TUNES S1

the fifteenth century the musician expected to set ballads to four
musical phrases. This pattern slowly imposed itself on the texts,
so that the artistic imitators of the ballad style in the later sixteenth
century adopted the quatrain as the normal sentence. But for at
least fifty years after Encina wrote, it would not have been accurate
to describe ballad texts as quatrains; the sentences continued to
end with the sixteenth syllable.1 Ballads were falling into the hands
of expert musicians, who gave them polyphonic settings for
chamber concert parties. These settings are too elaborate to be
indicated by the symbols we have been using to denote musical
phrases, since the phrases are subject to many slight variations.
Roughly speaking, however, the first sixteen syllables of The Burn-
ing of Rome (Roma abrasada), as interpreted by Matos Flecha2 in
the sixteenth century, to cite only the treble part, run like this:
aaV'oTT/ty-jSy, where a is the first octosyllable, /? the first words of it,
077 the last words of it echoed variously, and y the second octo-
syllable, with flourishes. Such a fashion immensely slowed up the
performance of any given ballad, and helps to explain why the
Cancioneros de Romances, when they first appear in the middle
years of the sixteenth century, consist of truncated ballads. There
are many indications that the text of the medieval ballad was
normally longer than that of those examples now accessible to us.
A careful arrangement of tunes will thus help us to divine, if not
to ascertain, the history of the ballad form in Spain between 1350
and 1550. They may suggest, on occasion, some specifically
foreign influence. The Castilian ballad is free from the rule
operating in France and North Italy, by which the halves of a long
line must not have the same kind of ending: masculine and femi-
nine, or feminine and masculine endings are obligatory in the two
hemistichs. A Castilian tune allowing for this distinction is highly
indicative of foreign provenience, as with a very simple setting of
Rosafresca recorded by Salinas:

68 U8: ee/d.ef. e/d.cc ee/d.ef. e\d.
In Catalonia one encounters such settings without surprise.3

1 A simple setting of this sort, for Don Bueso> is quoted by E. M. Torner in
his Temas folkloricos, Madrid, 1935, p. 134, as now sung among the Jews of
Teruan:

58 US: f/g.b.b/c.b. c/dcbob/cba. b/dbgag/fed. b/cbg.e/f.g.

2 See Torner, Temas, p. 66.

3 As in Pelay Briz, Cansons de la Terra, Barcelona, 1866-87, i, p. 105: Los
Estudians de Tortosa; iii, p. 65: La Escrivana; iii, p. 111: Los tres tambors; i, p. 63: