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  • Las ensaladas (Praga, 1581): Con un suplemento de obras del género
  • Antoni Pizà
Las ensaladas (Praga, 1581): Con un suplemento de obras del género. Estudio y edición Maricarmen Gómez Muntané. Valencia: Generalitat Valenciana/Institut Valencià de la Música, c2008. [Vol. 1: Estudio, 193 p. Vol. 2: Edición, 464 p. Vol. 3: Ed. facs. de las partes vocals (4 partbooks: tiple, [End Page 854] iv p., 56 fols.; alto, iv p., 54 fols.; tenor, iv p., 53 fols.; baxo, iv p., 51 fols.). ISBN 978-84-482489-1-8 (vol. 1), 978-84-482489-2-5 (vol. 2), 978-84-482489-3-2 (vol. 3), 978-84-482489-0-1 (set). €55]

Among listeners and performers of early Iberian music, the ensalada is considered one of the most popular and rewarding musical genres. Not too much scholarly attention has been given, though, to this quintessentially Renaissance repertoire. True, the New Grove (2001) has a short and excellent article on the genre, but the second edition of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (1994–2008) includes it only as part of the discussion of the quodlibet; furthermore, major surveys of Western music history, such as that by Richard Taruskin, do not even mention it (The Oxford History of Western Music, 6 vols. [New York: Oxford University Press, 2005]). And although there are a few modern editions of the music, there is no single monograph that deals with it in a comprehensive manner. A case in point: to my knowledge, the only doctoral dissertation dedicated to the ensalada is a performance thesis, not a full-fledged musicological study (Roger Hamilton Wesby, “The Ensaladas of Mateo Flecha el viejo: Nonsensical Quodlibets or a Genre of Deeper Meaning?” [D.M. diss., Indiana University, 1995]). So, if there were to be only a single merit to the publication under review, it would have to be its wide-ranging ambition to cover all angles of the genre, its history, and its composers, in addition to providing a reliable text of its major works geared to the needs of musicians and scholars alike.

The ensalada is a kind of Spanish quodlibet, written for four or more voices, that—just like a garden salad, metaphorically speaking—mixes different meters, textures, languages, musical moods, situations, characters, etc. The texts generally are allegories of the Nativity, and seem especially to have been performed around Christmas. The message, though, is always conveyed through a secular story that frequently includes realistic characters both ordinary and aristocratic, entangled in situations, often funny, with many references to real places and people. Although there are many antecedents of the genre both in the Iberian world and elsewhere, the composer who brought it to its standard and generally accepted form was Mateo Flecha the elder (ca. 1481–ca. 1553). Very little is known with certainty about Flecha. As a professional musician, he would have spent his career either in the service of the church or working for some of the top echelons of the Spanish aristocracy. In his Biographie universelle des musiciens (8 vols. [Brussels: Leroux, 1835–44]), François-Joseph Fétis included an entry confusing Flecha and his nephew. Many later scholars worked on the basis of this short biography, perpetuating the mix-up and the inaccuracies in the process.

The nephew, Mateo Flecha the younger (ca. 1530–1604), was also a musician and poet, and an ambitious, high-ranking, and well-traveled member of the clergy. His own compositions were madrigals in the vein of his contemporaries Orlando di Lasso and Andrea Gabrieli. In 1581, in Prague, he published an anthology of his uncle’s ensaladas with some additional pieces by other composers and even a madrigal that he attributed to himself. In the preface to this edition he claimed that his uncle was the inventor of the genre (not true, strictly speaking), and that these ensaladas were actually in demand. The publication, he said, aimed to fill an editorial need. He further justified his enterprise by arguing that the many existing manuscripts were very expensive and contained errors.

Despite the apparent success of Flecha the elder’s ensaladas during his own time (if one is...

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