From a Spanish Palace Songbook

'Captivating' (Daily Telegraph)

A treasure as rich as any discovered by Columbus in the New World is the so-called Cancionero de Palacio ('Palace Songbook'), still preserved after almost five hundred years in the royal palace in Madrid. This elegant, disarmingly petite volume originally contained well over five hundred songs, of which almost 460 survive. Compiled over a period possibly as long as forty years, the Songbook is clearly intended to have been a repository of polyphonic song, most probably of the repertory of the royal court of Ferdinand and Isabella. The link with the royal court has never, in fact, been proven, and rests largely on the evidence of the high proportion of songs attributed to composers who served at least for some of their careers in the royal chapels. A substantial number of the songs, however, bear no ascription at all, and it is possible that this emphasis is misleading. The large body of songs - about sixty - attributed to one composer, Juan del Encina, throws into relief a possible involvement on his part in the compilation of the collection, at least in its early stages. Encina, nine of whose songs are featured on this recording, never actually served at court, at least in any official capacity: it would appear that he was not, for example, a salaried member of the large chapel choirs funded by the Aragonese and Castilian treasuries. He did serve, during the 1490s, at the court of the Duke of Alba, the king's cousin, in Alba de Tormes just outside Salamanca, and it would seem that much of his poetry, most of his plays and many of his songs would have been written and composed during this period: his collection of lyric verse was published in Salamanca in 1496 and dedicated to the duke.

However, Encina clearly had royal connections, both during this, his most productive period, and later, towards the end of the first decade of the sixteenth century, when he represented the chapter of Málaga Cathedral at court. By that time, however, he was basically resident in Rome and it is more likely, if he was involved in any direct way with the Palace Songbook, that this occurred during the 1490s. Certainly, during this period he dedicated a number of prose works to members of the royal family, and notably to prince Juan, heir to the throne whose untimely death in 1497 inspired the moving lament Triste España sin ventura. It may be that Encina, having successfully curried favour with the future king, saw his own hopes dashed by Juan's demise. The role of the prince himself in the cultivation of polyphonic song at court should not be underestimated: he is said to have spent his afternoons singing three-part songs with his chapelmaster, Juan de Anchieta, and a handful of the best of the choirboys in the royal chapel. This princely passion for polyphonic song might well account for the enormous vogue for it that swept not only through the royal circles but also through the courts of the nobility in the first decades of the sixteenth century. Even lesser nobles vied for the services of the best singers, specifically for the performance of songs. The evidence that can be drawn from their correspondence and from other literary sources, fictional and non-fictional, suggests that there were three basic ways in which these songs were performed: one was a cappella, usually with one voice to a part or with a number of boy singers on the top line, as in the case of prince Juan's siesta-time musical pursuits; the second, and that explored most fully here, involved the art of solo song accompanied by vihuela, lute or even harp; the third saw a combination of two or three 'soft' instruments in a purely instrumental rendition. While the songs in the Palace Songbook are notated in the manner customarily used for vocal polyphony, there can be little doubt that they were often performed in all these ways in the intimacy of the chambers of kings, dukes and even lesser mortals such as university students.