Description
In Spanish music history, the beginning of the Baroque represents an unsolved problem. Literary critics recognize a major break around 1580 (Montesinos 1959), as reflected in two closely related novelties: the rise of the comedia nueva, and the flourishing of the romance nuevo. I argue that this disruption was a broader cultural transformation that also involved music and whose key feature was the rise of popular culture.
I posit that several phenomena, traditionally regarded as distinct, came together to produce a deep and unified cultural shift: the rise of strummed guitar accompaniment for song and dance; the popularity of “immoral” dance-songs such as the zarabanda, and the chacona; the widespread adoption of triple meter with hemiolas; and the generalization of compás ternario menor (C3) with metric alterations represented by blackened figures that enabled a more precise representation of complex rhythms. The idiosyncrasies of the so-called seventeenth-century Spanish style (Stein 1993) cannot be explained without considering these transformations.
The cultural shift was catalyzed by the contemporary establishment of public theatres, which empowered commoners to demand entertainment suiting their taste. This transformed Spanish culture from a high-brow tradition dictated by the elites into one increasingly defined by plebeian preferences. In music, the appeal of popular song can be seen as early as Salinas’ De musica libri septem (1577), which aristocrats also soon embraced, as evidenced by the concurrent hiring of the mixed-race guitar player and singer Leonor de Guzmán around 1610 in the household of three grandees (Rodulfo Hazen, 2022).
The well-known controversy over theatre—more than 50 publications between 1580 and 1630—bears further witness of the impact of this process, as illustrated by Juan de Mariana’s Treatise Against Public Entertainments (ca. 1590), a vehement diatribe against the negative influence of poetry, theatre, music, and dance on Spanish society.
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