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.

Towards the end of the 1960s a new upsurge of interest in early instruments was gaining a momentum that would enable a more extensive revival of the vihuela. Thomas Binkley was the first vihuela player in my experience to come close to evoking the spirit of sixteenth century players. The driving force behind the Studio der Frühen Musik and one of the most powerful contributors to the twentieth century early music revival, Binkley’s performances on the 1968 double-LP Musica iberica (Teldec SAWT 9620/21-B) accompanying Andrea von Ramm were thoroughly inspirational and have stood the test of time better than many others. At precisely the same time, the first Spanish discs dedicated exclusively to the vihuela were being planned for the ambitious Hispavox Colección de música antigua española. The three discs recorded between 1969 and 1974 by Jorge Fresno (Hispavox HHS 5, HHS 10, HHS 23) and the album by Rodrigo de Zayas and mezzo-soprano Anne Perret (Hispavox HHS 15) allowed a wide selection of music from the old vihuela books to be heard for the first time in recorded history.

One of the factors that limited the enduring value of the old Hispavox recordings stemmed from the quality of instruments available at the time. Fresno and de Zayas played vihuelas that were handsome but heavy. Built using the principles of modern guitar making and strung at a much higher tension, they were difficult to play and both artists achieved astonishingly good results under the circumstances. This experience was part of the process of the evolution of early music performance, and while luthiers gradually learned that earlier makers knew exactly how to make instruments that were ideal for their purpose, the situation of the vihuela was limited by the lack of historical models to copy. At the time, the Jacquemart André vihuela was still the only known original, but it is a large, unusual instrument and not really a suitable prototype for modern copies. Since then, two further instruments have been rediscovered: one in Quito, Ecuador, identified in 1976 by the Chilean guitarist and vihuelist Oscar Ohlsen; the other owned by the Musée de la Musique, Paris, and brought to public attention in 1998 by museum curator Joël Dugot. These recent discoveries give valuable new insights, but still do not provide makers with an ideal model. Contemporary makers draw on a variety of sources. They are guided by experiment and intuition, and informed by research. Many ideas are inspired by images of vihuelas preserved in original paintings and prints, although these do not resolve many fundamental questions of construction. Makers have thus turned to sixteenth century lutes as well as guitars of the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that appear to maintain some of the fundamental construction principles developed in the sixteenth. Information resulting from musicological research furnishes further details. Much has been deduced, for example, from descriptions of instruments in inventories of deceased estates. They inform us not only about the owners of vihuelas, but also of their appearance, size and value. The most valuable instruments were made from rosewood or ebony, common local timbers such as walnut were used for cheaper vihuelas, soundboards were frequently decorated in the way we see in illustrations, and instruments were made in a variety of sizes. In the last quarter of the sixteenth-century, new innovations begin to appear such as instruments with curved rather than flat backs, and there was a new fashion for sound-hole decorations in the style customarily associated with later guitars, using multiple layers of parchment to create lazos hondos. Recently, François Reynaud located and published the 1575 inventory of the workshop of Toledo violero Mateo de Arratia that gives us a list of his tools and the partially completed instruments in his workshop and allows us to understand some of the techniques and processes used by early violeros. Interpreting the available information in individual ways, contemporary vihuela makers have learned to build light instruments with a string tension only one third of that of the modern guitar, but which produce a strong, rich tone. They use a very simple form of internal construction, and respond ideally to the essentially linear polyphony of sixteenth century music. Since the 1980s several makers have been making outstanding instruments that approximate the style of original vihuelas as closely as current knowledge permits.

