Obras completas de Rodrigo de Ceballos (review)

Rodrigo de Ceballos. Obras completas de Rodrigo de Ceballos. Edited by Robert J. Snow. Granada: Junta de Andalucía, Consejería de Cultura, Centro de Documentación Musical de Andalucía, 1995-97. [Vol. 1: Motetes a cuatro voces. Pref. in Span., Eng., p. xi-xvii; introd., p. xix- xxix; score, p. 1-231. ISBN 84-87826-28-8. Vol. 2: Motetes a cinco voces. Prefatory note in Span., Eng., 2 p.; score, p. 1-242. ISBN 84-86944-47-3. Vol. 3: Misas. Prefatory note in Span., Eng., 2 p.; score, p. 1-171. ISBN 84-86944-69-4. Vol. 4: Lamentaciones, salmos, himnos. Prefatory note in Span., Eng., p. xi-xvii; score, p. 1-217. ISBN 84-86944-70-8. ISBN 84-87826-26-1 (set). DM 132.]

Rodrigo de Ceballos (ca. 1530-1581), a friend and colleague of Francisco Guerrerro (1528-1599) and recognized by musicologist José López-Calo as one of the greatest Spanish polyphonists of the sixteenth century, left a large and impressive body of music that has remained mostly unknown until now with the recent publication of Robert J. Snow's edition of the composer's complete works. This edition was projected to comprise five volumes of music plus a sixth dedicated to a critical study of Ceballos's life, the sources, and the music and its liturgical context. But at the time of his death in 1998, Snow had completed only the first four volumes. The fifth volume was planned to present the composer's eight settings of the Magnificat, four items from Compline, and the few known secular songs.

Although Snow centered his scholarship in the United States, he worked cooperatively and regularly with his colleagues in Spain. The publication here under review reflects this collaboration--some of the sources come from Andalucía; the Centro de Documentación Musical de Andalucía in Granada published the volumes; López-Calo translated all of the prefatory material into Spanish; and the first volume opens with a preface by López-Calo, translated into English.

Snow's Ceballos edition contributes to the growing body of works now available to scholars and performers from the repertory of the Iberian siglo de oro. Older editions of this music prepared by such Spaniards as Felipe Pedrell, Juan B. de Elústiza, and Higini Anglés are now expanded and superseded by new editions by Spanish scholars that include, in addition to López-Calo, Dionisio Preciado, María del Carmen Gómez Muntané, José María Llorens, and Pedro Calahorra Mártinez, as well as the non-Spanish scholars Bruno Turner, Tess Knighton, Jane Morlet Hardie, Michael Noone, Greta Olson, and Grayson Wagstaff, among others. These editions run the gamut from scholarly to performing, and through recent collaborative projects with performing groups and recording companies (such as Wagstaff with Paul McCreesh and Archiv Produktion and Noone with Richard Cheetham), some of this important music is coming to the attention of a much wider audience.

Recent published scholarship on Ceballos is not extensive. Snow's The Extant Music of Rodrigo de Ceballos and Its Sources (Detroit Studies in Music Bibliography, 44 [Detroit: Information Coordinators, 1980]), originally presented as part of the festivities honoring Dragan Plamenac at the University of Illinois in 1976, presents a summary and critique of all preceding research on the composer and includes a small number of facsimiles from the manuscript sources of Ceballos's extant music, together with transcriptions of four four-voice motets. Since the publication of this volume, we have only López-Calo's thematic catalog of sacred vocal music held by the Cathedral of Granada (Catálogo del Archivo de Música de la Capilla Real de Granada ([Granada: Centro de Documentación Musical de Andalucía, 1993-94]) and his recent article on Ceballos in the Diccionario de la música española e hispanoamericana (ed. Emilio Casares Rodicio et al., 10 vols. projected [Madrid: Sociedad General de Autores y Editores, 1999-]). Apparently López-Calo...