The Singing Body in a Zemic Approach: The Case of Miguel Garrido

The aim of this article is to do a zemic approach to the singing body, that is, the body of the singer as a creator of meanings onstage, in a performative sense (vocal, gestural) as well as a configurator of identities (roles, gender, charisma, etc.), and how it could influence the music of the past. The chosen object of study has been Miguel Garrido, one of the most popular graciosos (comic actor) of the last third of the eighteenth-century Spain, specialized in short theatre, that is, sainetes and their sung equivalent, tonadillas. In fact, the selected repertoire has been the six solo tonadillas (for one voice) composed for him, housed in the Municipal Historical Library of Madrid. The reason of this choice is twofold. On one hand, Garrido's success as a comic actor (gracioso) was so important that these tonadillas allow to study how such a specific singing body could influence the composition of his repertory. And, on the other hand, these six pieces for Garrido represent a rare exception in a subgenre like the solo tonadillas, which was principally performed by women. Fontanille's semiotics of the body and, especially, Tarasti's zemic theory have been revealed as excellent methodological frameworks to study at what extend the characteristics of Garrido as a singing body (his body and physical presence onstage, his charisma as a comic actor, his singing skills and his incarnation of roles, even women) influenced the composition of these pieces, made specifically for him.