Since the mid-eighteenth century the fandango has been regarded as the epitome of Spanish cultural identity. It became increasingly popular in instrumental chamber music, as well-known examples by Domenico Scarlatti, Antonio Soler and Luigi Boccherini show. To date, published musicological scholarship has not considered the role of solo violin music in the dissemination of the fandango or the shaping of a ‘Spanish’ musical identity. Now, eight rediscovered pieces – which can be dated to the period 1730–1775 – show that the violin was frequently used to perform fandangos, including stylized chamber-music versions. In addition to offering evidence of the violin's role in the genre, these pieces reveal the hybridization of the fandango with foreign musical traditions, such as the Italian violin sonata and French courtly dances, demonstrating hitherto overlooked negotiations between elite and popular culture in mid-eighteenth-century Spain. Analysis of these works’ musical features challenges traditional discourses on the ‘Spanishness’ of the fandango and, more broadly, on the opposition between ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ music in eighteenth-century Spain.
En los últimos quince años se ha producido un notable auge de los llamados performance studies (literalmente, estudios sobre la interpretación musical), que parten de la premisa de que la música no es un texto (la partitura), sino más bien un evento, todo lo que sucede en el momento en que dicho texto se convierte en sonido. Este giro conceptual está teniendo un enorme impacto en la musicología, vinculando de manera más directa a musicólogos e intér-pretes. Las publicaciones sobre la historia de la interpretación, el análisis de grabaciones sonoras o los criterios de ejecución para diferentes periodos e instrumentos, entre otras muchas cuestiones, están a la orden del día. Este auge se ha sentido sobre todo en el mundo anglosajón, con autores como John Rink y Nicholas Cook 1 . En el entorno hispano, estudiosos como Luca Chiantore ya detectaron la necesidad de aplicar estas perspectivas hace tiempo 2 , pero aún queda mucho camino por recorrer para integrarlas en el debate musicológico. La división del sistema español de educación musical en conservatorios y universidades, con orientaciones académicas demasiado diferentes, no facilita tal integración, que sin embargo es posible. Un ejemplo son los recientes congresos sobre performance studies promovidos por el grupo de investigación Música en España: composición, recepción, interpretación (MECRI), que han dado lugar a varias publicaciones 3 .En este contexto, la traducción al español del conocido tratado de violín de Leopold Mozart realizada por Nieves Pascual (Arpegio, 2013) ha sido sin duda pertinente y necesaria. La misma autora analiza en un reciente libro los contenidos del tratado en comparación con otros textos
The Salamanca Manuscript (ca. 1659), preserved in the Biblioteca Nacional de España but virtually unknown to date, is the earliest Spanish violin-music source that has been located. It contains ten melodies of bailes (popular dances), danzas (courtly dances), and canciones (songs) from Spain, Portugal, Italy and Latin America. Most of this repertoire was sung, played and danced simultaneously. The manuscript includes five dance types of which Iberian melodic examples prior to 1700 were hardly known to date: folijón, morisca, zarambeque, chaconne and Spanish galliard. In addition, it contains examples of three schemata that are better known: ruggiero, jácara and canario. The music is written in tablatures that symbolize violin fingerings, but not the rhythm or harmony, so the transcription is very problematic. The article contains a codicological study of the source and a "historically informed re-composition" that departs from various sources, not only musical (e.g., Sanz and Ruiz de Ribayaz), but also iconographic (e.g., Velázquez) and literary (e.g., Cervantes). The proposed transcriptions allow for refining the musical prototypes of the eight aforementioned bailes and danzas so far extant. This small music selection shows the intense internationalization of popular repertory in the mid seventeenth century.
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