Thursday, 8 July 2021, 09.00-10.30, Room 209 | Chair: João Pedro d’Alvarenga (CESEM, NOVA FCSH)
Jeremiah’s Lamentation by Manuel de Tavares | Luísa Correia Castilho (IPCB- Instituto Politécnico de Castelo Branco / CESEM, NOVA FCSH)
Manuel de Tavares, Portuguese by birth and Spanish by profession, served as chapel master in several Cathedrals in Spain. After a period of training in Portalegre, Portugal, he held the post of chapel master in the Cathedral of Baeza (1609 to 1612), Murcia (1612 to 1631), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (1631 to 1638), and Cuenca (1638). In Baeza, among his various compositions that are preserved in the Cathedral’s archive, there is a setting of a Lamentation of Jeremiah. This Lamentation is copied in choirbook M4, which contains a small collection of five lamentations, one by Morales, one by Tavares, and three by Mateo Nuñez Fernandez.
The purpose of this communication is to analyse Tavares’ Lamentation according to the following parameters: the musical contents and its normative framework, the macro formal structure, the use of modality, the cadential plan, the expressive relationship between the literary text and the musical text, as well as the thematic and motivic materials, verifying which Lusitanian or Spanish tradition was the monodic basis for the polyphonic setting of this Lamentation.
From the Mediterranean to Mexico: Lamentations by Brito and Padilla | David W. Hughes (Hochschule für Musik Freiburg)
Estêvão de Brito (c.1575-1641) and Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla (c.1590-1664) met in January 1613, as rivals in the competition for the post of chapel master at Malaga Cathedral. Portuguese-born Brito won the post, staying at Malaga for the rest of his life; Padilla came in second place, and would go on to head the musical establishment at Puebla, Mexico. Brito’s journey eastward to Spain – and Padilla’s westward to Mexico – reveal a certain cultural mobility, and their music shows how the dynamics of cultural confluences caused a musical style centred on Spain to develop in diverse ways across the globe.
Both composers, highly regarded by their contemporaries, composed settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah based on the Spanish reciting tone. In my paper, I will undertake a comparative analysis of these settings, exploring different approaches to chant and musical commonplaces, with two principal objectives; to illuminate the compositional techniques used by seventeenth-century Iberian composers, and how these relate to the music theory of their day (in particular Francisco de Montaños’ 1592 Arte de Musica); and to underline the musical links between Spain and the New World during this period. Building on research that highlights the technical achievements of Spanish music (Rees 2019, Knighton & Ros-Fábregas et al. 2015, Rees & Nelson et al. 2007) and work that emphasises the wide geographical reach of Iberian polyphony (Coelho 2005), my case study explores how different cultural factors, both practical and artistic, influenced the cultivation of musical excellence in different ways in different places.
Antonio Mogavero and his Lamentationvm Ieremiae Prophetae (1623) in the Iberian context | Carlos González Ludeña (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
Antonio Mogavero (ca. 1550-¿1634?) was an Italian composer and priest, whose musical career began to bright in the last decade of the 16th century. In those years he worked in Venice as music pedagogue in the patriarchal seminary, and some of his compositions were printed there before his depart to Spain in 1604. Then he stayed in Valencia teaching music in the Corpus Christi’s Royal College and Seminary until 1615, when he moved to Madrid.
In the Spanish capital, Mogavero served to Philip III and Philip IV as chaplain, but according to the introduction of his Lamentationvm Ieremiae Prophetae (Venice, Alessandro Vicenti, 1623), he reached the position of “musicis Capelle Regalis”. However, the years of this composer in the Madrilenian court are almost mysterious due to the lack of documentation about his career in there. It is important to mention this set of lamentations of Jeremiah was not at all so unknown like his author is nowadays in the History of the Iberian music: it was part of the João’s IV musical library and had diffusion in the Spanish cathedrals. Despite of the important studies dedicated to Mogavero’s life in Italy and his compositive style, are needed new approaches about their significance in the Iberian world. For that reason, this paper tries to bring clarity about that.
