Ramos and Frye at Seville: “oral contrafacta” in the Cancionero de la Colombina

Ramos and Frye at Seville: “oral contrafacta” in the Cancionero de la Colombina Santiago Galán Med&Ren International Conference, 2015 - Brussels At the close of the 15th Century, two related phenomena coincide at Spain: the compilation of songbooks or “cancioneros”, and the publishing of printed music treatises in Spanish. The “cancioneros” gives us a sample of the rich repertoire of vernacular polyphonic songs that were composed and sung along the 15th Century in the Spanish kingdoms, previously transmitted orally, as suggest the very scarce remaining traces of written songs until the end of the Century. At the same time, the Spanish music theorists of those years (such as Ramos de Pareja) discussed techniques of oral training for church singers, but incidentally, some comments in their texts reveal knowledge of the European popular secular music of the moment. Many of the songs in the “cancioneros” are attributed to Spanish composers, while a significant portion of them remain anonymous. Between these, we have been able to find some unnoticed contrafacta of widely known foreign polyphonic compositions (such as one song by Walter Frye), adapted in a way that invites to propose a possible kind of reworking of this musical material into a new “local” product, which we will call “oral contrafacta”. This process would involve the use of memory, orality and the Spanish particular tradition of improvised counterpoint reflected in the musical treatises at the end of the 15th Century.