About the Book
Silent Music explores the importance of music and liturgy in an eighteenth-century vision of Spanish culture and national identity. From 1750 to 1755, the Jesuit Andrés Marcos Burriel (1719-1762) and the calligrapher Francisco Xavier Santiago y Palomares (1728-1796) worked together in Toledo Cathedral for the Royal Commission on the Archives, which the government created to obtain evidence for the royal patronage of church benefices in
Spain. With Burriel as director, the Commission transcribed not only archival documents, but also manuscripts of canon law, history, literature, and liturgy, in order to write a new ecclesiastical history of Spain. At the center of
this ambitious project of cultural nationalism stood the medieval manuscripts of the Old Hispanic rite, the liturgy associated with Toledo's Mozarabs, or Christians who had continued to practice their religion under Muslim rule. Burriel was the first to realize that the medieval manuscripts differed significantly from the early-modern editions of the Mozarabic rite. Palomares, building on his work with Burriel, wrote a history of the Visigothic script in which he noted the indecipherability of
the music notation in manuscripts of the Old Hispanic rite. Palomares not only studied manuscripts, but also copied them, producing numerous drawings and a full-size, full-color parchment facsimile of
the liturgical manuscript Toledo, Biblioteca Capitular 35.7 (from the late eleventh or early twelfth century),which was presented to King Ferdinand VI of Spain. Another product of this antiquarian concern with song is Palomares's copy (dedicated to Bárbara de Braganza) of the Toledo codex of the Cantigas de Santa Maria. For both men, this silent music was invaluable as a graphic legacy of Spain's past. While many historians in the Spanish Enlightenment articulated the
idea of the modern nation through the study of the Middle Ages, Burriel and Palomares are exceptional for their treatment of musical notation as an object of historical study and their conception of music as an integral part of
history.
Table of Contents:
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Abbreviations
Notes on Orthography and Terminology
Preface
Introduction
1. Burriel in the Spanish Enlightenment
2. The Commission on the Archives in Toledo Cathedral
3. A Gem Worthy of a King: The Facsimile of a Mozarabic Chant Book
4. Alfonso X in the Age of Ferdinand VI: Copying the Cantigas de Santa Maria
5. Palomares and the Visigothic Neumes
Epilogue
Bibliography
About the Author :
Susan Boynton, Associate Professor of Historical Musicology at Columbia University, has published on medieval Western liturgy, chant, monasticism, prayer, the history of childhood, and troubadour song. She is the author of Shaping a Monastic Identity: Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000-1125 (Cornell University Press, 2006) for which she won the American Musicological Society's Lewis Lockwood Award in 2007. She is also
coeditor of volumes on music and childhood, on the Bible in the Middle Ages, and on the abbey of Cluny.
Review :
"A gem worthy of study: This book allows silenced voices of the Spanish Enlightenment to speak about how liturgy and chant contribute to a people's history and identity." --Raúl Gómez-Ruiz, SDS, Sacred Heart School of Theology and author of Mozarabs, Hispanics, and the Cross
"Susan Boynton tells a fascinating story of equal interest to medievalists and students of the Spanish Enlightenment, to musicologists and intellectual historians, and to anyone who thinks about how nations invent their own histories. All will learn from the exceptional breadth and depth of her scholarship." --Don M. Randel, President, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Editor, The Harvard Dictionary of Music, 4th ed.
"A truly remarkable scholarly achievement, one that adds a fresh, new, wholly original musicological dimension to current understanding of Spain's eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Silent Music is a must read for anyone interested in this particular chapter in Spain's history, and, more broadly, the role of music in the history of the European Enlightenment." --Richard L. Kagan, Arthur O. Lovejoy Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University
"[An] extraordinary book...Can serve as an exemplary introduction to the study of Visigothic chant and how it was viewed, despite its virtual disappearance in the 11th century, as one of the most important traits in the cultural construction of modern Spain. It is also a remarkably balanced history of monstrous cultural betrayal and its deeply ironic and melancholy aftermath." --Alejandro Planchart, Early Music America
"Impressively wide-ranging...Silent Music is a welcome and worthy addition to a series, Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music, which is already establishing itself as a venue for studies distinguished by their excellence." --Michael Noone, Reviews in History
"[The] book offers as much to the intellectual historian as to the musicologist, and should undoubtedly be read by anyone interested in the Spanish Enlightenment as well as in the historiography of the Spanish musical tradition. It strips away the myths and confusions that still seem at times to surround the old Hispanic chant tradition and its relationship to the endeavours of Cardinal Cisneros. Above all, it peels back layers of cultural history and shows how
these at times build directly on one another, and at times develop in parallel, impinging on one another or merging according to political needs and concerns of a given age." --Tess Knighton, Óenach:
Forum for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Ireland Reviews
"Impressively wide-ranging...Without a doubt, Silent Music is a welcome and worthy addition to a series, Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music, which is already establishing itself as a venue for studies distinguished by their excellence." --Reviews in History
"A very fine analysis of the Spanish cultural worlds of the late-eleventh and mid-eighteenth centuries." --Catholic Historical Review
