- Date: 149
- Composer: Juan del Encina
- Period: Renaissance (1450-1599)
Review
Though stories of the Renaissance in European music tend to focus on Italy and the Low Countries, Spain achieved its own Renaissance musical language fairly early. As Ferdinand and Isabella sought to purify their peninsula from the Moslems (as well as the Jews), they also built Spanish culture in more peaceful ways. The rulers varied from the practice of their predecessors, and did not seek as many foreign musicians, but rather cultivated natives. It was an excellent time for Juan del Encina, son of a shoemaker, to step onto the scene. He was a seminal figure in the Spanish theater, and with his contemporaries he helped cement a new Spanish style of both secular poetry and music. The intersections of these cultural revolutions may even be seen in a simple piece such as his four-voiced villancico, Hoy comamos y bebamos. It may have been composed for amateur performance during a Spanish play, either by a soloist with vihuela or by a group of singers. Its music embodies two important Spanish innovations of the time, the villancico form and the dance form known as the folia.As a villancico, Hoy comamos y bebamos is a textbook example. The musico-poetic form seems to have been central to the new Spanish courtly taste; one manuscript collection owned by the Spanish Royal Chapel -- the Cancionero Musical de Palacio -- contained no fewer than 300 of this genre (including Hoy comamos). The poetry consists of a refrain form (form Abba), and its music tends to be as clear-cut in its phrases as the poetic lines are in their rhymes. In this case, the text is an expansion of the timeworn phrase "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die." (In Encina's text, the death is not quite literal: the next day will be the religious holiday of the tongue-in-cheek Saint Antruejo, for which everyone must fast.) Encina's music proceeds in closely clipped phrases, simple modal chord progressions, and sprightly syncopated rhythms. It also offers one of the earliest surviving examples of a specific dance melody that would become immensely popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the folia. Spanish and Portugese musicians -- and later, others elsewhere in Europe in emulation -- would go on to write scores of variation sets upon the melody perhaps begun by Encina. ~ Timothy Dickey, All Music Guide
