ABSTRACT
In his classic monograph on 17th-century music, Lorenzo Bianconi categorizes the villancico as Catholic devotional music and describes it as ‘the Iberian equivalent of the Italian lauda’ [1987: 122]. Twenty years ago such a categorization would have seemed unsurprising given that it underlined the villancico’s popular character and its strophic structure, allowing it in effect to be considered as a relative of the English carol and French noël. It is clear that for much of its history the sacred villancico maintained a continual interaction with secular models that already in the 15th and 16th centuries made it a kind of popular song dressed anew in devotional verse [Ros Fábregas, 1993: 1505–14]. However, during the 16th and 17th centuries the villancico became a genre that was widely cultivated by professional church musicians and consequently began to assimilate distinctive compositional techniques from liturgical music, such as polychorality [Torrente, 2000a].
