The Cancionero de la Sablonara: A critical edition. by Judith Etzion

Abstract

Only a small portion of the music produced in Spain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been revived either in modern editions, live performances, or recordings. There is little Spanish music—apart from the works of the immigrant Domenico Scarlatti—between the generations of Tomis Luis de Victoria and Isaac Alb4niz that has gained prominence. Superficially, this might seem due to the lack of modern editions, or historically it might be attributable to the priorities of an earlier generation of Spanish cleric-musicologists whose interests lay in the liturgical masterpieces of renaissance polyphony. It is simply that Spanish baroque music (other than that for the church) does not conform to the models defined and accepted in normative Western music history, and Spanish composers of the period are not comparable to the Monteverdis, Lullys, or Bachs of this world. In terms of contemporary musicological values, they may as well have been women or homosexuals. (The latter is not necessarily out of the question, nor the former for that matter, although the evidence is less encouraging.) The fact that Spanish composers chose their own musical path and that Spanish audiences rejected opera very early in the seventeenth century was effectively an act of suicide in terms of gaining a place of prominence in modern music history.1