Seventeenth-Century Portuguese Polyphony: Toward a More Precise Interpretation

Abstract

Given the conservative style of seventeenth-century sacred polyphony in Portugal, some musicologists have considered this repertoire to embody a separate ‘Mannerist’ period, distinct from the accepted classifications of ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Baroque’. This interdisciplinary study targets the validity and usefulness of such a periodization by offering an understanding of the term ‘mannerism’ as employed by historians of art and architecture and analyzing scholarly translations of the term to musical repertoire. Using major works of Cardoso, Magalhães, Rebelo and Gesualdo as examples, the study finds that the Portuguese repertoire labeled ‘mannerist’ stands in opposition aesthetically and ideologically to the Italian repertoires to which scholars originally applied the term. Instead, these works parallel the Italian stylus ecclesiasticus repertoire of the same period, and thus appear conservative due to the absence of local operatic or vernacular traditions rather than due to reactionary compositional techniques.