The Music in Garcilaso de la Vega’s Poetry and his Poetry in Music: A Musico-Poetic Interchange Between Sixteenth-Century Spain and Italy
Date
2014-09-25
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Abstract
This dissertation, about the music of Garcilaso de la Vega’s poetry and his poetry in music, draws from the fields of philology, linguistics, and musicology to provide an interdisciplinary perspective of the topic embedded in two interrelated contexts: Hispanic/Neapolitan Renaissance poetry and music.
Garcilaso, a sixteenth-century courtier and soldier, travelled extensively to serve in war especially in Italy. This cross-cultural contact led to the adaptation of Italian poetic forms and meters. Garcilaso fused imitated forms with the lyricism of his Spanish language. Scholars repeatedly praised his poetry for mastery of form and style, and a finest sense of musicality. And thus the question: What do critics mean by musicality? And how does musicality serve the literary medium in the construct of meaning? Few scholars have investigated Garcilaso’s lyric expression. Moreover, considering that humanist imitation of the classics extended to their theories of language as a means to convey their ideology, and given that Renaissance composers sought the finest vernacular poetry for their musical settings, in the second part I pose the question: To what extent did Garcilaso’s poetry and the sixteenth-century musico-poetic context intersect?
For the first argument, I construe musicality, in Bakhtinian terms, as the means by which the poetic voice conveys meaning and establishes a dialogue with the listener and other texts. I thus examine the tapestry of poetic linguistic elements that heightens the etymological meaning of words. For the next section, I survey the complex tapestry of Hispanic/Neapolitan dialogic genres to understand how Garcilaso’s poetry intersected with the musico-poetic landscape.
My findings reveal that the epithet ‘musical’ in Garcilaso’s poetry, is substantiated by a linguistic soundscape consisting of tangible elements embedded in every fibre of the poetic structures herein analyzed. In the second part of the study, Garcilaso’s poetry emerges in the music collections by Alonso Mudarra, Diego Pisador, Esteban Daza, Pere Alberch Vila, Pedro and Francisco Guerrero, Juan Vásquez, the Italian composer Giulio Severino, and in Italian anonymous manuscripts, such as Magliabechiano XIX (Florence, Italy). This dissertation includes a CD containing Renaissance musical settings of Garcilaso’s poetry, including a new transcription of the Magliabechiano musical setting.
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Literature--Romance
Citation
Oss-Cech Chiacchia, M. C. (2014). The Music in Garcilaso de la Vega’s Poetry and his Poetry in Music: A Musico-Poetic Interchange Between Sixteenth-Century Spain and Italy (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/28252