The development of modern instruments of high quality has been only one of the advances of recent decades. Frequent live performances and the availability of recordings covering a broader section of the repertory are the most visible evidence of growing interest in the vihuela, but there have also been great changes in performance style, as well as in our historical knowledge of the instrument, its music and its historical context. If not involved directly in research themselves, most performers of historical instruments keep abreast of scholarly advances and this, in combination with their intuitive response to the music, can influence many dimensions of their performance. A greater understanding of each vihuela composer, his musical personality and performance context, for example, have helped to project their music with greater individuality. Luis Milán is now understood as a flamboyant entertainer of the ladies at the Valencian court of Fernando of Aragón and Germaine de Foix, probably a nobleman, and a man who aspired to be a Renaissance courtier of the kind so lucidly defined by Castiglione. He is unlikely to have had a formal musical training in counterpoint and vocal polyphony, instead he was an improviser probably descended from an older unwritten musical tradition of instrumentalist singers. Milán himself tells us that the works in El Maestro were all composed on the vihuela and then written down, making them, in effect, transcriptions of his own improvisations. Understanding him as singer of romances, as a musical storyteller, provides enormous insight in performing his music: in discovering the narrative logic within his fantasías, and in performing his music today as if we were the original improvisers. This is precisely the sensation that we derive from Hopkinson Smith’s two CDs of Milán’s music, one of solo music (El Maestro, vol. 1, Astrée E7748) and another of songs performed together with soprano Montserrat Figueras (El Maestro, vol. 2, Astrée E 7777).

One of the things that distinguishes El Maestro from all other vihuela books is that Milán’s music is all his own: he included no vocal polyphony arranged for the vihuela. Whether by Spanish, Italian, French or Franco-Flemish composers, these arrangements represent nearly two-thirds of all the surviving vihuela music, and can be used to comprehend many dimensions of the vihuelists’ background, training, taste, and other details of their musical style. These arrangements have traditionally been discarded as of secondary importance compared to original compositions, however, even as literal transcriptions of the vocal originals, they make highly attractive solo instrumental pieces, or songs with vihuela accompaniment. Their importance is even greater when we consider the repertoire in its sociological context. In the last twenty years there has been a fundamental shift in our perception of the social position of the vihuela in sixteenth century Spanish society. Formerly seen as principally an instrument of the court, largely based on evidence suggested by the printed musical sources, recent research makes it clear that the vihuela enjoyed a much wider popularity. I will return to this point shortly, but it is relevant here to understanding the tablature arrangements made by the vihuelists. Their function, on the one hand, was didactic, as they allowed instrumentalists to learn the composition techniques of master polyphonists through playing their music at a time when conservatories did not exist and music education possibilities were limited. On the other hand, the arrangements provided a repertoire of high quality music to be used for leisure purposes, whether in the private chambers of the courts, or in purely urban or domestic settings. The vihuela was, in fact, one of the principal vehicles for transmitting to the urban classes the art music that had traditionally been limited to a much narrower privileged sector of society. Similar to the role of the piano in the nineteenth century as a transmitter of symphonic and operatic repertoire through arrangements, the vihuela was a key factor in bringing the highest art music of its time to the educated middle classes.

The first vihuelist to publish arrangements, Luis de Narváez, was also responsible for establishing a new style of original fantasia that was emulated by subsequent composers. The books of Alonso Mudarra and Enríquez de Valderrábano published in the 1540s share many common characteristics of musical style with Narváez’s Delphín of 1538. Published only two years after Milán’s El Maestro, Narváez’s Delphín is markedly different. Documents found just over ten years ago by Juan Ruiz Jiménez have substantially redrawn our image of Narváez. Originally from Granada, he spent most of his professional life in the service of Francisco de los Cobos, secretary of Carlos V, later entering the service of Felipe II in 1548. In the new documents Narváez depicts himself above all as a composer of vocal polyphony, and only secondly a vihuelist. Two of his motets, incidentally, survive in mid sixteenth century publications from the Low Countries. It is likely that he met the great Francesco da Milano in Rome while there with Francisco de los Cobos, and that this was influential in the development of a new style of vihuela fantasia which he proudly claims to have introduced into Spain. This new imitative fantasia rapidly became the predominant style and prevailed for the following fifty years at least. These fantasias derive from the same techniques used by composers of motets and masses, and are conceived as though the vihuela were an ensemble of three or four contrapuntal voices, but blending abstract polyphonic ideas with the idiomatic devices suggested intuitively by the vihuela. Other works by Narváez, however, also show links to Milán and earlier improvised traditions, especially his diferencias or variations on the formulas associated with the recitation of romances and in improvisations on cantus firmi from well-known hymn melodies. Two monographic CDs of Narváez’s music are available, one of solo pieces by Hopkinson Smith (Los seys libros del Delphín, Astrée E 8706) while the other features songs and solo pieces performed by Juan Carlos Rivera with soprano Marta Almajano (El Delfín de música, Almaviva DS-0116).

