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The Sacred Villancico in Early Eighteenth-Century Spain: the Repertory of Salamanca Cathedral Torrente, Álvaro Knighton, Tess This thesis examines the sacred villancico in Spain during the first decades of the eighteenth century, taking the repertory of Salamanca Cathedral as its principal point of reference. The period following the death of Charles II in 1700 saw one of the most dramatic transformations of musical idiom in Spanish history, yet it had attracted little scholarly attention, obscured by a historiographical tradition that treated the eighteenth century as an age of decline and assumed that the villancico had degenerated after a Renaissance 'Golden Age'. Drawing on the extensive and largely unstudied holdings of the Archivo Catedralicio of Salamanca, the study approaches the genre from two directions. The first is contextual: it reconstructs the historical and institutional setting of cathedral music-making under the early Bourbons — the Spanish cathedral network, the organisation and personnel of the capilla, and the ceremonial framework governing when and where villancicos were performed, from the Christmas season and Corpus Christi to exceptional occasions such as the consecration of the Catedral Nueva in 1733. The second is analytical: it traces the structural and stylistic transformation of the genre — the introduction of Italian operatic forms, the rise of the sacred cantada, the shift from modality to tonality, changes in metre and vocal texture, the emergence of the orchestra, and the move towards modern notation. The discussion of formal change extends beyond Salamanca to the Real Capilla in Madrid and other major Spanish institutions. Three appendices in the second volume present the primary material: transcriptions from the Ceremonial of Salamanca Cathedral; a catalogue of the villancicos preserved in the cathedral archive by the two principal composers studied, Tomás Miciezes and Antonio Yanguas; and transcriptions of ten selected villancicos. University of Cambridge 13 December 1997 Thesis Doctoral Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) eng https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/252320 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/bae59151-028d-4c8f-bf9d-da04b35bac1e/download 67e07d2f6a69068505f4ec4be007cfad https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/b2f7f77e-30fe-46e5-b689-5dc44c8c20ba/download 87eda9de84448d1f82354d60eee3eb5f https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/