Cervantes and Music: Meaning of Music in His Texts and Musical Reception of His Works
Every musical adaptation of a literary work has to be considered as an exercise of perception and interpretation that provides additional information on the hermeneutics of a writer’s works. These adaptations allow us to understand and explain how the literary work has been recreated and transformed in each epoch. Once a play or a novel has been put in music, every musical version offers the audience a sort of critical and at the same time musical thought that reflects a new conception —even misconception— of the work. It cannot be denied that Cervantes’s works have provided composers excellent material for their musical compositions and this fact has to be taken into account to describe the process of his musical reception: how the characters and the episodes of his works have been selected by composers and perceived by the audience and what kind of musical treatment —genres, musical patterns, etc— each composer provides.
At the same time, there cannot be any doubt that Cervantes’s works reflect faithfully the Spanish musical world of XVIth and XVIIth centuries: musical instruments, dances and bailes, romancesand songs are often cited and performed in his pages in order to depict not only a special and picturesque environment in which his characters evolve —such as a gypsy’s world in La gitanilla or Muslim’s traditions in La gran sultana or Los baños de Argel— , but in addition assign a particular semantic value to each musical element adding a supplementary meaning to the work’s understanding.
In this research we must distinguish between three different aspects:
Musical instruments: This first point of the project will provide a catalogue of the musical instruments cited by Cervantes explaining their social functions in the texts and offering, from an educative point of view, different sound files, image files and text files in order to familiarize the users with the musical world around Don Quixote’s author.
Songs, Romances, dances and bailes: This second point deals with the accomplishment of the digital edition of the scores related with Cervantes’s texts. This interactive frame will be accompanied by sound files, facsimile editions, bibliographical information about composers, and different articles explaining the significance of the relationship between music and poetry in Cervantes’s works.
Musical reception of Cervantes’s works: Finally, the development of this project will provide a complete catalogue of musical compositions based in Cervantes’s texts. Information included will be articulated by genres, countries, and musical periodization and it will be the first step to seriously study how the Cervantes’s literary genious has encouraged the composers’s creative imagination.