National Singing Styles - Spain

Spanish contributions to musical developments in Italy were significant: the Spanish may have given Italy the castrato voice. Many elements from Spanish spoken theater (such as buffo parts, the character of the servant-confidant, and the mixture of different elements of social class) were incorporated into Italian opera. While these elements sparked many musical developments in Italy, they did not lead to the same degree of innovation in Spain, where the Baroque arrived much later than elsewhere in Europe. The court of Philip IV was conservative, the musical life of the chapel heavily steeped in the Renaissance Flemish tradition. Foreign influences on Spanish musical life in the second half of the century were also limited, though this was not
for lack of exposure.

The principal treatise we have for Spanish singing is Domenico Pietro Cerone’s El melopeo, published in Naples in 1613 and written in Spanish (not Cerone’s native language), possibly in order to curry favor with Philip III and the Spanish viceroy in Naples. A very conservative work, El melopeo nonetheless exerted a profound influence in Spain that lasted into the late eighteenth century. An enormous volume, it is the earliest music treatise still surviving that was brought to the New World.

Book VIII of El melopeo deals with glosas, which we might call in English “running divisions,” and with garganta technique, the throat articulation technique that singers used to execute them. One can view this section as Cerone’s diminution manual in the sixteenth-century tradition of Diego Ortiz, and of Tómas de Santa Maria, from whom Cerone borrowed some examples.


Cerone says little about vocal technique and claims that his aim is to aid the beginning glossador; yet he does tell us that cantar de garganta means the same thing as cantar de gorgia in Italian. The glosas require agility (destreza), lightness (ligereza), clarity (claridad), and time (tiempo). These descriptive words are strikingly similar to the words used by the French in outlining the ideal singing voice. Cerone makes it clear that the number of notes in a division do not need to add up metrically but that perfection consists more in maintaining the time and the measure than in running with lightness, because if one reaches the end too late or too soon, everything else is worthless. He also recommends, unlike the Italians, doing the division in one breath. Execution of divisions for Cerone requires primarily (1) strength of the chest (fuerça de pecho), by which I think he means breath capacity rather than strong air pressure—since he goes on to say he means by this being able to sing to the end of the line, and (2) the disposition of the throat.

Spanish singers used a fundamentally Renaissance vocal style and technique until very late in the seventeenth century. Many of the texts of later seventeenth-century tonos and tonadas are of a narrative or descriptive nature, not expressive in the manner of an Italian monody. Their general style is restrained and simple, though they may have been ornamented in the garganta style. Louise Stein has pointed out that most of the actress-singers active on the Spanish stage were not well educated and were trained by rote in a traditional, popular style, in marked contrast to the training of the Italian castratos.

One of the challenges in performing Spanish vocal music of this period lies in finding a balance between the accentuation of the text and the (often complex) musical rhythms. Sprezzatura does not seem to have been adopted by the Spanish. Although one might occasionally apply “corrective” word accentuation, the overriding rhythmic vitality of the music seems to take precedence as a general rule over accentual matters of the text. This creates a typically Spanish dynamism between the words and the music.