SONGS WITHOUT NOTES

A significant portion of Spanish poetry from the Siglo de Oro by Lope de Vega, Luis de Góngora, and many others, was created to be sung with guitar, harp, and percussion accompaniment. Thus for this period notated music represents only the tip of the iceberg of a widespread musical practice that was orally transmitted and never written down. And it was precisely this unwritten tradition that had such a lasting influence in Europe, in contexts as diverse as the development of basso continuo or the integration of the sarabande in the Baroque instrumental suite. To study these unwritten practices, we need to turn our attention away from notated musical scores and toward literary sources, theoretical treatises, instrumental tablatures, and improvisational harmonic schemes. This seminar explores issues of unwritten musical traditions and practices in Spain and Italy during the Siglo de Oro. The study day is organized in three thematic sessions with papers by scholars from Spain, the U.S., and Canada: musical encounter and relations between Spain and Italy, the cultural history of the chaconne, and the performance of music for the guitar and violin. The seminar culminates in a recital that brings these issues to life, featuring the soprano Raquel Andueza and theorbist Jesús Fernández Baena in a program showcasing the reconstruction and reimagining of seventeenth-century musical dance-songs for which written notation is not preserved.    Speakers: Álvaro Torrente, Professor of History of Music at the Complutense University of Madrid and Director of the Complutense Institute of Musical Sciences; Cory M. Gavito, Professor of Musicology at Texas Woman's University; Nina Treadwell, Professor of Music at University of California, Santa Cruz ; Elisabeth Le Guin Professor of Musicology at the University of California , Los Angeles; Ana Lombardía, Complutense Institute of Music Sciences; Daniel Zuluaga, Colombian lutenist and guitarist​   Sponsors: RCC; Complutense Institute of Musical Sciences