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E. Decima One type of folk song that formerly flourished in New Mexico and other parts of the Southwest is the decima. Although now moribund in New Mexico, it is remembered in other areas in the New World. It is known in Chile, for example, as the verso and in Panama as the mejorana (see Schaeffer 14, pp. 10-11). The form is apparently very old. Campa in his Spanish Folk Poetry in New Mexico said that it originated in Spain and flourished in the fifteenth century (Campa 2, pp. 127-30). Mendoza has devoted an entire seven hundred-page volume to the decima in Mexico (Mendoza 9c). Briefly, the decima takes its name from its ten-line verses or stanzas. When it consists of four such verses preceded by a fourline stanza, each line of which in its turn becomes the last line of one of the ten-line stanzas, it is known as a decima glosada. The four-line stanza is known in Mexico as the planta and in Chile as the cuarteto. When the ten-line verses follow the rhyme scheme abbaaccddc, the decima is called an espinela, after the sixteenth-century poet Vincent Espinel , who introduced it. The term valona is sometimes used to include (1) an entire poem that includes decimas or (2) all the various types of decimas, which beside the decima glosada and the espinela include such forms as the quintilla, in which a five-line planta is followed by five ten-line stanzas; long strings of ten-line verses with or more usually without a planta] and poems featuring verses of twelve lines, for which I employ the term duodecima. In subject matter the decimas tend to be philosophical or to consist of reflections on the state of the world. The most common form of the decima in New Mexico is the decima glosada, with a planta and four decimas, following the rhyme scheme of the espinela as defined above. Other forms may be regarded as exceptions. In the foreword to Prospero S. Baca; s "One Hundred Twenty-one Decimas and Other Folk Songs" (Baca 1, Robb 13j), I have commented on the variants of the decima form included in this unpublished notebook. A number of the decimas in the following pages are taken from Baca's manuscript. A unique and rather surprising New Mexico tradition required that the singer sing all decimas to a standard tune. All but one or two of the twelve or more singers who sang decimas for me, although living in widely separated parts of the state, employed the same recognizable tune. It started high, like many Indian melodies, and gradually sank Prospero S. Baca, one of the great folk singers of his time and place, in Bernalillo, New Mexico, about 1942. Several of the decimas in Section E are taken from Baca's "One Hundred TwentyOne Decimas and Other Folk Songs." 376 Decima to end an octave lower. Naturally, since the tunes were apparently never written down and the singers were unfamiliar with musical notation anyway, there were variations; and, too, the tune had to be modified to fit the words of each song, but this was accomplished by the singers with amazing naturalness and facility. In the decima tune a major seventh is almost immediately followed by the minor-seventh tone of the scale, giving it a sort of modal ambiguity. One of my informants , Elfego Sanchez, of Tijeras, New Mexico, added that in singing decimas "you start out loud and get softer." A good example of the New Mexico decima melody is Que Largas las Horas Son (El). Many of the decimas in my collection exist only as song texts, without music, copied from the notebooks of the singers. This is largely due to the custom of using the same melody for all the decimas known to the singer. Baca, for instance, made no recordings to accompany the decimas from his notebook because, as he explained, he sang them all to the same basic melody, adapted freely in each case to the words of the particular text, and he was embarrassed to sing virtually the same melody over and over again. A sufficient number of the variants of the melody exist to give a good idea of the traditional melody, which, once heard, is easy to recognize, even when encountered in an altered form. For these reasons I have included a number of decima texts without corresponding melodies. The name of the singer suffices...

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