Medieval Music of
Santiago de Compostela
Created by Laura Gregory
for MUSL 242: Music of the Middle Ages and Rennaisance
on April 27, 1997

        Santiago de Compostela is located in a region of northwestern Spain called Galicia. The language spoken in this region, Galician, is very similar to both Spanish and Portugese and is considered by some to be a dialect.  During the Middle Ages, the Spaniards claimed to have found the tomb of St. James the Elder (Santiago) in Compostela.  St. James is credited with spreading the Gospel to the Iberian Peninsula.  This discovery led to the establishment of a cathedral and a shrine in the city, transforming it into a major destination for pilgrims even to this day.

        The route of pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela became an important channel for the transmission of ideas between the Peninsula and the rest of Europe.  As a result the rapidly growing city began to flourish as a cultural center as well as a religious destination.

        One example of this cultural communication is the use of the style of polyphony popularized in Notre Dame in the pilgrim hymns of the early twelfth century.  The Codex Calixtinus is a collection of such songs recounting histories and legends of Compostela and the apostle Santiago.  According to José Subirá, many of these songs, written in Latin, employ discant organum with two or three voices.  (Organum is the addition of new melodic lines above the original chant. Discant refers to the use of measured rhythm in all of the voices.)

        Another example of religious music from this time period is a collection of non-liturgical monody, the Cantigas de Santa María.  When Alfonso X el Sabio became king of Castille and Aragón in 1252, he organized the composition of this group of over four hundred songs about the Virgin Mary.  Some he composed himself.  These songs are the first known literature in the Galician language and are well preserved with their original musical notation. 

       Every tenth song was a loor, or a praise of the Virgin. The others were narrations of miracles. Many of the Cantigas contained four-line stanzas with a BBBA rhyme scheme and a refrain of a rhymed couplet before and after each stanza. Others employed six-line stanzas and four-line refrains, both with alternating rhyme patterns.

        A number of different genre influenced the style of the Cantigas.  According to Julian Ribera, the strophic form of the Arabic Zajal may have played an important role through the Moorish occupation in Spain. Gilbert Chase has found that the melodic patterns in the Cantigas closely follow the forms of the French genres Virelai and Rondeau.  He has also found evidence of the influence of the Conductus in the metrical form of the Cantigas.  

        Another monophonic genre, although secular instead of sacred, arose near Santiago de Compostela.  As a patron of the arts, Alfonso el Sabio also encouraged the composition of this new genre of the thirteenth century, lyric poetry.  This is the first known example of secular monody on the Peninsula, and the first such songs were written in Galician, not Spanish (Castillian).  The composers and performers of lyric poetry were called troubadours and sometimes jongleurs.  The topics of composition inclueded love, villians, sea men, satires, and tales of ridicule or slander.  Some important examples of this genre are the Cantigas de Amigo and the seven Cantigas de Amor, the latter written by Martin Codax.  The cantigas by Martin Codax are the only surviving examples with musical notation of this genre.

        The medieval music of Santiago de Compostela, both sacred and secular, served to give Spain its own cultural production to share with the rest of the world that travelled the road to Santiago.  The songs written in the vernacular were an important contribuition in establishing Galician as a literary language and in endowing that region of Spain with its own culture independent of the rest of the Peninsula.  Although politically united with the rest of Spain, Galicia still maintains its own language and culture, and Santiago de Compostela remains an important site for the transmission of this culture to the rest of the world.

Bibliography

Chase, Gilbert.  The Music of Spain. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1941.

Reese, Gustave.  Music in the Middle Ages. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1940, pp. 244-248.

Ribera, Julian.  Music in Ancient Arabia and Spain. California: Stanford University Press, 1929.

Stevenson, Robert.  Spanish Music in the Age of Columbus. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960.

Subirá, José. Historia de la musica española e hispanoamericana. Barcelona Silvat Editores, S.A., 1953.

Links

Unless otherwise specified, all links are in English.

• Camino de Santiago
• A history of the route of pilgramage to Santiago de Compostela. (Spanish)
• Historia, Leyenda y Significado de Santiago
• A history of how Santiago became a destination for pilgrims. (Spanish)
• Santiago: History and Legend
• The same as previous link but in English.
• El Camino de Santiago
• The route of pilgrimage from a pilgrim's perspective. (mixture of Spanish and English)
• Alfonso el Sabio (1221 - 1284)
• A short biography of Alfonso X in relation to the Cantigas de Santa María.
• The golden age
• An account of the period when religious lyric poetry in the Galician language flourished.
• La etapa de mayor esplendor
• The same as previous link. (Spanish)
• A etapa de maior esplendor
• The same as previous link. (Galician)
• As Cantigas de Amigo
• A collection of the texts to Galician lyric poetry known as the Cantigas de Amigo written by 88 composers from the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries. (In Galician, but easily accesible to speakers of other languages)
• Cantiga C
• Text from one of the Cantigas de Santa María written by Alfosnso X. (In Galician, but easily accesible to speakers of other languages)
• Musica del Camino
• Contains texts of some of the Cantigas de Santa María and other songs connected to the pilgrimage to Santiago. (texts of songs in Latin or Galician with translations in Spanish; page in Spanish but easily accesible to speakers of other languages)
• Cancioneiro profano
• A collection of texts to Galician lyric poetry including that of Martin Codax and Alfonso X. (in Galician but accesible to speakers of other languages)

Go to MUSL 242:Music of the Middle Ages and Rennaisance
Go to Vanderbilt University: Blair School of Music
Go to Vanderbilt University