Accademia del Piacere - Rediscovering Spain
The decadent, ultraconservative Spanish monarchy of the 17th century tightly closed its cultural borders for fear of heretical northern European influences. Censorship and Inquisition were working at full capacity, and the arts suffered the consequences of that regressive nationalism. Paradoxically, today we can enjoy the musical implications of these policies. Away from Italian influences, Spanish musicians were forced to create a unique, original music, full of archaisms but also full of new solutions, influenced by popular music and also by forms and styles from the immense colonies of the Spanish empire.
Spanish liturgical music was then constrained to the repetition of old clichés, such us the old-fashioned Venetian polychoralism; but secular and instrumental music, even those for the most aristocratic circles, were literally flooded by the influence of the dances from overseas, unloaded by colonizers with gold and silver in the harbor of Seville. In this way, traditional Spanish rhythms slipped into palaces, but so did music coming from Spanish Naples, from neighboring Portugal and of course, those from the American viceroyalties together with the rhythms of black Africa, carried by thousands of slaves forced to cross the Atlantic.
These dances were filtered into the palaces hidden behind the strumming of the fashionable instrument, the guitar. Most of them had ternary meter and form of variations on a ground bass, that means, repeated chord sequences on which musicians improvised freely in this way displaying all their technical skills. The most beautiful and spectacular of these improvisations were written down in editions and manuscripts such as those of the Neapolitan Falconieri, the Aragonese Sanz and the Majorcan Guerau. In them we can listen to the decisive step throughout Spain of cross-rhythms and their insistent, simple harmonic wheels—harmonies probably crucial in the birth of modern tonality. As a part of the first globalization, these dances coming from the most humble environments and the most distant lands of the world eventually dominated the music of the court of Versailles, and reached the pen of great composers, such as Bach or Scarlatti. In their hands chaconnes, fandangos, folias and canaries went down in history.
