Music for the Dead and the Control of Ritual Behavior in Spain, 1450-1550

Abstract

The idea that music had the to influence the behavior of participants in rituals was taken for granted in late-fifteenthand sixteenthcentury Spain. This assumption relates in part to the discussion of the musical ethos and its to affect the character of the listener as discussed in ancient Greece by Plato and Aristotle, among others. This power became one aspect of Greek thought transmitted into Latin by Boethius, whose work provided the basis for much of the theoretical writings of Ramos de Pareja in fifteenth-century Spain. Concern about this as it was thought to influence behavior is reflected in a number of documents, specifically ecclesiastical constitutions and accounts of rituals in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. My investigation centers on the repertory of polyphonic music for the liturgy for the dead composed first by Spanish and later by Latin American composers. This music, particularly the items for Matins and the processions to honor the deceased, became a singularly Spanish obsession. Unlike composers in other areas of European culture, where settings for Matins and the processions continued to be somewhat rare throughout the sixteenth century, composers in Spain and its colonial areas in the western hemisphere created an enormous number of such works. As will become apparent below, there is evidence for older traditions of polyphonic music in this liturgy in Spain; some of these traditions were probably improvised practices that may have existed long before the time of the first surviving works. Much of the understanding about how the later written works affected the listeners was almost certainly based on beliefs surrounding these older practices. There were probably many different traditions involving improvised music to honor the dead. Some of these no doubt were laments in the vernacular, but there was some tradition based on ornamenting, with polyphony, those portions of the responsory chants sung by cantors. This practice was probably the basis for the later written works. The oldest extant written settings from this repertory are those by Juan de Anchieta and Francisco de la Torre, both of whom composed responsories for the processions and Matins. Both of these items were written in the period between 1470