Abstract
on the reverse of his 1555 titlepage he himself prints a table of contents. In this tabla he catalogues “the books in the present volume” (including bk. VI, which was not printed). He also succinctly summarizes each libro. Each of the first five books will be subdivided into chapters: I into 20, II into 36, III into 50, IV into 93, and V into 33 chapters. Bk. I will be principally given over to praises of the art: both pagan and Christian authorities serving as quarries for quotations. Bk. II will introduce rank beginners to plainsong, vocal polyphony, and to keyboard and plucked string instruments. In bk. III, on the other hand, he promises to explore in depth both the theory and practice of plainsong (29 chapters) and of polyphony (21 chapters), and to address his remarks to intermediate and advanced students. In bk. IV he will offer advanced instruction in keyboard-performance and in the playing of all manner of plucked string instruments; he also will teach how to intabulate for these various instruments, discuss tuning problems, trace the tortuous history of tuning procedures and describe new tuning systems, investigate the modes afresh from a performer’s vantage-point, and conclude with an appendix of nine original organ pieces. (This bk. IV — the longest in the 1555 Declaración — occupies fols. 60–120; or nearly half the entire volume.) In bk. V he will tell how to compose monody, how to improvise and to write counterpoint above a given cantus firmus, and how to compose polyphony. (Immediately preceding this bk. V he inserts Morales’s recommendatory letter dated at Marchena, October 20, 1550.) In bk. VI (not printed), he “compiles a list of the musical errors perpetrated by predecessor Spanish theorists and copiously refutes them.” (This unprinted last book was to have contained six tractates. The first four were to have refuted his “14” Spanish predecessors’ mistakes, the fifth to have discussed “musical genera” [diatonic, chromatic, enharmonic, and semichromatic], and the sixth to have told how to tune and play his own newly invented instruments.)
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References
If what he says at fol. 4v. of the 1549 Declaración concerning an early music teacher who tried to hide everything he knew be taken at face value, Bermudo had already mastered the musical rudiments before entering religion.
See Possidius, Sancti Augustini Vita,ed. H. T. Weiskotten (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1919), p. 112: “ex Hispaniae partibus transmarinis navibus Africae influxisset et irruisset…. Videbat enim ille homo Dei civitates excidio perditas…. hymnos Dei et laudes ex ecclesiis deperisse.” Augustine did not see the havoc wrought on Spanish churches at first hand.
At fol. 93v., col. 1, Bermudo again praises el claro Guzmdn for his ability to play a distuned vihuela. Guzman, a native of Granada, “became so famous in Italy that Paulus Jovius praised him in his Universal History,” recounts Francisco Bermúdez de Pedraza in his Antiguedad y Excelencias de Granada (Madrid: Luis Sanchez, 1608), fol. 132.
Printed in El arte Tripharia at fols. 15v.-16 and in the 1555 Declaración at fol. 23. Only the El arte version clearly shows where the versicles start.
Villada, appointed Sevillian organ prebendary in 1540, died in early March, 1573. Soto, a fellowkeyboardist with Antonio de Cabezón to Charles V from 1528, ascended from a yearly salary of 75,000 maravedis to 115,000 when c. 1539 he became in addition “chamber-and chapel-musician” to the Empress Isabella, Charles V’s consort. See MME, II, 35 and 174. Venegas de Henestrosa ciphered a sixth-tone tiento by Soto as item 50 of his 1557 Libro de cifra nueva. He was enough of a poet to contribute an introductory sonnet to Jorge de Montemayor’s Las obras (Antwerp: Juan Steelsio, 1554). He died at Palencia in 1564. See AM, X (1955), p. 104. His son Cipriano Soto, following in his footsteps (just as Hernando de Cabezón followed in Antonio de Cabezón’s tracks), became organist successively to the Princess Juana and her brother, Philip I I.
Kinkeldey, Orgel und Klavier,p. 228. Tenor B should not start until meas. 14; tenor G in meas. 13 should last a semibreve. (This measure-count applies to his unreduced example.)
Bermudo may have had in mind the rank amateur, Diego Pisador (Libro de Miisica de Vihuela [Salamanca, 1552]).
