The recent meeting of the International Hispanic Music Study Group at the National Meeting of the American Musicological Society in Minneapolis, presided over by William Summers, Coordinator of the Study Group, and organized and Chaired by Dr. Michael Noone, was to include presentations by seven scholars:

Tess Knighton, "Devotional piety and musical developments at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella,"

Douglas Kirk, "Newly-discovered works of Philippe Rogier in Spanish and Mexican instrumental manuscripts,"

Emilio Ros-Fábregas, "The Cardona coat of arms in the Chigi Codex: Spanish or Neapolitan?"

Kenneth Kreitner, "The church music of fifteenth-century Spain: a handlist,"

Eugene Cramer, "Regensburg, Bischofliche Zentralbibliothedk, Proske Sammlung, Mappe Victoria, I, n. 27a: Adding to the Victoria canon,"

Wolfgang Freis, "Music theory and theorists in sixteenth-century Spain,"

Elizabeth Seitz, "The manifesto for 20th-century Spanish nationalism: Felipe Pedrell's Por nuestra música"

Because of circumstances beyond their control, Kirk, Knighton, and Freis, were unable to attend; Knighton and Freis, however, sent copies of their planned presentations, which were read to the meeting by proxies. Two papers on Hispanic music given at other sessions will also be discussed.

Although the subjects of papers given were heavily weighted toward music of the late fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the results of these studies raise issues that may be helpful to scholars studying Hispanic music from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Because the papers seem to suggest a natural grouping by topics and related issues in research, I will discuss them according to topics rather than in the order that they were presented.

Kreitner, Knighton, and Ros-Fábregas focused upon the earliest music chronologically and their talks raise some thorny questions about what we really know concerning the nature of Spanish sacred music in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, why the compositional approach in this music developed as it did, and what were the "native" versus the "foreign" influences that shaped music on the Iberian Peninsula.

Kreitner, in particular, posed the most fundamental of all questions. Given the richness of musical life in fifteenth-century Spain revealed by documentary evidence, what was the repertory to which so many writers referred? Kreitner narrows slightly the group of works placed under the banner of association with the Catholic courts by eliminating composers, such as Peñalosa, whose known activity was mostly after 1500, but he still admits that most of what we know about music in fifteenth-century Spain is based upon repertory written no earlier than 1470.

He also presented a handlist of works that may be labeled "fifteenth-century" with reasonable security. He arrived at this list by an examination of all the accepted sources for early repertory, [the major sources: Seville 7-1-28 (the "Colombina"), Paris 4379, Segovia s. s., Barcelona 454; and four smaller manuscripts: Barcelona 251, Paris 967, Seville 82-4-33 and 82-4-33bis] and further utilized his knowledge of biographical information to distinguish settings by Spaniards from those by foreigners.

Kreitner admitted that this is only a first step because his study omits examination of style or the development of compositional practice. As he stated in the discussion that followed his presentation, the earlier works do have a stereotypical approach that is more homorhythmic, especially when compared with the work of Peñalosa, who used imitative textures much more extensively than the earlier Spanish composers had.

As with the topic of Kreitner's talk, the paper by Knighton revealed the need to examine the reasons behind some accepted beliefs about Spanish music. While admitting that some style characteristics common in Spanish music can be found in music elsewhere in Europe, she states that the particular way "in which they are combined and employed" originated with composers employed by the Catholic Monarchs.

Expanding upon ideas first broached in her doctoral thesis on music at the court of Ferdinand, Knighton discussed both musical aspects and the liturgical/devotional practices that may have influenced the compositions. This liturgical evidence relating many of the settings that Knighton studied is their common association with feasts either of the Holy Cross (The Invention; the Triumph; or the Exaltation) or Holy Week.

She includes both works in Latin and villancicos in Spanish among works with similar texts focusing upon the suffering of Christ on the cross and associates the enthusiasm for such texts with the contemporary wave of interest in Christology, which was at least partially spurred by Franciscan preachers associated with the courts, as well as Spain's growing obsession with the battle against heresy.

It is the specific passages of these devotional texts describing the suffering of Christ or those connecting it with the redemption gained through the Crucifixion that composers sought to project with certain musical techniques. The use of block chords extending into what Knighton labels "faster-moving, quasi-recitational style" and the isolation of certain passages by full cadences with fermata at the end of the immediately preceding phrase which are not found in music from other areas of Europe.

But, as the examples chosen by Knighton demonstrate, and as those of us who study examples of this repertory know, Spanish composers did use these techniques so extensively that they are among the immediately recognizable features of music in Spain before Morales.

