ANDALUSIAN MUSIC AND THE CANTIGAS DE SANTA MARIA

Manuel Pedro Ferreira

When the question of the relationship between the Cantigas de Santa Maria and Medieval Hispano-arabic music is raised, the shadow of Julin Ribera's partial musical edition of the Cantigas , published in 1922, cannot be avoided1. In Ribera's edition, the Alfonsine songs are presented as derivatives of classical Arab music, and transcribed according to what Ribera thought was typically Arab; as a consequence, their original notation was often disregarded. Ribera's approach came under heavy criticism from professional musicologists, amongst them Higinio Angls, who in his monumental work of 1943-58 buried &endash; seemingly for good &endash; the scholarly pretensions to read Arab music into the Cantigas2. In the past half-century (1943-1993), the pro-Arab stance has therefore been confined to the performing domain as a kind of colouristic exoticism, of doubtful historical seriousness, which is sometimes made vaguely respectable through mention of the Islamic instruments depicted in one of the manuscript sources of the Cantigas3. This tendency to value instrumental colour can be explained not only on the basis of Ribera's claim that the repertory has an "orchestral" character4, but also in relation to the history of the modern "early music" movement; in actual practice, instrumental colour has been served as a kind of dressing added to Angls's transcriptions, which have been generally accepted by the performers. A lot has none the less changed after Ribera's edition in our knowledge of Medieval Arab music; and our understanding of the original notation of the Cantigas has progressed in the past few years. The time has come to re-evaluate the Arab question from a scholarly point of view. The first thing to do is to rephrase the question, substituting "Andalusian" for "Arab". Moorish-Andalusian (or Ibero-Arab) music is not just, or even mainly, Arab music per se. It is a hybrid Western tradition which evolved independently from oriental trends from the ninth-century onwards and reached its highest level of integration of Western and oriental elements in the twelfth-century5. The originality of Andalusian music, when compared with other Western Medieval traditions, is to be sought primarily in the aspects of form and rhythm. Form represents the Peninsular indigenous element; rhythm, the Arab one. The question of musical form in the Medieval Andalusian song has generally been ignored; recently, Vicente Beltrn and, most importantly, David Wulstan, have faced the problem and attempted to give it a solution6. Both take as their starting point the formal structure of the poems, to which they remain anchored as their only secure evidence; naturally, since the textual data gives minimal musical information, their conclusions cannot be firmly founded from a musical point of view. I have therefore taken the opposite approach: start with the surviving music from Moorish Andalusia (Al-Andalus). My work was made possible by the recent publication, by James Monroe and Benjamim Liu, of nine surviving azjal and muwashshahat composed in Al-Andalus between c. 1100 and the mid-fourteenth century7. As complementary data, I used the analysis of a representative sample both of today's North African music of Andalusian origin8 and of the muwashshah

oral tradition in general9. The results of this undertaking, which I will summarize here, will be published in detail elsewhere10. The main conclusion is that the muwashshah and the symmetrical zajal seem originally to have had mainly two kinds of formal scheme, corresponding to the virelai (AA || BBB AA , AB || CCC AB) or to a special kind of rondeau (AB || BBB AB , [...] AAA BA). The zajal proper, textually assymetrical, must have had related schemes, for the zajal and the muwashshah are two faces of the same tradition11. At this juncture, the example of the Cantigas de Santa Maria has to be taken into account. Poetically speaking, most of them have the zajal form. Musically, they tend to present the virelai form, which as we have seen is also characteristic of the muwashshah. In itself, this fact is not conclusive, for the French virelai could be taken as both the poetical and musical model for the Cantigas; the only problem with this hypothesis is that the virelai hardly existed in France before c.1300, while the Cantigas were composed before 1284; this fact led Willi Apel to propose a Spanish origin for the virelai12. Moreover, in the Cantigas the influence of the French rondeau is slight when compared with the important presence of the reverse kind of rondeau (AB || BB AB), also characteristic, mutatis mutandis, of the muwashshah; this is