Cancioneiro de Elvas

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1928, the musicologist Manuel Joaquim found the Cancioneiro de Elvas, in English the Elvas Songbook, in the library of Elvas. It is a manuscript of Renaissance songs from the 16th century. It ranks among only four surviving Portuguese songbooks of its age, alongside the Lisbon Songbook, the Belém Songbook and the Paris songbook. The songs are written in both Portuguese and Spanish, and together they form an important window onto secular music in Renaissance Iberia. Yet the book carries no date and no composer's name. Who wrote its music, and when was it copied? What exactly is inside it? And how can a manuscript that says almost nothing about itself still tell us so much?

• 2. Two Books in One

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  Sixty-five pieces of music make up the first part of the Elvas Songbook. Each is a polyphonic work for three voices, and all of them are secular, drawn from both Portugal and Spain. The poems set to music are villancicos and cantigas, two song forms that carry the sound of everyday courtly entertainment rather than church ritual. The second part of the manuscript turns from sound to words. It holds 36 poems that have no music at all. A reader opening the book therefore meets a collection that is half a performer's repertoire and half a small anthology of verse. Three musicologists have studied and transcribed the musical portion: Manuel Joaquim, Manuel Morais and Gil Miranda. Their work has made the three-voice pieces available beyond the manuscript itself, but the question of when the pages were filled still needed an answer.

• 3. Dating Without Dates

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  Nowhere in the manuscript does a date appear, so the exact moment of compilation cannot be known. Scholars have turned instead to clues hidden in the pages. One song sets a poem by Dom Manuel de Portugal, written for his beloved Dona Francisca de Aragão. That poem is known to date from around 1555, which means the songbook cannot be older than that. The paper offers a second clue. Its watermark resembles one used in Italy up to the decade of 1570. Placing the two clues side by side, researchers conclude that the Elvas Songbook was copied sometime between the decades of 1560 and 1570. The same manuscript that hides its date also hides the people behind its music.

• 4. Anonymous Composers

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  Not one composer is named anywhere in the Elvas Songbook, and every piece is left anonymous. Comparison with other Iberian songbooks has partly lifted that veil. Matching the same songs across collections reveals the authors of 7 of the 65 works, and possibly an eighth. Juan del Encina accounts for four of them. Pedro de Escobar is credited with two or perhaps three. Pedro de Pastrana wrote one. That leaves the large majority of the music with no known author at all. Their melodies were copied carefully into the manuscript, yet the people who shaped them remain unnamed, awaiting a match in some other songbook that has not yet been found.