The Discovery of Seven cantigas d'amor by Dom Dinis with Musical Notation

Abstract

0 uinico documento musical presentemente conhecido comrn cancoes trovadorescas de indole profana em galego-portugues e o Pergaminho Vindel... (Ferreira 61). I am happy to report that this statement, made in 1986, no longer holds true. Alongside the Vindel manuscript with musical notation for six cantigas d'amigo by the thirteenth-century Galician poet Martin Codax, discovered more than 75 years ago in the binding of a fourteenth-century manuscript, we now have a fourteenth-century parchment fragment of one folio containing musical notation for seven cantigas d 'amor by Dom Dinis, King of Portugal (reigned 1279-1325). I discovered the fragment on July 2, 1990, in the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (ANTT) in Lisbon. The fragment has suffered mutilation and defacement, leaving both the texts and the musical notation incomplete, but the discovery is a major one for GalicianPortuguese cancioneiro studies and for the history of early Portuguese music. Indeed, some on both sides of the Atlantic are calling it the descoberta do seculo. I came across the fragment in the course of gathering information for the Bibliography of Old Portuguese Texts (BOOPT), a computerized union catalogue of the primary sources for the study of the culture and language of medieval Portugal and Galicia, currently being compiled by Arthur L. Askins, Martha Schaffer and me in collaboration with various scholars in Portugal. When I found the Dom Dinis fragment I was looking for parchment bookcovers containing fragments of Old Portuguese texts which Avelino de Jesus da Costa discovered in the ANTT in the late 1 940s while he was preparing an inventory of medieval manuscript fragments in Portuguese libraries and archives.' In Cartorio Notarial de Lisboa No. 7A, caixa 1, maco 1, livro 3,1 found a cover which apparently escaped Costa's attention. It was in very deteriorated condition but contained musical notation and texts in the vernacular, written in three columns on both sides of the folio. I began reading the texts and examined more closely the notation. I quickly realized that I had before me a set of Galician-Portuguese troubadour lyrics with musical notation similar to that preserved in the Vindel manuscript and in the Cantigas de Santa Maria of Alfonso X. No authorial attribution was present on the fragment, but having at hand a laptop computer with the BOOPTdatabase, including incipits from the entire corpus of Galician-Portuguese troubadour poetry, within several minutes I determined that the manuscript fragment contained ccantigas d'amor attributed to Dom Dinis in the Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional (B), the Cancioneiro da Vaticana (V), and the Cancioneiro da Bancrofi Library (C).' Tears came to my eyes as I considered the significance of the discovery. I proceeded to transcribe the texts and music and then collated my transcription with the versions of Dom Dinis's poetry in the facsimile editions of B and V. The order of the texts, seven in all, was the same as in the later songbooks. After telephoning the news of my discovery to Arthur Askins at Berkeley, I informed my good friend Prof. Jose V. de Pina Martins at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. Prof. Pina Martins kindly called the then Director of the ANTT, Dr. Martim de Albuquerque, to relate the news of the discovery and to stress the urgent need to have the parchment fragment removed from the sixteenth-century notarial documents to which it was sewn. Dr. Albuquerque, in the throes of preparing for the imminent move of the ANTT to its new building in the Cidade Universitaria, graciously received me several hours later in his office at the ANTT in the Palacio de Sao Bento, where he made it clear that as the discoverer of the fragment and the one who identified its contents, I would have full publication rights. Dr. Albuquerque then offered his cooperation in having the fragment photographed in color, before and after its removal from the notarial documents, and he immediately

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