Thinking about performance in galician-portuguese songs: challenges between orality and the manuscript tradition of the troubadours

Abstract

Apart from the significant increase in interest in the Middle Ages by the public, Galician-Portuguese medieval songs still represent a great challenge for its interpretation and recreation today. Motivated by this issue, we propose, in this paper, a debate on the construction of the performance of Galician-Portuguese songs recognizing its specificities as a song in a context of creation and oral transmission. Therefore, we will analyze the perspectives and methods proposes by Musicology and the Early Music movement for medieval sources and the main challenges in view of the scarce material of the ‘Vindel’ and ‘Sharrer’ scrolls, fragments that contain cantigas de amigo and cantigas de amor, respectively, with musical notation. We consider that the concept of performance and its understanding in the medieval context is fundamental to advance in the understanding of troubadour performance, whose own songs provide some evidence, which we intend to explore in this article.