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Exploring Musical Narratology: The Romeo and Juliet Myth in Music by Małgorzata Pawłowska (review)

Illari, José Duce, and Carolina Sacristán. Illari unravels the multiple layers of meaning imparted by Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco to his “Cuatro plumajes airosos,” thus discerning a high level of musical and intertextual complexity in a work that interweaves elements from Neoplatonic cosmology with musicrhetorical gestures. Duce examines Juan Bautista Cabanilles’s usage of rhetorical figures in his tono a cuatro “Mortales que amáis.” From a more general perspective, Sacristán addresses the topic of tears as it is instantiated in seventeenth-century Christmas villancicos and argues that they share a didactic and performative intent with contemporary sermons. The essays by Bègue and Álvaro Torrente have a strong theoretical component, although the latter is more preoccupied with issues of polysemy. Bègue’s analysis confirms that the villancico underwent a progressive formal transformation that blurred its former traditional structure leading to polymorphism. Torrente, however, takes a different approach and investigates the early-modern usage of the term estribillo (refrain) in poetic and musical sources as well as numerous dictionaries and poetic treatises to determine that the concept was initially conceived as a differentiated segment meant to be sung at the end of a romance or to the unrepeated beginning of a religious villancico. In its variety of perspectives, El villancico en la encrucijada is the largest addition to the scholarship on the villancico since the 2007 publication of Devotional Music in the Iberian World, 1450–1800: The Villancico and Related Genres (ed. Tess Knighton and Álvaro Torrente [Burlington, VT: Ashgate]), from which four authors—Bègue, Bombi, Illari, and Torrente—also contributed to the current volume. Granting that the collection is an advanced incursion into the music of the earlymodern sphere of Spanish influence, the essays of this collection appropriately reflect the current state and trends of the field. This book essentially achieves its purpose of displaying the multifarious crystallizations of the villancico in contexts beyond Europe and exploring them from original approaches.