The ‘Guerra Manuscript’ (c.1680) and the Rise of Solo Song in Spain

Abstract

The discovery of a new anthology of secular songs from Madrid fills an important lacuna in our understanding of secular music in seventeenth-century Spain. The Biblioteca Xeral of the University of Santiago de Compostela — near the romanesque cathedral for which the famous Codex Calixtinus was written — preserves a manuscript of 111 folios (E-SCu MS 265) which has hitherto escaped the attention of both musicological and literary scholars. It contains 100 anonymous songs, all but two for solo voice and continuo, and was copied by a certain José Miguel Guerra, scribe of the Spanish Royal Chapel. The manuscript is undated but, as we will argue later, it appears to have been compiled around 1680. If this estimate is correct, it would make this anthology the earliest collection of its kind, a significant missing link between the latest polyphonic cancioneros of the mid-seventeenth century and the numerous anthologies of solo songs and cantatas from the 1690s onwards. This article represents a preliminary investigation of the manuscript, its contents and the circumstances of its compilation, though many of the questions surrounding the collection will have to await further study.