The wide-ranging collection of figurative representations provided by these buildings contains abundant imagery of musicians and dancers, decorating every type of sculptural element: archivolts, capitals, corbels, metopes, statue-columns and baptismal fonts. At times these are biblical personalities such as King David performing sacred music or celestial visions such as the Twenty-four Elders of the Apocalypse. On other occasions they are examples of profane music in which male and female jongleurs take the lead. Initially the church hierarchy’s use of these images was clearly ideological in purpose, using them to warn the faithful of the prospect of damnation implicit in such practices that were popularly associated with a licentious and disorderly life, and thus contrary to the ideals upheld by the Church. These themes were very quickly taken up by the faithful, particularly by the stonemasons of the period who had to accommodate this doctrinal symbolism. The function and possible significance of such imagery is related to both its immediate context and that of its topographical status within the church itself.
Profane music and dance in the Middle Ages
In both religious and daily life, music and dance played an important role in the cultural outlook of the Romanesque period. However, as Professor Ismael Fernández de la Cuesta points out, medieval man’s highly religiously-charged view of his surrounding environment would not have allowed for a clear distinction to be drawn between the sacred and the profane. Both have an element of the sacred, more obviously so in the former, and while less so in the latter it was not considered to be absent.We have several examples from Visigothic Spain of the dual use of music in both religious and secular ceremonies. Saint Isidore of Seville puts this on record with his treatise De musica which forms part of the Etymologiae:
“Music is used not only in religious ceremonies, but in every kind of ceremony, happy or sad. In the same way that they sing hymns during holy office they also sing nuptial songs at weddings, and at funerals laments and lamentations to the playing of the tibia. At banquets the zither or the lyre are handed around the fellow guests so that the appropriate songs may be sung”.
There is no express prohibition of profane song in any of Isidore’s writings; what is more, it is clear from both his Etymologiae and his Regula that it was accepted that this music had a place in secular life. He even supported the usefulness of song during work in that the melodies were able to relieve weariness. Though in this situation the Bishop of Seville differentiated between sacred and profane song:
“If secular craftsmen whilst at their labours sing obscene love songs without cease, and employ their tongues in singing poems and fables without stopping their work, how much more fitting that the servants of Christ should have praise to God on their lips, and should employ their tongues in singing psalms and hymns whilst they undertake manual tasks!”
Saint Fructos did not subscribe to this monastic practice, and made clear his opposition to these types of musical distractions during labour in his Regula Communis:
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