Musical instruments in the Cantigas de Santa Maria

During the 12th and the 13th centuries, throughout the Christian world, flourished the cult of the Virgin Mary. Men saw her as an intermediary between the common people and God, her Son, and as a symbol of absolute love and immaculate service to a feminine idea. People were inclined to ask the Virgin to plead their cases with God, and large numbers of songs were devoted to her, singing her praise and recounting the miracles that she performed in aid of the pious and the clean of heart. There are many collections of these songs in Italian, French and Latin, but the largest one is the Cantigas de Santa Maria, compiled between 1260 and 1280 by Alfonso X, El Sabio (The Wise) “King of Castilla, Toledo, Leon, Galicia, Sevilla, Cordoba, Murcia, Jaen and the Algarbe”

There are some 426 cantigas contained in four manuscripts, of which three are in Spain (two in the monastery of Escorial and one in Madrid) and one in Florence. The two most important are the Escorial manuscripts. One contains 401 cantigas with their music and a series of richly illuminated miniatures of musicians holding instruments, giving us a first-hand clue of the instrumentation used in their performance. The variety of instruments is impressive. All types of stringed instruments, bowed (fidulas and rebab or rebec) or plucked (citterns or guitars, mandolas, lutes, psalteries or zithers and harps ), wind instruments (shawms and double shawms, bladder pipes, transverse flutes, pipes or recorders, trumpets, horns or trombas, bagpipes), percussion (drums and tabors, clappers or castanets, cymbals, chime bells) and even portative organ and organistrum or symphonia. Also, the miniatures seem to provide indispensable evidence that the Cantigas were sung by one or more voices variously accompanied by one, two or a group of instruments and sometimes by dancers (thanks to Leda Filippopoulou).

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