Being not only the earliest sources, but also the first to be studied, the courtly associations of Milán and Narváez were influential in constructing the image of the vihuela as a courtly instrument. The pioneering studies of Pujol and Ward revealed a total of only some thirty-five sixteenth century vihuelists. Subsequent archival research has now quadrupled this figure and articles on many of them are included in the recent Diccionario de la música española e hispanoamericana. Furthermore, the discovery of printing contracts for some of the vihuela and related keyboard has made it clear that they were published in large editions of 1000-1500 copies, and were obviously aimed at widespread distribution. The close interrelationship between the habitually separate research fields of Renaissance vocal polyphony and instrumental music is also becoming clearer as there are more discoveries of composers such as Francisco Guerrero, who also played the vihuela and possibly used the instrument as a compositional tool. Not only do we know of professional vihuelists employed at court, but also of noblemen who were amateur players. Vihuelists from other social groups include university educated professionals and their wives, clerics who played the vihuela in their leisure time, and soldiers such as Garcilaso de la Vega, whose swiftness with the sword was often balanced by skills in poetry and music. The recent discoveries concerning sixteenth century violeros reaffirm the same view of the broad popularity of the vihuela and its social penetration, in stark contrast to the paucity of surviving instruments. If each of the c. 130 known violeros made as few as fifty vihuelas in his lifetime—a modest figure judging by the inventory of Mateo de Arratia— this would represent some 6500 instruments, but it is more likely that the surviving names represent only one quarter or even one tenth of those who practised their craft in the sixteenth century. The popularity of the vihuela was surely extensive.

Alonso Mudarra spent the last thirty-five years of his life as a canon of Seville Cathedral after having been raised in the household of the Dukes of the Infantado. His Tres libros de música (1546) probably reflects both his musical experience in a noble household as well as the musical tastes of the educated clergy. Mudarra’s collection includes fantasias, tientos, dances, variations, and tablature arrangements of vocal polyphony and exquisite songs with vihuela accompaniment. The lyrical quality of these works, many of which have been recorded by Montserrat Figueras and Hopkinson Smith (Libro tercero de música en cifra y canto, Astrée E 8533), is truly exceptional, and show the lute song to have been well developed in Spain before flourishing in other parts of Europe. Mudarra’s fantasias are similar to Narváez’s in many ways, but their initial imitative expositions are often completed by free polyphonic writing in which Mudarra also applied the same melodic talents that are evident in his songs. Broad selections of Mudarra’s solo music are available on numerous recordings, notably on the Juan Carlos Rivera recording De los álamos de Sevilla (Almaviva DS-0106).

It was probably the dedication of Enríquez de Valderrábano’s Silva de sirenas to Francisco de Zúñiga and the reference to him as a resident of Peñaranda de Duero that lead Juan Bermudo to assume him to have been a musician in the service of the Count of Miranda, but contemporary research has failed to uncover any trace of his life. All that remains is his anthology of 171 solo pieces and songs, both original works and arrangements of music by other lutenists and vocal composers. The style of his solo music is highly individual and somewhat enigmatic, and his fantasias proceed as long discourses that often borrow extensively from the music of other composers, but with relatively little of the polyphonic imitation that is the structural nucleus of the music of other instrumental composers. Although highly appealing music, few vihuelists have incorporated much of his music into the commonly performed repertoire. Two recent recordings by Alfred Fernández present numerous works by Valderrábano for the first time alongside music by his contemporaries: Valderrábano y los vihuelistas castellanos (Unacorda UCR 012000) and, more recently Nunca más verán mis ojos (Enchiriadis EN 2004).