found in more than seventy Cantigas13. Since this last form is virtually unknown elsewhere in Medieval Europe14, it is probably indigenous; and since the Cantigas were mostly composed in a cultural environment where the Ibero-Arab presence was strongly felt, it probably derives from the zajal or its mozarabic counterpart. The Cantigas de Santa Maria appear therefore, from a formal point of view, to encapsule typical features of medieval Andalusian music: the virelai form and what I propose to call the Andalusian rondeau. Let us now turn our attention to rhythm. Rhythm is intrinsically linked with the musical notation of the manuscripts. The notation has been variously described by different authors, depending on the interpretative model used to approach it. Hendrik Van der Werf, for instance, confronted the notation with the late-thirteenth-century Franconian system, and inevitably concluded that the alfonsine notation is not Franconian15, which is hardly surprising since this system was formulated in writing only around 1280, when most of the Cantigas were in the process of being copied16. It does not follow, though, that the alfonsine notation lacks a mensural character, for there were mensural systems in existence before Franco of Cologne. On the contrary, I think that it can be proved that the mensural dimension is an important one &endash; I have dealt with this problem elsewhere17 &endash; regardless of how we choose to interpret it. Interpretation is about ways to make the data historically intelligible. Angls was right when he accepted the notation as it stands without trying to force it into preconceived moulds, as Ribera has done; he also realized that the rhythms written down by the copyists were often equivalent to the contemporary French patterns known as "rhythmic modes", but that this was not always true. Unable to accept Ribera's hypothesis of an Arab derivation, he championed the theory of a folkloric origin for the cases of non-modal rhythm; needless to say, the "folk music" label could embrace everything, and because of this generality could be neither proven nor challenged; it was an easy way out of the problem. In my own work, I have expanded the framework of possible preexisting models: French developments of modal rhythm, troubadouresque isosyllabism and the rhapsodic rhythm found in the cantigas d'amigo; since even this large range of possibilities does not exhaust the rhythmic variety found in the repertory, I had eventually to confront the long-discredited hypothesis of an Andalusian connection.

According to one of the leading specialists in Arab music, Baron Rodolphe d'Erlanger, "le rythme est, en musique arabe, l'lment principal et prpondrant de toute composition vocale ou instrumentale". He also remarks that the rhythmic system used by Arab musicians today is substantially the same as it was during the first centuries of Islam18. This system is based on the principle of periodicity: the repetition of a rhythmic period defined by the number and quality of the attacks and the time elapsing between them. This time is strictly measured, meaning that it is counted in units of time. Among the ancient music theorists, Al-Farabi ( 950) is the only one who tries to describe the actual musical practice, instead of following Greek music theory19; he eschews the Greek definition of the basic time-unit as the shortest perceptible time value, choosing instead as time-unit a compound time, as Arab musicians do today20. According to Al-Farabi, a rhythmic period is typically composed of two identical rhythmic cycles. A cycle is a repeated rhythmic pattern superimposed on a given meter. From an abstract point of view, each cycle has a basic form in which all the attacks are separated by equal time-intervals, and the last attack is followed by a silence of the same length (the disjunction). In actual practice, this basic scheme gives way to more complex rhythmic patterns which have the status of standard metric fillings. These metric fillings can be varied over a wide range, and two different variants can be joined together in a period. Al-Farabi himself lists a large number of rhythmic periods derived from each of the seven basic meters, and describes the conventional variation procedures which lead to them; his list is not exhaustive; he simply wants to show how these variation procedures work in practice21. In the following examples, the spacing between two commas ( ' ' ) illustrates the minimum time-unit; if an audible attack marks the beginning of a time-unit, it will be represented ( | ' ); time signatures will be used for convenience, the minimum time-unit being equivalent to a quaver. When the chosen meter is the "First Thaqil" (or "First-Heavy"), (a) (4/2) | ' ' ' | ' ' ' | ' ' ' ' ' ' ' doubling of the attacks will produce the following pattern; (b) (4/2) | ' | ' | ' | ' | ' | ' ' ' ' ' adding a loud attack to allow a proportional disjunction will change it into: (c) (4/2) | ' | ' | ' | ' | ' | ' | ' ' ' If we reproduce this cycle twice in a row, we have one of the forms of the rhythmic period "First-Heavy" listed by Al-Farabi. Another example is the "Heavy-Ramal" meter, (a) (3/2) | ' ' ' | ' ' ' ' ' ' ' with another attack added for continuity, this changes into (b) (3/2) | ' ' ' | ' ' ' | ' ' ' and with doubling of the second attack, it becomes

