A genre transplanted: The madrigal in Spanish collections of printed music (1536--1614)

The Italian madrigal arrived in Spain in the 1530s and soon enjoyed widespread appeal, illustrated by examples of the genre in most of the printed collections of instrumental and vocal music carried out by sixteenth-century Spanish composers. Since this important repertory has not received enough scholarly attention, this dissertation takes a broad approach and considers the various circumstances that affected the cultivation of the madrigal in Spain.;With this purpose in mind, it examines the content and particular features of each printed collection and arrives at the first definition of the genre in Spain. Once a repertory has been established, it analyzes the music and elucidates the similarities and differences with the Italian madrigal. It also examines the texts used by Spanish madrigal composers and how they represent a microcosm of Spanish verse during the sixteenth century, when two poetic traditions came together: a more current one, adjusted to humanist concepts and characterized by hendecasyllabic meter, and an older one, based on octosyllabic Spanish verse.;As part of the study of the cultivation of the genre, this dissertation investigates the courts that adopted the madrigal into Spain and takes into account the role of ecclesiastical and urban audiences who were responsible for its flourishing, as members of the church and the educated gentry enjoyed madrigals in the privacy of their own homes and at gatherings, such as literary academies, which were formed in various Spanish cities at the time. It also analyzes the impact of the music printing business in Spain and how its insufficient development limited the production of madrigals.;My analysis of these examples shows that the genre went through a process of adaptation to a new culture, which ultimately gave rise to the unique characteristics of the Spanish madrigal. As in Italy, the madrigal in Spain was text-generated and composers expressed the words with a variety of musical devices, particularly textual repetition, melismas, large melodic skips, changes in texture, and word painting, but unlike their Franco-Flemish and Italian colleagues, Spanish composers avoided intense musical effects, which resulted in a more restrained version of the genre.