The Verset and Fabordão Genres in The Context of Music Manuscript 242 from the Coimbra University Library

Abstract

This paper is the result of the extensive research I have been pursuing on Music Manuscript 242 from the Coimbra University Library (P-Cug MM 242). Presented in score-format, this sixteenth-century handwritten treasury is of fundamental importance in what regards the understanding of instrumental music in Portugal during the late Renaissance up to the first decades of the seventeenth century. Earlier examples of tento and fantasia are copied in it, as testified by the keyboard works of António Carreira (c.1530-c.1594). Besides a large amount of scored copies of motets, mass movements, chansons and madrigals by some of the principal mid-sixteenth century European composers, identified and inventoried by Owen Rees, the manuscript includes also a large number of instrumental pieces of unknown authorship, that deserve our attention. From them, I have selected two groups of copies, which contain short instrumental pieces that I intend to present in this paper. The first group, the main object of this study, is formed by a series of keyboard works with the same plainchant melody which I propose to include in the organ verso and/or fabordão genres and to discuss it, focussing their formal, stylistic and performance characteristics, as well as its inclusion in the liturgical instrumental alternatim practices in the Monastery of Santa Cruz de Coimbra during the given historical period.