Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

FIG. 4-7B Page from a mid-twentieth-century fake book, to be compared with Fig. 4-7a.
One genre that is especially well documented as a site of instrumental performance is the carole, the
public springtime dance-festivity. Its musical component remained for the most part an unwritten tradition
—but some of the music, transformed, may have survived in the formes fixes, the villancico, and all the
other genres that descend from ring-dances with refrains. The relationship between the forms and
practices that survive in written form and those that came and went without a paper trail has been aptly
characterized as “the iceberg problem.” The written elite dominates our view, but it accounts for only the
smallest fraction of what existed at the time. The great vanished mass is what dominated the view—that
is, formed the assumptions and the expectations—of contemporaries, even (or especially) those who
performed the elite fraction. Vague references to “instruments,” in the plural, can be found in many
descriptions of the carole. And with that we circle back to the cantigas, many of which, as virelai types,
can trace their lineage back to the carole. All the questions raised by those lovely, pesky miniatures
remain open after all.