Therefore, Knighton's attempt to connect them to the cultural/theological milieu may be an important insight creating avenues for future research. Her unique familiarity with the era of the Catholic monarchs makes this hypothesis plausible because she is able to relate specific motets to those days of the liturgical calendars of the courts known to have been given more magnificent display, almost certainly including polyphonic music.

In addition to the musical works mentioned above, Knighton reminded us of a parallel interest exhibited in the contemplation of Christ's suffering available in the many visual representations in altar pieces as well as the tradition of devotional tracts devoted to the Vita Christi.

The second reason that she offers for the approach taken by composers, an obsession of the Monarchs and all of Spain with fighting heresy, seems on the surface much less well grounded in terms of evidence connecting this trend to actual music. However, as my own research on the Office For The Dead has shown, this obsession with orthodoxy definitely affected the conduct of funerals and may have had a causal relationship to the widespread dissemination around 1500 of polyphonic works for that Office.

Therefore, many repertories in addition to those mentioned might be examined in relation to how the Church's desire for greater control affected various aspects of piety and resulted in the need for settings with specific kinds of texts.

The insights into the nature of Spanish music before 1510 related by Kreitner and Knighton make the findings of Ros-Fábregas quite a good complement to their work. Ros-Fábregas has solved a long-standing problem facing scholars of Ockeghem's music and its influence upon the sixteenth century, specifically on Spain. Was the Chigi Codex carried to Spain and, if not, where were the works by Spaniards added to the manuscript? The presence of the book in Spain is suggested by those added works and also by the fact that some coats of arms of the original owners have been covered over and replaced by those of the Spanish Fernández de Córdoba family.

In an earlier chronology of the choirbook's ownership, Herbert Kellman had proposed that it entered Spain sometime after the year 1515. Eleanor Russell used this hypothesis to argue that the copy in Tarazona 5 of the tract from Ockeghem's Mass for the dead was made directly from the Chigi. She stated that the book's presence in Spain affected the developing compositional style there.

Ros-Fábregas, through an analysis of the heraldic imagery found in the manuscript, concludes that the Chigi Codex must have been owned by the Neapolitan branch of the Cardona family--the Barons of Bellpuig--not by one of the well placed members of that family in Cataluña. His research proves conclusively that the coat of arms in the manuscript belonged to Ramon Folc de Cardona (d. 1522), who had commanded Fernando's army in Italy and was Viceroy of Naples from 1509 until he died. Cardona's body was returned to the family's ancestral seat, Bellpuig in the province of Lleida in Cataluña. The coat of arms found on his tomb in Bellpuig matches that found in the Chigi.

Ros-Fábregas also noted that Cardona's son married a member of the Fernández de Córdoba family, thus explaining the presence of that coat of arms in the choirbook. After their marriage in 1539, this couple established a home in Barcelona, at which time the Fernández crest may have been painted into the book.

Therefore, the Chigi Codex would have been in Spain probably twenty years later than earlier proposed, a time at which it could not have had the kind of influence posited by some scholars. This discussion of outside influence on the emerging Spanish school will continue, but the Chigi Codex seems to have been eliminated as the source of one large package of Northern music.

Taken with the papers by Knighton and Kreitner, which revealed even more the importance of the musical tradition in Spain before 1500, Ros-Fábregas' research helps define what was available, or not, to the composers in Spain during the years 1500-1530, when music in the country went through extraordinary changes.

Such relationships to the "outside" are also important in the study offered by Freis upon sixteenth-century musical theory in Spain. As he stated in his paper, theory in Spain is much like that in other national schools except that Humanism had little effect upon most Spanish theorists, who could not read Greek. Even those such as Bermudo, who expressed some interest in reviving Greek learning, remained in the Medieval tradition because they derived almost all of their knowledge of the ancients directly from Boethius. Of the Spanish theorists, only Salinas knew Greek and could approach the sources first hand.

The background of each theorist is important for any understanding of his approach. Related to this, Freis divided theorists in Spain into two categories: those with professional musical credentials, and those seemingly with no position clearly related to music. These non-professionals include Bermudo, whom Freis relates "is the one [Spanish theorist] to deserve most clearly the designation 'amateur'." This high percentage of nonprofessionals among theorists is, once again, not unique to Spain, and, as he points out, needs to be given more consideration in the historiography of music theory in general.

This paper, like those before, reveals that many basic elements of the musical life of Spain remain to be studied. One aspect that his presentation brings into focus is the relationship between the tradition of chant treatises, to which the vast majority of theoretical books in Spain belong, and the other tradition that included discussion of polyphonic music. As he states, the earlier chant treatises often include only the music needed for important liturgical celebrations without much of what we would consider "real" theory. However, these offer invaluable insights into the performance context of so many polyphonic settings of liturgical items.