(c) (3/2) | ' ' ' | ' | ' | ' ' ' which corresponds to another form of the cycle mentioned by Al-Farabi. Variation can also produce syncopation: if we take the continuous pattern, double all attacks and then drop out the fifth, the result is (d) (3/2) | ' | ' | ' | ' ' ' | ' This is one of several syncopated cycles in Al-Farabi's list. If repeated once, we have a homogeneous rhythmic period; if combined, for instance, with the continuous doubleattack cycle, we have an heterogeneous variant also listed in Al-Farabi; if combined with the basic "Ramal" cycle, we have the rhythm al-hafif, used in a thirteenth-century Andalusian composition which survives in today's oral tradition22. It is important not to forget that the musical tradition that Al-Farabi describes travelled West from Badgdad to the Andalus, where it found fertile ground. Furthermore, a number of features distinguish Arab rhythmic periodicity from medieval Western European rhythmic tradition: the larger scale of some cycles and rhythmic periods, the use of syncopation and the importance of quadruple meter may be mentioned. This means that when we find a medieval Spanish repertory, written for the most part probably in Toledo or Seville (next door to a Moorish-Andalusian environment), and using large-scale cycles or periods, with syncopated patterns or in quadruple metre, we may reasonably conclude that it reflects the influence of Arab music. The Cantigas de Santa Maria are such a repertory. In the "Heavy-Ramal" meter, the combination of variants (c) and (d) listed above produces the rhythmic period found in CSM 92 (ex. 1). If we take the above-mentioned form (c) of the cycle "First-Heavy" and double the second attack, we encounter a variant found in CSM 42423 . If, in the second presentation of this rhythmic variant, we add a final attack for support, as recommended by Al-Farabi, we will have a long rhythmic period identical to that found in CSM 25 (ex. 2)24. The long rhythmical period which begins CSM 100 has two versions which differ in the second half (ex. 3); the initial version survives in the rhythm al-Btayhi of the Andalusian tradition (ex. 4)25; both versions can be described as heterogeneous periods made up of two of the "First-Heavy" cycles listed in Al-Farabi26. In this same song, there is another heterogeneous rhythmic period which shares its second half with the second version of the first period (ex. 5). The first half presents a cycle that is another variation on the "FirstHeavy" meter27, and is found in the rhythm al-qa'im wa-nisf of the Andalusian tradition (ex. 6)28. CSM 353 uses exclusively this same cycle. CSM 116 uses a related rhythmic period, made up of this same cycle followed by the basic form of the "First-Heavy" meter (ex. 7). This period is strikingly similar to that found in two sister-compositions by Juan del Encina, "Seora de hermosura" and "Una saosa porfa", which share the same melodic openings29; and is reproduced almost exactly in the first version of "Norabuena vengas" in the Cancionero de Palacio30. CSM 109 exhibits a more complex period based on the same cycle, produced by repeating part of it in the middle of the period &endash; a variation procedure also mentioned by Al-Farabi (ex. 8). The medieval French rhythmical theory and the alternative models mentioned above are unable to explain these seemingly anomalous facts, whereas they make complete sense in the light of Arabian rhythmic theory and its influence on Andalusian song. Given the

