ABSTRACT
As Juan José Carreras [1998a] has shown in his introduction to Music in Spain during the eighteenth century, perceptions of 17th- and 18th-century Spanish music have changed considerably, especially since the publication of Antonio Martín Moreno’s text book [1985] or José Subirá’s pioneering studies [1953]. Little by little, the received stereotypical ideas of an irreversible decline in music in the Iberian peninsula have disappeared to make way for an ongoing rehabilitation of almost two centuries of creativity. At the heart of this overall re-evaluation lies a consideration of the villancico [Laird, 1997], and an ever-increasing reassessment of its importance in the musical world of 18th-century Europe—especially its integration into the group of works generally termed ‘cantatas’. Similarly, the idea of the decline of the villancico caused by the influence of Italian music continues to smoulder, 1 yet it is clear that many of the works by Spanish chapelmasters were adapted with ease to the prevailing musical idiom of the period.