The modern history of vihuela music, in both the publication of editions as well as recordings has developed largely according to the chronology of the original publications. Milán, Narváez, and Mudarra are by far the best-known vihuela composers today. After the pioneer Hispavox recordings of the early 1970s, approximately a decade passed until further solo vihuela recordings were released. These began with the first of the five CDs by Hopkinson Smith. Already highly reputed as player from the mid 1970s, Smith’s controversial recordings challenged accepted notions of vihuela performance. His first vihuela recording, works from El Maestro (1984), imposed his already legendary dynamic flair on Milán’s music. For the first time, Milán’s solo music achieved a depth of character and a breadth of colour that gelled with the composer’s own musical personality. Smith brought a new rhythmic flexibility that was unknown, and his sound revealed the polyphonic qualities of the vihuela as never before. The same qualities apply to his subsequent recordings of Narváez and Mudarra. A student of both Emilio Pujol and John Ward, Smith is a key link between tradition and modernity, and brings together Pujol’s pioneering spirit and love of the vihuela with Ward’s analytical mind, blending them together with his own unique artistic gifts. A foundation member of Hesperion XX, he also played a vital role together with Jordi Savall and Montserrat Figueras in the dramatic redefinition of the sound of Spanish Renaissance music, following the inspiration of Thomas Binkley. In his role as professor of lute and vihuela at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, Smith has been a central figure in the development of vihuela performance during the last twenty years, and the majority of today’s leading vihuelists have attended his classes or have been influenced by his interpretations.

The music of the later vihuelists, Miguel de Fuenllana, Diego Pisador and Esteban Daza still resides more in the domain of musicologists than in the concert hall or on recordings. It corresponds to a period in which the polyphonic density of music generally increased and is often extremely demanding both for the performer and listener. I sometimes wonder if it is not the performer who derives the greatest pleasure from this music through the continuous discovery of its charms at each new encounter, and with its textures subtly manipulated to give new nuances. May this have been its original purpose, as intimate musical experience rather than concert music?

Again allied to the broadening perspective of the vihuela in society, it is of fundamental importance to realise that both Pisador and Daza were amateur vihuelists, while Fuenllana was a professional player attached to the court of Felipe II for most of his working life. Pisador was probably of noble descent and spent many years as a mayordomo in Salamanca, maintaining family honour in apparently modest circumstances. His Libro de música of 1552 represents years of dedication and includes arrangements of eight complete masses of Josquin alongside some thirty original works and fifty further arrangements of vocal polyphony. Even when one resolves the typographical errors that abound in his tablature, it is evident that his compositional ability was limited. In his fantasias, Pisador was neither able to control the density of musical texture nor direct the flow of his harmony with great skill. There is a frustrating and un-reconciled tension between his ability to conceive satisfying musical forms and his lack of ability to bring his intentions to fruition. On the other hand, his diferencias and songs, which are of modest pretensions are more satisfying works in performance. Together with arrangements of vocal polyphony these are the works performed by Felipe Sánchez Mascuñano with soprano Miryam Vincent on the 1995 monographic anthology La música de Diego Pisador (Ars Viva AVA16101).

Like Pisador, Esteban Daza came from a large and once prestigious family in neighbouring Valladolid. Some details of his life suggest him to have been a recluse who took refuge from the world in the hermetic abstraction of his vihuela. Even after the death of his father, he avoided taking on the family responsibilities that befall the firstborn son in a large family and there is no evidence that he ever practised a profession after his university studies. Nor did he venture far from the family fold: unmarried at fifty, he continued to reside with four of his younger siblings, and at the end of his life was buried in the family chapel at San Benito el Real. In this environment, Daza was able to achieve a level of musical competence and polish that we might consider in modern terms to befit a professional. Together with about forty deft arrangements of motets, villancicos and villanescas, his fantasias are models of dense polyphonic counterpoint, high precision miniatures that are cast very well for the instrument. The two recent recordings that feature Daza’s music give pride of place to his arrangements of Spanish songs, and to his fantasias. Estevan Daça, El Parnasso (Arcana A316), released in 2001 by Ariel Abramovich and countertenor José Hernández Pastor, is the first recording entirely dedicated to Daza’s music and includes nearly all his song arrangements and a selection of fantasias. A smaller but similar selection is included on Spanish Songbooks (Emergo EC3928-2), released in 2000 by Dutch vihuelist Lex Eisenhardt and soprano María Luz Álvarez.