Freis is correct in noting that each of these would have begun as a guide to proper singing in one particular institution, but such how-to treatises would have been helpful to many singers in churches throughout large regions where the liturgical practices would have been similar. Therefore, the concept of the "commercial" value of each may need to be reevaluated since some of the earlier treatises may not have been intended to appeal to a national audience as some of the later ones did.

Eugene Cramer's presentation, a study of a manuscript now in the Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek containing what could be a large number of heretofore unknown works by Victoria, may reveal an important discovery filling what the author labeled a "gap" in the compositional output of probably Spain's most well known composer.

Although his paper did not have the obvious juxtaposition of music inside Spain versus that outside, it provides an interesting view of how much remains to be done even on Victoria.

Cramer based his examination not only on the early seventeenth-century manuscript identified in his title, but also upon Mappe Victoria I, N. 27a, Bischöfloche Zentralbibliothek, Regensburg, a transcription of the earlier source by Karle Proske made in the early nineteenth century. He examined the works present in these manuscripts in terms of the liturgical use and their stylistic relationship to Victoria's known work.

The physical evidence available to both Proske and Cramer was the presence of two previously published works by Victoria in the manuscript as well as the fact that it has been bound together with a copy of Victoria's Hymni... of 1581. When published, this study will be a valuable addition to Victoria scholarship.

Mark Brill's "Colonial Rediscovery: A New World Zapotec Mass," given during another paper session, is a further development of ideas that he presented during the 1993 IHMSG session in Montreal. Based upon statements in the Zapotec language accompanying the work, Brill contends that a four-voice setting of the Mass now in the library at Tulane University was composed in 1736 by a Native American composer in the area of present-day Oaxaca, Mexico.

Brill hypothesizes that this setting reveals native influence upon the developing musical style in Mexico. The nature of Brill's work is important for future scholars who seek to determine the nature of the native elements incorporated into the musical culture of Colonial Latin America.

Although they discussed repertory far removed chronologically from the studies mentioned above, the last two presentations also examined musical aspects described as both native and/or foreign. Elizabeth Seitz' paper on Felipe Pedrell revealed many congruities with a talk given at another paper session by Carol Hess, "Musical criticism and the Black Legend on the eve of the Spanish Civil War."

Despite the fact that the majority of members of the IHMSG appear to focus their research upon music from earlier epochs, the interest in and level of exchange surrounding these two papers was extensive and spirited. Both presentations described the conscious attempts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to define a Spanish identity through music.

The subject of the paper by Seitz, Pedrell's manifesto, Por nuestra música, elaborating his vision of national opera in Spain, was first published in 1891 with his opera, the trilogy Los Pirineos. As Seitz stated, the essay had a far greater effect than the purposefully nationalistic opera to which it was attached.

One of Pedrell's primary goals was to push composers beyond the stereotypical clichés that had come to represent the traditional music of Spain so that they would be more fully aware of the scope of their native traditions, and thus, they would move Spain away from the musical domination by other countries.

His views concerning opera reflect his use of Wagner as a model, especially as regards the importance of the leitmotiv. Russian composers, too could serve as a models because they "have approached opera from the standpoint of the voice and not the orchestra." Seitz believes that the fulfillment of Pedrell's prescriptions was the opera La vida breve by his student Manuel de Falla.

Falla and his struggle with his nationalistic identity were also a primary focus of Hess' paper on criticism and the role of the "Black legend." She uses the reaction to the Madrid premiere in 1921 of Falla's Three Cornered Hat by Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes to underscore the basic ideological polarities represented in musical criticism of the time.

According to Hess, this reaction prefigured the rise of the cultural traditionalism of the Franco regime with its insistence upon españolismo, the nationalistically oriented glorification of the country, condemned by Pedrell, that had been replaced by more international works such as those by Falla.

Hess notes the difficulty of studying this aspect of reception both because scholars disagree upon a definition of Fascism and because of the modern predilection to condemn any artistic portrayal deemed racist. However, this cry against Falla's depiction of Spanish life through "foreign" methods was manipulated by the various ideologies represented in the right-wing Spanish press. Therefore, Hess connects this charge of racism against Falla with the increasingly "hackneyed españolismo" of music written by Spaniards after 1939.

The issues discussed by Hess and Seitz were ideas about which I was largely ignorant before their respective presentations. I strongly encourage them and the other members of the IHMSG whose research focuses upon music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to form sessions of their own at some time in future.

In fact, this struggle for identity discussed by Seitz and Hess seems to sum up the papers on Hispanic music presented during the AMS meeting. The sorting out of what was Spanish versus what was an outside influence will continue to be an essential focus of research on Hispanic music because the resulting admixture produced such remarkable music.