Influence of Architecture on Music (1450–1610): Hispanic Testimonies

Abstract

The term Renaissance, first coined by Jules Michelet in 18551, has traditionally been used to underline the revitalisation of classical culture during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The vestiges of Greek treatises in musical theory and some characteristic compositional demands of the time have usually been related to the Greco-Roman precepts of balance, symmetry, rhetoric, etc. However, the increasing attention in these centuries to acoustics2, which originates from the spread of architectural ideas transmitted from Antiquity, is a theme scarcely treated in comparison with the number of studies focused on repertoires, their analysis, theoretical treatises and the role of music and musicians within institutions or society3. Murray Schafer’s proposals in the 1970s and Tilman Seebass’ denunciation of the scant attention to contextual sources has given rise to a series of musicological studies that often include the terms “soundscape” and “urban spaces” and focus on the location of the musicians in specific places, but in most cases, they do not take into account the auditory perception or the direct influence of the topography on the praxis4. This chapter focuses specifically on these aspects forgotten by current trends in geo-referencing, connects them with treatises of architecture, and shows their reflection in Renaissance musical performance. To achieve this objective, the classical writings concerning buildings and their influence on the Iberian Peninsula are first analysed, before pointing out some Hispanic Renaissance testimonies about the experience of sound in relation to space.