Luys Milán: Vihuela Virtuoso

Years ago I owned a volume with the complete instrumental music of Luys Milán, 16th century composer of music for vihuela, a guitar-shaped instrument roughly equivalent to the lute that was widely played in Spain. Not to be confused with the modern folk instrument played in Mexico. Alas, I lost it together with a lot of other music, years ago. All I have had of Milán for quite a while are the two fantasias found in the very useful Hispanae Citharae Ars Viva collection by Emilio Pujol. I find myself playing more and more those fantasias so I decided to replace my Milán holdings. There seems to be only one available option these days:

This is a good series--I have previously owned volumes devoted to Luis de Narváez--but it is expensive and the Milán instrumental works are divided into four volumes. Incidentally, the date is likely wrong: Milán's collection for vihuela seems to date from 1536. This makes it the first book published for vihuela and it was followed by six more, up until 1576, each by a different composer. The Die Tabulatur series is semi-scholarly in that it includes three different versions of each piece, aligned vertically. The top version is the original tabulature (very similar to modern tabulature). Underneath it is a transcription on two staves in the notional original key, supposedly for lute or keyboard. On the bottom is the transcription for guitar. I say "semi-scholarly" because a proper scholarly edition would contain a full apparatus of critical commentary and a reference bibliography.

Click to enlarge

This is useful in a couple of ways. For one thing, you can always consult the tabulature to see how Milán would have fingered a particular passage. The problem with tablature for contrapuntal music is while it shows where each note begins, it does not show how long it lasts, so the voice-leading is anything but clear. Both transcriptions are interpretations of how the editor thought the voices should be sustained. On the guitar, at least, they are not always feasible and the tablature fingering often does not permit voices to be sustained the way the editor imagines. The big plus of the tablature is that it shows the exact pitch of each note. In the vocal notation of the time there was sometimes a certain ambiguity because there were certain conventions covering the application of accidentals. This practice was called musica ficta. Follow the link for a discussion in Wikipedia. Lute and vihuela tablature shows us how musica ficta was often applied. The only inconvenience with this layout is that there are a lot of page-turns and sometimes your eye might go to the wrong line!

Here is a performance on guitar of this fantasia by Mario Oriz:

Until the invention of the tuning fork in 1711, there was no standardized pitch, but it is usually claimed that the lute was tuned from G to g. The vihuela had the same tuning, though both instruments came in different sizes at different pitches. For this reason the guitarist in the clip has put a capo on the third fret which notionally re-creates the vihuela tuning. It does lighten the sound, which is a plus, and also makes some stretches easier.

As you can hear, this fantasia and others by Milán generally, follows a typical 16th century contrapuntal structure with sections that unfold a single motif in different voices concluding with a cadence. But there are also other, more chordal, sections. In a future post or two I am going to analyse a couple of fantasias in terms of their point of imitation structure, cadences and use of accidentals. How, for example, in this piece might we explain the frequent use of C# alongside the prevailing C natural?

One interesting thing about the efflorescence of vihuela music in 16th century Spain was that from the first book, by Milán, to the last one, by Daza, there is a movement from more abstract musical forms like the fantasia, tiento and pavana, to dances, variations and transcriptions of popular vocal music. Then the guitar took over and the vihuela disappeared.