Without any doubt, Miguel de Fuenllana is one of the most outstanding instrumental composers of the sixteenth century and still largely underestimated. He is a composer who deserves to be included among the most outstanding instrumental musicians of the sixteenth century alongside Antonio de Cabezón, Francesco da Milano, William Byrd, John Dowland, or any other acknowledged Renaissance master. In considering the only surviving source of Fuenllana’s music, it should be remembered that Orphénica lyra (1554) was published when he was probably still in his early twenties, and we can only guess what he might have achieved in the following thirty or forty years of his musical career. At the time of the book’s publication, Fuenllana was in Seville, but the following year the theorist Juan Bermudo cites him as being a musician of the Marquesa of Tarifa. Although not independently confirmed, the probability of this is supported by his subsequent appointment to the royal court in 1560 as a chamber musician to Felipe II’s second wife, Isabel de Valois, immediately following the marchioness’ departure for Naples where her husband, the Duke of Alcalá, had been appointed viceroy. Fuenllana spent more than thirty years in court service.

The majority of the 188 pieces in Orphénica lyra are arrangements of vocal polyphony: Mass movements, motets and Spanish and Italian secular works. Published prior to his court appointment, this music probably reflects Fuenllana’s musical experience in his employment with the Spanish nobility. His original works, sixty fantasias and tientos, are demanding exercises in dense imitative polyphony. They are strongly architectonic works that conceal a high level of expression within their dense counterpoint. It is very difficult music, and this is undoubtedly a principal factor that continues to make it the least heard vihuela music today. The only monographic recording drawn from Fuenllana’s anthology was the 1999 debut of José Miguel Moreno’s ensemble Orphénica Lyra. Although in many ways an exquisite recording that transmits some dimensions of Fuenllana’s extraordinary musical sensibility in various ensemble reconstructions mainly of popular song arrangements, it is disappointing that only two of the master’s original pieces are included on Fuenllana, Libro de Música para Vihuela intitulado Orphenica lyra (Glossa GCD 920204). The eleven solo pieces Juan Carlos Rivera selected for his record De los álamos de Sevilla (Almaviva DS1 0106), give a complementary selection, although it too only presents two of the fantasias. Listeners wishing to hear more of these works must return to the old Hispavox recordings or to excellent modern guitar performances by Italian Piero Bonaguri Incontri—Encounters (Phoenix 00617), recorded in 2000, in which he uses the reflective fantasias to contrast with works by twentieth century composers.

Once limited exclusively to the seven vihuela books that we have been discussing until now, the panorama of the vihuela has been gradually expanding during the last decades. Published in 1993, José Miguel Moreno first solo vihuela recording, Canto del Cavallero (Glossa GCD 920101), not only consolidated the reputation he had gained during the previous decade as one of the most formidable modern vihuelists, but also took the bold step of including for the first time selections from the books of Venegas de Henestrosa (1557) and Hernando de Cabezón (1578) conceived “para tecla, arpa y vihuela” alongside works by Pisador, Fuenllana, Valderrábano and Milán. Beyond the luxurious sound and impeccable artistry that Moreno brings to the vihuela, these are the first recorded attempts to include some of the music that in its own time was considered interchangeable between keyboard instruments, the vihuela and the harp.

On another front, the vihuela repertory has been slowly expanding due to the discovery of new tablature manuscripts. The discovery by Juan José Rey in 1975 of works bound into a poetic anthology Ramillete de flores (1593) held in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid was the first of these. Its importance was twofold: a source considerably later than those previously known, and a repertoire with greater emphasis on popular performance styles than on polyphonic arrangements and fantasias. Together with manuscript additions to the Vienna copy of Valderrábano’s Silva de sirenas, and another small collection discovered in Simancas and published by Antonio Corona-Alcalde in 1986, these works have broadened our perspective of the practice of the vihuela in sixteenth century Spain, helping us to see the published books as the more formal dimension of a broader and multi-faceted practice.