so TUNES

minted to a measure, itself perceptible but indefinite;1 and this may

have been the epic manner in Spain.

The Spanish ballad may have arisen because of a new musical
manner, as well as through new subjects (civil and frontier wars,
foreign ballads) and a new episodic way of regarding the old sub-
jects. The unit of musical construction is the phrase for an octo-
syllable of text; therefore we may say with assurance that the
ballad metre is octosyllabic. The unit was doubled to cover the
sixteen syllables of each sentence, which was closed by an asso-
nance and a pause. So the form would be

act aa aa aa, &c.,

since the pauses group the musical phrases in couples. Salinas in
his De Musica, xv (1577), gives an example of the 'antiquissimus et
simplicissirnus cantus quse Romances appellantur quibus historise
sen fabulse narrantur' as a tune for Count Alarcos

U8: bbbbc . caa . bbbbc . Łaa .

The next steps were to introduce more definite time, and to vary
the unit on repetition so as to close the couplet with something like
a cadence. A tune for Gerineldo is

34 U8: ggoagg/b . a... / ggkagjf/gg . gr/

The ballad would then run in musical phrases like aa' aa' aa' aa'.
This leads naturally on to tunes composed of two phrases: a/3 a/3 a/3
a/?. The words and music of such ballads could be written in lines
of sixteen syllables if convenient, and that is how Salinas writes
the music in 1577, and Nebrija the words in 1492; but the practice
does not alter the fact that the unit of construction covers eight
syllables only.

This early austere manner gave way, probably during the later
fifteenth century, to the more developed phrases of quatrains. The
transition may have been effected gradually. Repeating the octo-
syllables gives the form oaf ft aaffi for one tune of The Month of May
(Mes de Mayo). Repetition of the words with variations on the
melody gives us a tune for Alhama of the form aaa'Ł, with refrain,
and for Gerineldo aa'^y. Any of these tunes would still fit Nebrija's
description of old ballads, since they covered sentences of sixteen
syllables.

The final step was the quatrain proper: a/3yS. It is so that the
musician-poet Encina describes Spanish ballads in 1496, only four
years after Nebrija had described them differently. By the end of
1 See Note B, at the end of the book.