Transcribed in Felipe Pedrell, Cancionero musical popular espanol (Valls: Eduardo Castells, 1922), III, 135–136 and transposed in Jesfis Bal y Gay, Romancesy uillancicos espanoles del sielo XVI (México: La Casa de España, 1939), p. 17. Palero’s glossed Mira Nero de Tarpeya (ciphered in Venegas de Henestrosa, 1557 [MME, II, 151–152]) belongs to another mode. Still a third setting of this same romance-text deserves comparison with Bermudo’s. Embedded in Matheo Flecha the Elder’s ensalada, El Fuego (mm. 148–172) this third setting is for quartet. Flecha’s tenor-line strongly resembles that of the middle part — a ponderous c. f. — in Palero’s instrumental glosa. For Flecha’s triple-meter version (contradicting AM, X, 120 [lines 15–17]) see Las Ensaladas ( Barcelona: Biblioteca Central, 1954 ), pp. 71–72.
Marc Pincherle called Bermudo’s la première methode de harpe to reach print anywhere. See A. Lavignac, Encyclopédie de la musique,II/3. (Paris: Lib. Delagrave, 1927), p. 1927.
Santiago Kastner, “Relations entre la musique instrumentale française et espagnole a u XVIe siècle,” Anuario musical,X (1955), p.102. The Library of Congress copy came from Coimbra.
Cf. Alonso Mudarra’s Fantasia que contrahaze la harpa en la manera de Luduuico (MME, VII, 16–18). This splendid piece ends with the boldest cross-relations (f# vs. f #) to be found in the Tres libros de música. Ludovico was Ferdinand V’s court harpist. See Francisco Asenjo Barbieri, Cancionero musical de los siglos XVy XVI ( Madrid: Tip. de los Huérfanos, 1890 ), p. 170.
Contrary to Anuario musical, VII (1952), pp. 90–91, the Fray Tomas de Santa Maria who published the Arte de toner fantasia was not the same Fray Tomas de Santa Maria who served as father confessor to Princess Mary of Portugal, and who was requested to supervise her will. Princess Mary’s homonymous confessor died in 1545, twenty years before the Arte de tidier fantasia was published. For details see Vicente Beltran de Heredia, Historia de la Reforma de la Provincia de Espana: 1450–1550 (Rome: S. Sabina, 1939 [Dissertations Historicae,fasc. XI]), p. 176. Further reference to the homonymous composer’s death in September, 1545, is given (ibid.) at p. 169. On the other hand, the theorist died in 1570. Cf. Fray Juan de Marieta, Segundo Parte, de la Historia Eclesiastica de Espana (Cuenca: Pedro del Valle, 1596), fol. 211 (no. 102).
On the ethos of the church modes, see Ramos de Pareja, Musica practica (ed. Johannes Wolf [Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1901]), pp. 56–60. Bermudo in 1555 assigns the same ethical properties to each of the eight modes that Ramos had given each in 1482. But on the other hand Bermudo often disagrees with such an immediate contemporary as Thomas Tallis (c. 1505–1585) — who as musical editor of The whole Psalter translated into English Metre (“Parker’s Psalter”) (London: John Day, 1567) was probably responsible for the ethos chart at fol. E1 verso and the instruction on “The nature of the eyght tunes [tones]” at fol. VV4 of the famous 1567 English publication.
The only portion of Cicero’s De Re Publica known in Bermudo’s day was the Somnium Scipionis,this being the portion glossed by Macrobius c. 400. The rest now available was found in 1820. Bermudo cites Macrobius by name at least twice (Declaración,1549, fols. Iov. [= Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis,II, i, 4-7], and 27v. [ibid., II, iii, 7]).
Declaración,1555, fol. 526v., col. 1.
Declaración, 1555, fol. 128, col. 2.
Ibid., fol. 129v., col. 1. The names of several outstanding singers at Granada are given in Bermúdez de Pedraza’s Antiguedad y excelencias (1608), fol. 132v.; all were prebendaries in the royal chapel (Coçar the younger was the “best bass in Europe,” Garçon was a “unique contralto,” and Liseda an admirable tiple).
At fol. 38v. of El arte Tripharia he shows a bar-lined score (but for two parts only). Although composers should not depend on bar-lined scores, he approves of them for players. See the Declaration 1555, bk. IV, ch. 41, and the bar-lined score at fol. 88.
Edward Lowinsky, “On the Use of Scores by Sixteenth-Century Musicians,” journal of the American Musicological Society,I, i (Spring, 1948), pp. 17–23.
