Music, Musicians and Manuscripts in Cervantes´s Toledo

Seizing the opportunity of the 400th anniversary of the publication of Cervantes’ Don Quijote de La Mancha part 1 (Madrid: 1605) this paper explores the composition, performance, and practice of music in the Spanish primatial cathedral of Toledo in the period 1480-1610.
Toledo cathedral’s collection of over 230 atlas-sized choirbooks is one of the world’s most important and least studied. The polyphonic parchment manuscripts, described in the New Grove as ‘the largest and most handsome set’ copied in sixteenth-century Spain, preserve over 300 works by over 60 composers. The more than 200 plainsong choirbooks remain uncatalogued and undescribed. A complete series of payment documents enables the identification of scribes, illuminators, and binders and the precise dating of all aspects of the manuscripts’ production. Indigenous inventories allow us to trace the collection’s subsequent preservation and evolution, and to document the loss of missing volumes.
This study places the collection within the context of the cathedral's prodigious manuscript production, reveals the library as a unique barometer of liturgical change in early modern Spain, examines its relationship with contemporary print culture, and interrogates the library’s wider cultural meanings and functions.

Michael Noone earned his PhD. at King’s College Cambridge and has taught at the University of Sydney, Cornell University, the University of Hong Kong and the ANU. His publications on Early Modern Spanish music include Music and Musicians in the Escorial Liturgy under the Habsburgs (Rochester University Press, 1998) described as a “trailblazer” and Códice 25 de la catedral de Toledo (Alpuerto, 2003). As a conductor he has recorded 10 CDs of Spanish Renaissance polyphony, the latest of which has been nominated “Choice of the Month” in the current issue of the BBC Music Magazine. In 2003/4 he directed world-premiere performances of unknown works by Guerrero, Morales et al. that he discovered in Spanish cathedral archives. In 2001 he founded the Ensemble Plus Ultra (see www.ensembleplusultra.com) with whom he has given concerts throughout the UK and Spain.