Musica vocal profana en el Madrid de Felipe IV: El Libro de Tonos Humanos (1656)

The Libro de tonos humanos (Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, M-1262) is the most substantial Spanish manuscript cancionero of the seventeenth century. Completed in Madrid in 1656, it contains more than 200 songs, almost all for four voices; the great majority are romances con estribillo, consisting of a number of stanzas set in relatively simple style and a concluding estribillo which is typically more elaborate. The texts are secular, hence tonos humanos (as opposed to tonos divinos). A significant minority of the songs bear attributions, the composers including musicians associated with the Spanish court such as Manuel Machado, Mateo Romero, and Carlos Patiño, and Carmelite musicians active in Madrid such as Manuel Correa and Bernardo Murillo. An intriguing aspect of the manuscript is the light that it may shed on the cultivation of secular song in a prominent Carmelite convent in the mid-seventeenth century.

Alejandro Vera's book is based upon his doctoral thesis of 2001. It undertakes a multi-faceted study of the manuscript, addressing in particular detail contextual issues such as its links with the Carmelite order and (very possibly) the court, but also encompassing for example analysis of certain musical techniques and elements of style, and including an edition of forty songs. The appearance of this study overlaps with that of a new edition of the Libro de tonos humanos by Mariano Lambea and Lola Josa, in the series Monumentos de la Música Española, and belonging to a new subseries entitled La Música y la Poesía en Cancioneros Polifónicos del Siglo XVII (Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas/Institución Milà i Fontanals). Of the projected four volumes of this edition, the first (MME 60) had appeared in 2000 before the completion of Vera's book, and the second (MME 67, 2003) has since been published. Vera's aim is for his coverage to complement that of Lambea and Josa's edition, so that for instance he excludes consideration of the themes of the poetic texts, addressed by Josa in the introduction to vol. 1. While such complementarity is—despite some overlaps—to quite a large extent apparent in what has been published to date (to take one further example, Lambea and Josa do not explore, in their first or second volumes, the Carmelite context of the manuscript), one notes Lambea and Lola's stated intention to provide the bulk of their biographical, critical, and analytical material in the final volume of their edition. Be that as it may, Vera's study deserves to be welcomed warmly. Within his chosen limits (e.g. one does not get a rounded introduction to the poetic element of the repertory from this book), his scholarship is robust and thorough, and the exposition of his principal themes is a model of clarity. He presents a good deal of new information, and his syntheses and evaluations of existing scholarship and previously known evidence are astute.

Following an introductory bibliographical review, the author provides in chapters 1 and 2 a detailed account of the manuscript, its structure, copying, and provenance. Much of the codicological detail serves his larger conclusions (although some of this detail could well have been relegated to appendices, when the dissertation was being revised for publication). Vera argues for the manuscript's association with two distinct contexts, linked to the two scribes: the bulk of the copying was certainly undertaken by Diego Pizarro, a Carmelite friar and castrato singer based at the principal convent of the Calced Carmelites in Madrid, and was presumably copied for use at the convent itself. However, Vera proposes that Pizarro's work on the collection followed that of the other scribe, and that this scribe was in all probability associated with the court, and perhaps with the royal chapel. While this hypothesis of court links has a weaker evidential basis than the connection...