historical context, one cannot but reach the conclusion that, at least, the above-mentioned Cantigas were influenced by Ibero-Arab music. That being so, perhaps there are other traces of this influence. Again, the first thing to do is to look more closely at what seems to be a rhythmic anomaly from a French-centered perspective: the dotted rhythm, which is impossible to write within the normal usage of thirteenth-century French notational systems. It can be observed in seventeen of the Cantigas31; in two of them it is used to the exclusion of any other rhythmic pattern32. The way the Toledo and Escorial MSS solve the notational problem is similar: they add a brevis to the long, and then write an isolated brevis; or they use vertical lines after the long to signal its ultra mensuram quality, and then write an isolated brevis (Ex. 9)33. The rhythmical meaning of these procedures is clear from the different ways the scribes chose to write down the same musical idea, whether in the same manuscript, when a phrase is rewritten several times, or in different manuscripts which have the same song; comparative work shows that a long with a brevis attached to it is rhythmically equivalent to a long followed by a double bar; it also shows that this augmented long is equivalent to a long followed by a ligature cum opposita proprietate, or a binary oblique ligature followed by a brevis or a double bar34. Sometimes the Escorial MSS substitute what seems to be a semibrevis for the brevis35, but this can easily be explained as a case of notational inertia &endash; forms of the Toledo notation which are reproduced without translation in the Escorial notation (ex. 10). The important presence of the dotted rhythm in this repertory, given that it is ignored in the surviving Galician-Portuguese troubadour songs and in all the remaining written European music, can be explained through the influence of the Andalusian tradition. We have seen that one of the Andalusian rhythmic cycles uses dotted rhythm; in the Middle East, it is also found in the rhythm Sufiyan36; both derive from classical Arab rhythmic practice. In some of the surviving Medieval Andalusian songs37, dotted rhythm is pervasive: it tends to be associated with the sucessive occurrence of a long and a short syllable (ex. 11). This probably means that dotted rhythm was a standard declamation procedure in Ibero-Arab song, and that it may have influenced the composers of the Cantigas. Another feature of the Andalusian tradition is the use of a five-beat metric pattern already listed in Al-Farabi. Among the seven basic musical meters acknowledged by this theorist, three have five beats per cycle; each of them has a variant which is similar to the French 3rd rhythmic mode, except that the first long has only two units of time instead of three (ex. 12). This rhythmic pattern surfaces in a Hispano-Arab song which has been identified as a muwashshah and was partly transcribed, in the sixteenth-century, by Francisco Salinas (ex. 13a)38. The pattern's influence on folk music is attested to by several traditional songs which reached us in polyphonic settings by Encina, Anchieta and others; its survival may be illustrated here by the song "Tan buen ganadico" as transcribed by Juan del Encina (Ex. 13b)39. It can also be found in CSM 223 &endash; alternative interpretations of the notation leading, in my view, to unsatisfactory results (ex. 13c). This last case may not be the only one. It happens, on the one hand, that some melodies (Prologue, ns 10 and 105) or isolated phrases (cf. ns 38, 41) in the Cantigas de Santa Maria are notated in such a way that both the five-beat and the six-beat transcription is possible. On the other hand, CSM 339 has a phrase which is clearly reminiscent, from both a melic and a rhythmic point of view, of the Ibero-Arab song quoted by Salinas (ex. 14); its notation indicates the third rhythmic mode, which implies a six-beat meter instead of a five-beat one; this suggests that the use of the third rhythmic mode could, in some cases,

be seen as a rhythmic variant based on the "Light-Ramal" meter, or indicate a notational adaptation of an original five-beat pattern. Although the presence of the five-beat meter in the Cantigas cannot be proven with absolute certainty due to notational ambiguity, the important presence in this repertory of Andalusian forms and Arabic rhythmic features makes it historically plausible, and helps to explain the relatively generous use of the third rhythmic mode by Alfonso's collaborators. From this point of view, the preponderance of the second rhythmic mode over the first in the Cantigas, especially in the Toledo MS, could also derive from the coincidence between, on the one hand, the French second mode and, on the other, the fundamental form of the Arab "Light-Ramal" meter. In short: although Angls rightly identified a strong French flavor in the Marian Cantigas, Ribera was also justified in pointing out its debt towards the Andalus. To these important influences one could add those of liturgical music, the troubadours and the GalicianPortuguese love song. We have to conclude that this extraordinary Marian collection juxtaposes and combines a number of musical styles which we are just beginning to identify.

