Biblioteca de la Guitarra y Cuerda Pulsada

This thesis investigates borrowing from vocal music in the Spanish vihuela de mano repertoire of the sixteenth century. The study first provides an overview of the culture and context of musical borrowing specific to the vihuela repertoire, followed by an evaluation of current methodologies for the research of borrowing. Then, these components aid a case study of borrowing in the genre of the intabulation, with discussion of artistic and technical issues that arise in this practice. Although borrowing occurs in many genres of vihuela music, the intabulation is especially central to this issue as it consists of mostly borrowed material.

Throughout intabulations, many conventions of adapting vocal music to this highly idiomatic instrument exist, and these same practices have wider implications in other genres. Intabulations contributed significantly to the spread of international style and were also important didactic tools, serving to teach amateur musicians of the middle class the art of counterpoint and composition. Due to this didactic quality, a greater understanding of artistic and technical preferences in intabulations informs an understanding of compositional style of the vihuela repertoire in general.

Little scholarly work exists concerning borrowing techniques in the genre of the vihuela intabulation, so the study is framed by two areas of literature review. First, a partial account of the vihuela’s history and culture as it relates to borrowing establishes why this type of research is valuable. Next, an investigation of research methods commonly used in vocal music borrowing aids an analysis of borrowing in the vihuela intabulation. The third chapter presents several comparative transcriptions of vihuela intabulations and their corresponding vocal sources, providing case studies of both artistic and technical issues that surface when realizing polyphony on the vihuela. Finally, the concluding chapter categorizes the artistic and technical alterations discussed in chapter three to allow for broader application. The paper concludes that the amount and style of figuration in intabulations is directly related to the compositional style of the source vocal work, since certain methods of composition allow for more ornamentation than others.

Borrowing in the Music and Culture of the Vihuela:  A Case Study on the Intabulation