FIG. 4-6 Miniatures from the cantiga manuscript at the Escorial Palace, Madrid, showing various contemporary instruments.
These illustrations inevitably raise more questions than they answer. They stimulate the performer’s
imagination (and the cantigas have been well and colorfully served by early music ensembles, especially
in recordings), but as historical evidence they must be approached with caution, despite their evident
realism. The encyclopedic impulse—the urge to include everything (here, every instrument and costume
known to the artist)—serves the purposes of rich decoration and conspicuous consumption, not those of
accurate depiction. One cannot merely assume that all the instruments so marvelously depicted in the
cantiga manuscripts ever played together, or that they played cantigas.
And yet the opposite assumption, that the notation of monophonic (“unaccompanied”) medieval songs
reflects their actual performance practice, would be equally unfounded. As we have observed more than
once, the written sources of medieval music were more often prestige items—“collectibles”—than
performance materials. And, as we may recall from the first chapter, the strictly unaccompanied unison
style of Gregorian chant was regarded as something of a special effect. So there is really no reason to
allow the stark appearance of early written music in itself to influence or limit our notion of what it may
have sounded like in performance.
If a team of Martian musicologists were to visit the desolate earth after World War III and discover a
“fake-book” (a big compilation—often produced illicitly, in violation of copyright—of pop tunes with
shorthand chord symbols for the use of nightclub or “cocktail” pianists), would they know they were
seeing a blueprint for elaborate impromptu arrangements, or might they draw false conclusions about the
“monophonic” musical culture of twentieth-century America?^4 And yet even the fake-book is more closely
allied with actual performance, and gives far more performance information, than the average medieval
manuscript, especially retrospective anthologies containing “monophonic” vernacular songs that were
performed by nonliterate professionals (joglars or minstrels).