1. Julin Ribera, La msica de las Cantigas. Estudio sobre su origen y naturaleza, con reproducciones fotogrficas del texto y transcripcin moderna, Madrid: La Real Academia Espaola, 1922 (Vol. III of Cantigas de Santa Mara de Don Alfonso el Sabio , published by the same Academy; volumes I and II appeared in 1889). 2. Higinio Angls, La msica de las Cantigas de Santa Mara del Rey Alfonso el Sabio, 3 vols., Barcelona, Biblioteca Central, 1943, 1958, 1964 (the last-published volume is a facsimile edition of MS E). 3. MS E (Library of El Escorial, ms. b.I.2). 4. Ribera, op. cit., p. 117: "siendo todas las melodas de las Cantigas destinadas a ejecucin por varias voces y por orquestra numerosa...". 5. For a historical summary, see the Appendix in Harvey L. Sharrer and Manuel Pedro Ferreira, Cantus Coronatus (forthcoming). 6. Vicente Beltrn, "De zjeles y dansas: orgenes y formacin de la estrofa con vuelta", in Revista de Filologa Espaola, 64 (1984), pp. 239-66; David Wulstan, "The Muwashshah and Zagal revisited", in Journal of the American Oriental Society, 102 (1982), pp. 247-64. 7. Benjamin M. Liu e James T. Monroe, Ten Hispano-Arabic Strophic Songs in the Modern Oral Tradition &emdash; Music and Texts, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. 8. Leo J. Plenckers, "Les rapports entre le muwashshah algrien et le virelai du moyen ge", in I. A. El-Sheikh, C. A. Van de Koppel e R. Peters (eds.), The Challenge of the Middle East: Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 1982, pp. 91-111; Jozef M. Pacholczyk, "The Relationship Between the Nawba of Morocco and the Music of the Troubadours and Trouvres", in The World of Music, 25 (1983), pp. 5-16; id.,"Rapporti fra le forme musicali della nawba andalusa dell'Africa settentrionale e le forme codificate della musica medievale europea", in Culture musicali: quaderni di etnomusicologia, 3:5-6 (1984), 19-42. To the data presented in these articles some more analytical information was added, based on Moroccan sources. 9. Lois Ibsen al Faruqi, "Muwashshah: A Vocal Form in Islamic Culture", in Ethnomusicology, 19 (1975), pp. 1-29. 10. Sharrer and Ferreira, op. cit. 11. According to the traditional view, the former derives from the latter, but the reverse seems now to be more likely: Wulstan, op. cit.; Samuel G. Armistead and James T. Monroe, "Beached Whales and Roaring Mice: Additional Remarks on Hispano-Arabic Strophic Poetry", in La Cornica, 13 (1985), pp. 206-42. 12. Willi Apel, "Rondeaux, Virelais, and Ballades in French 13th-Century Song", in Journal of the American Musicological Society, 7 (1954), pp. 121-30. 13. This calculation is based on the tables published by Angls, op. cit., Vol. III/1 Parte, pp. 397-400. 14. Friedrich Gennrich, Grundriss einer Formenlehre des mittelalterlichen Liedes als Grundlage einer musikalischen Formenlehre des Liedes, Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1932, pp. 67-68. 15. Hendrik Van der Werf, "Accentuation and Duration in the Music of the Cantigas de Santa Maria", in Israel J. Katz and John E. Keller (eds.), Studies on the Cantigas de Santa Maria: Art, Music, and Poetry, Madison: The Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1987, pp. 223-34. 16. The originals which underlay the final compilation of the Cantigas were mostly written (i. e. between two hundred and fifty and three hundred pieces) before 1280.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

