The 'Canciones y villanescas espirituales' of Francisco Guerrero and the tradition of sacred song in Renaissance Spain

Franciso Guerrero was one of the most prominent composers of the Spanish Renaissance, yet despite this fact very little study has been devoted to his Canciones y villanescas espirituales which has been available in modern transcription for nearly fifty years. A scant amount of previous research on this collection has provided only basic structural and musical characteristics of the publication. No previous study has considered the position of that publication within the larger area of sacred song in the Iberian Renaissance. This dissertation seeks to rectify this situation by providing an in-depth study of the collection itself as well as an analysis of its position within the larger tradition of sacred song composition in Spain.;The study begins with an introduction of the contents and makeup of the collection and establishes its position within the larger repertoire of sacred songs on the Iberian peninsula. The examination then turns to the organization of the collection which exhibits a careful system of ordering that had not been present in any earlier collection of sacred songs in Spain. The ordering takes into consideration a unique blending of number and arrangement of voices, thematic grouping of texts according to subject matter, mode, and arrangement of clefs. The analysis then turns to a study of the collection's contents which begins with an examination of the poetic content of the publication and its place within Spain's literary history. This is followed by an analysis of the musical characteristics of the two major musical forms in the collection: the refrain song forms, or villancicos, and the through-composed madrigals. As the study progresses it becomes apparent that the Canciones y villanescas is a work that is transitional in nature, incorporating traditional poetic and musical forms but with innovative stylistic and compositional features that would become standard in the Baroque. The overall organization of the collection is apparently unique to the environs of Seville and seems to suggest that the collection was intended for both liturgical and devotional use. Moreover, the collection also provides insight into the society of the time and represents a very contemporary view of Spanish religiosity at the end of the sixteenth century.