O códice polifónico de Arouca

Abstract

The Monastery of Arouca became, especially after the first quarter of the 13th century, through the benefaction of the Infanta Mafalda, one of the most important Cistercian feminine houses in Portugal. As a wealthy and renowned religious institution, music always played a fundamental role in this monastery’s liturgy. Its music books have long been the object of interest of a number of musicologists, both from Portugal and abroad, an interest which would be entirely justified by the discovery, by Manuel Pedro Ferreira in 1992, of the most ancient polyphonic piece known so far in Portugal, a hymn to St Bernard. In 1947 a choirbook was found, by Dom Mauro Fábregas, the only one in the convent’s collection containing exclusively polyphonic repertory by prominent Iberian composers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Amongst the gems included in it are one of Morales’s Magnificats, several Alleluias, by such names as Manuel Mendes, Francisco Velez, Simão dos Anjos and João Leite de Azevedo, and a parody mass on the secular song «O gram senhora», by a mysterious «Brasil». A series of marginal notes indicating instrumental execution enrich the book still further and shed some light on the musical performance practice in the context of the Arouca convent. 

Although already partly studied, the Arouca polyphonic codex is now for the first time the object of deeper research and a full transcription, a significant contribution to the study of the practice of sacred polyphony in 17th century Portugal.