The collection is presumed to have been completed or nearly so by the time Alfonso died (1284). On the dating of the manuscripts, see Manuel Pedro Ferreira, "The Stemma of the Marian Cantigas: Philological and Musical Evidence", in Cantigueiros, VI (1994), pp. 58-98. Manuel Pedro Ferreira, O Som de Martin Codax: Sobre a Dimenso Musical da Lrica Galego-Portuguesa (Sculos XII-XIV)/The Sound of Martin Codax: On the Musical Dimension of the Galician-Portuguese Lyric (XII-XIV Centuries), Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional - Casa da Moeda, 1986; id., "Bases for Transcription: Gregorian Chant and the Notation of the Cantigas de Santa Maria", in Jos Lopez-Calo (coord.), Los instrumentos del Prtico de la Gloria. Su reconstruccin y la msica de su tiempo, La Corua: Fundacin Pedro Barri de la Maza, 1993, Vol. 2, pp. 573-621. Baron Rodolphe d'Erlanger, La Musique Arabe, Tome VI, Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1959, pp. 1, 4. George Dimitri Sawa, Music Performance Practice in the Early Abbasid Era 132320 AH / 750-932 AD, Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1989, p. 16. D'Erlanger, op. cit., p. 7. Sawa, op. cit., pp. 46, 54. Liu and Monroe, op. cit., p. 82. In Angls's edition, this song is the second in the second Appendix [FJC 2]; its form belongs to the "Andalusian rondeau" type. This is true of the version recorded in the Escorial codices E and T, not of the version in To. D'Erlanger, op. cit., p. 148. Sawa, op. cit.,"First-Heavy" cycles ns 11+3 and 11+9. This variant is arrived at by adding an attack for continuity, doubling this attack, and dropping out the first articulation. Liu and Monroe, op. cit., p. 82. Juan del Encina, Poesa Lrica y Cancionero Musical, ed. R. O. Jones and Carolyn R. Lee, Madrid: Castalia, 1972. The Cancionero de Palacio shows a few striking continuities with the CSM: for instance, the rhythmic pattern minim-crotchet, minim-crotchet, crotchet-minim, minim-crotchet (or dotted minim), which often reccurs in this repertory, can already be found in at least ten CSM (34, 46, 104, 199, 232, 295=388, 300, 328, 345 and 398). CSM 1, 26, 37, 47, 51, 61, 88, 89, 101, 109, 112, 116, 118, 158, 193, 353 and 393. See also CSM 100, 315 and 352. CSM 118 and 393. The double vertical line may also be used at the end of a musical phrase or piece, with no apparent rythmical consequences (see CSM 123, 159, 160, 341, 386 and 394). The Cantigas 88 and 116 use a long with a double vertical bar to mean either long plus brevis, when followed by a brevis, or double long, when followed by a long (in the CSM 88, the Toledo MS makes it clear that in the latter case the augmentation applies to a three-tempora long). See CSM 1, 47, 51, 89, 116 and 393. CSM 37, 47, 193 and 353. D'Erlanger, op. cit., p. 53. Liu and Monroe, op. cit., songs I, III, V (ocasionally in other compositions). Francisco Salinas, De Musica Libri Septem, Salamanca, 1577. It is the song Calvi vi calvi / Calvi aravi ("My heart is in [another] heart / [because] my heart is arabic"),

quoted by Gil Vicente in both the Comdia de Rubena and the Tragicomedia de Don Duardos. See Emlio Garca Gmez, "La cancin famosa Calvi vi calvi / Calvi aravi", in Al-Andalus, XXI (1956), pp. 1-18, 215-16, and Juan Jos Rey, Danzas Cantadas en el Renacimiento Espaol, Madrid: Sociedad Espaola de Musicologia, 1978, pp. 25-26. Salinas's musical quotation was wrongly transcribed (in 6/8) by Higinio Angls, op. cit., Vol. III/2 Parte, p. 440. 39. Juan del Encina, op. cit., pp. 45, 294, 354 (see also the commentary by Manuel Pedro Ferreira, in Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Pblia Hortnsia de Elvas, Lisboa: Instituto Portugus do Patrimnio Cultural, 1989, pp. ix-x); Spanish songs in quintuple time are discussed by Marius Schneider, "Studien zur Rhythmik im Cancionero de Palacio", Miscelnea en homenaje a Monseor Higinio Angls, Barcelona: C. S. I. C., 1958-1961, vol. II, pp. 833-41, and Juan Jos Rey, op. cit., pp. 30-33.