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Historical awareness of the vihuela began with the encyclopaedic publications of nineteenth century Spanish musicógrafos, with the first modern transcription of a song from Miguel de Fuenllana’s Orphénica lyra appearing in the Calendario Histórico Musical para el año de 1873. A quarter of a century later, the 1902 publication of Guillermo Morphy’s Les Luthistes espagnols du XVIe Siècle, an anthology of songs and solo pieces from the seven surviving vihuela books, drew serious, wider attention to the instrument. This was followed by the inclusion of pieces in Felipe Pedrell’s Cancionero Popular Musical Español (1918-1922) and Eduardo Martínez Torner’s Colección de Vihuelistas Españoles del Siglo XVI (1923), an edition of pieces from Luis de Narváez’s Los seys libros del Delphín de música de cifras para tañer vihuela (1538). While all these publications brought the vihuela to the attention of erudite scholars, it was the involvement of the guitarist Emilio Pujol that brought the vihuela to a broader musical public. Pujol began editing and performing guitar transcriptions of vihuela pieces from the late 1920s and then took the further step of having a copy made of the recently discovered vihuela in the Musée Jacquemart André in Paris. In 1933, he made the earliest recording of vihuela music, including three of Luis Milán’s pavanas in the pioneering recorded music history, L’Anthologie Sonore, under the direction of the distinguished German musicologist Curt Sachs.
It was not until the 1960s that further vihuela recordings appeared, notably Graciano Tarragó accompanying Victoria de los Ángeles in recital, and also with the Barcelona ensemble Ars Musicae. By this time, selected works from Luis Milán’s El Maestro (1536), Narváez’s Delphín (1538), Alonso Mudarra’s Tres libros de música en cifras para vihuela (1546) had become common in the recitals of classical guitarists, and Andrés Segovia assisted the movement by inviting Pujol to participate in his annual master classes at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena. As a scholar, Pujol had published during this time his complete editions of the music of Narváez (1945) and Mudarra (1949) in the authoritative Monumentos de la música española, followed in 1965 by the original pieces in Enríquez de Valderrábano’s Libro de música de vihuela intitulado Silva de sirenas (1547). Much earlier, in 1927, Leo Schrade had published a modern edition of Milán’s El Maestro. While these new editions were giving easier access to the music, and Pujol’s included extensive scholarly studies, John Ward was working on the other side of the Atlantic on a doctoral thesis on the vihuela that was completed in 1953, and which provided the first global study of instruments, players, repertoire and historical context. Although never published, it still remains the most authoritative global study of the vihuela and its music.
I suspect that the initial impact and early success of the vihuela was not directly due to its sound, but rather to the images it conjured. On the one hand, it invoked legendary figures of antiquity, and the supernatural powers of music embodied in the myths of Orpheus and Apollo, and other legends invoked by the titles of the sixteenth century vihuela books. At the same time, and still in a period in which the guitar was striving to achieve legitimacy on the international concert platform, these images lent a certain ancestral authority to the guitar that was made audible through the obsolete modal harmonies of its distant heritage. This enchantment that linked the past to the present, the twentieth century to the Renaissance, is also paralleled in the way that Renaissance vihuelists attempted directly to invoke the music of classical antiquity. Deeper than a romantic yearning for the simplicity of the past, or even a purely historical concern, vihuelists had learned from the new Platonic translations and contemporary music theorists of the theories of the Greeks concerning the power of music and its ethical value in building worthy character. They understood the way that the vihuela could be used to move the affections and tune the human spirit to the harmony of the universe. These essentially Pythagorean rationalisations coincided perfectly with Christian devotion and were thus also in tune with their age. For them, the vihuela was the reincarnate lyre of Orpheus and they identified the instrument with noble and ancient musical virtues perfected in classical civilisation.
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