Tallis also (if he was indeed the musical editor of The whole Psalter [London: John Day, 1567]) believed that to each tone belongs its own emotion-producing quality. “First ye ought to conioyne a sad tune or song, with a sad Psalme. And a ioyfull tune and songe wyth a ioyfull Psalme. And an indifferent tune and song, with a Psalm which goeth indifferently” (ibid.,fol. VV2 verso). At fol. VV4 he explains “The nature of the eyght tunes” and at fols. VV4v.-YY4v. illustrates with original harmonizations of a psalm in each “tune” (= tone). His finals read successively, however, D, D, E, A,F, F, G, G.
Were no other data immediately available Bermudo would be known from this evidence to have been born not earlier than 1505.
Tinctoris, Tractatus de musica, ed. E. de Coussemaker (Lille: Imp. Lefebure-Ducrocq, 1875 ), p. 480.
Francisco Guerrero calls his lowest parts Basis (1566); so does Alonso Lobo (1602).
Ornithoparchus taught that the more cadences, the sweeter the music. See Micrologus, tr. J. Dowland (London, 1609 ), p. 85.
Alonso Lobo (Osanna II of Prudentes virgins Mass, 1602) directs both tenor and bass to read their parts off the same staff, but in different clefs and proportions (Basis supra Thenorem).
In his hymn a 4, Solemnis urgebat dies (Toledo Cod. 25, fols. 62v.-63), Morales’s altus sings (a fourth lower) the identical notes of the cantus-part but does not observe the cantus’s rests.
In his hymn a 4, Sacris solemniis. Joseph vir (Venegas de Henestrosa, item 92 [MME, II, 136–137]), Morales places the familiar Sacris solemniis plainsong in top voice. The alto precedes in the dux of an imperfect canon. The tenor cites a different tune, not traced to a plainsong source but perhaps Joseph vir. The bass loosely imitates the tenor.
Cf. Ramos de Pareja (Wolf edn.), pp. 43–44. Ramos asserted that the semitonium subintellectum often changed such sung syllables as re fa ut into a major third followed by a semitone. Both solfa sol and re ut re could similarly cloak semitonal movements. Mudarra acting on this cue claimed in his Fantasia XVIII to have taken “fa mi ut re” for his subject. But throughout, he spells the mi ut as a minor third and the ut re as a semitone. See MME, VII,39–40. (Ramos and Mudarra might be called collateral ancestors of our “fixed-do” solmizers. Bermudo on the other hand belongs in the family tree of the “movable-do” solmizers. He wishes to transpose por todas las teclas [fol. 138, col. 1].)
Sebastian de Vivanco in the Gloria of his Tone IV Magnificat (Salamanca, 1607) requires one voice-part to sing in seriatim order the octo torsos (tenor III).
When scouting the possible attribution to Morales of the Requiem at fols. 127v.-141 of the Santiago Codex (MME,XV, 27–28) Anglés wrote: Ademcis de lo dicho, precisa anadir que las obras de Morales conservadas en manuscrito nunca cambian nada de las notas escritas por el cantor; si algún cambio aparece alguna vez, selimita al valor de una nota que se divide en dos para mejor aplicarle el texto. Unfortunately for such a categorical statement the motet a 4, Accepit Jesus panes, — anonymous in the Santiago codex (fols. 34v.-35) but Morales’s in the Medinaceli MS 13230 (fols. 30v.-31) concordance — does illustrate precisely the kind of differences which he says are not to be found (the bass of the Santiago anonymous version materially differs at mm. 73–74, the treble at 74–76). On another occasion Angles himself testified to the profound differences between the Sistine MS 17 version of Morales’s Mille regretz Mass and the printed 1544 version. See MME,X, 54. Because of its history, provenience, and contents, the Santiago Codex would moreover be one of the likeliest in Spain to contain anonymous items attributable to Morales. The Mass at fols. 141v.-149 is certainly his Caça (concording with Medinaceli MS 607, pp. 248–259) even though the Agnus’s differ radically (Santiago Cod., fols. 148v.-149; Medinaceli MS 607, pp. 258–259).
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© 1960 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Stevenson, R. (1960). Synopsis of the 1555 ‘Declaración’. In: Juan Bermudo. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-0735-6_5
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