active church composer—like León, makes oblique reference to God as Apollo through appeal to classical tradition. Nevertheless, his Apollo wears contemporary clothing and plays a Renaissance stringed instrument (much like the vihuela books), demonstrating the impact of classical ideas about stringed instruments on musical humanism.

Figure 1.1 Apollo as divine string player in Gaffurius, Practica musicae. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The power of stringed instruments was not limited to the divine but also had earthly applications. In emblematic literature and images in political treatises, artists compared the republic to a harp (González 10) or even depicted Iberian rulers as classical players of stringed instruments. Sara González speculates that “the monarch appears as the musician who tunes, maintains and plays the instrument” (85). The physical properties of a stringed instrument make for a suggestive metaphor between it and a kingdom: many strings must be tuned and played harmoniously together for the whole instrument, or political body, to align in harmony. From ancient Greek thought, to Judeo-Christian tradition, to the European Renaissance, stringed instruments were frequently invoked for their remarkable power.

The Spanish vihuela books emerge from this musical humanist acknowledgment of stringed instruments as a special conduit. Allusion to the power of stringed instruments is present in five out of the seven books, for example, Valderrábano’s statement:

Ca en la vihuela es la mas perfecta y profunda musica, la mas dulce y suaue consonantia, la que mas applaze al oydo y alegra el entendimiento, y otrosi la de mayor eficacia, que mas mueue y enciende los animos de los que oyen.

(n.p.)

[In the vihuela is the most perfect and profound music, the sweetest and smoothest consonance; it is the most pleasing to the ear and happiest to the mind, and in other ways the most efficient, most strongly moving and illuminating the souls that hear it].

By the early modern period, instruments such as the zither, lyre, and ancient harp had evolved into instruments such as the rabel, lute, guitar, concert harp, vihuela de arco (bowed viol), and the vihuela de mano (strummed vihuela). The seven vihuela books and the instruments themselves were accessible to a wide variety of social strata, from the nobility, to courtiers, to servants, to university graduates, to clergymen, and even to members of the underworld of pícaros (Corona Alcalde 106–110, Griffiths and Hultberg 355–60). By reproducing prominent vocal compositions by famous composers such as Josquin des Prez and Cristóbal de Morales, the vihuela books brought elite music to a more widespread audience (Griffiths, “La imprenta” 10) and proved “useful for providing socially appropriate repertoire” to “upwardly mobile Spanish men and women” (Lawrence 137).¹

The seven books do not represent the work of a coherent school, although the earlier influence the latter (Griffiths “At Court and At Home” 10).² The authors represent a variety of professions and social positions, such as court musicians (Milán, Narváez, Valderrábano, Fuenllana), church musicians (Mudarra), and musical amateurs (Pisador, Daza). The books are made up of a variety of pieces: (1) intabulations of vocal music (masses, motets), (2) accompaniment for solo songs (romances [ballads], villancicos [carols], canciones [songs], madrigales [madrigals], sonetos [sonnets], all with the words printed next to the intabulation), and (3) purely instrumental works, which include dances, diferencias [variations], and virtuosic genres such as the fantasia. The books feature both Spanish and Franco-Flemish composers, reflecting the broad geographic character of Habsburg Spain.

Many scholars conceive of the vihuela as an innovative instrument that pushed both musical and ideological boundaries, a vital part of the musical humanist development of the new si...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Music and Myth from Orpheus to Tubal
• 1 Songs in the key of Spain: Vihuela and the Ideology of Musical Humanism
• 2 Cervantes off-key: Irony and Imperialism in the Novelas ejemplares
• 3 Pre-Columbian providentialism: Musical Origins in Andean Imagination
• 4 The king’s polyphony and the composing of the Americas
• 5 Four-part harmony for the four-part empire: Calderón’s Musical Metaphors at the Court of Philip IV
• 6 Immaculate composition: Religion, Race, and Propaganda
• Conclusion: Orpheus Looking Back
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index