El cant dels goigs orals a Catalunya i a Andorra

Abstract

In the mid-nineteenth century, Manuel Milà i Fontanals, who had extensively investigated the genre of ‘goigs’, concluded that they were related to the troubadour dances. This affirmation has been reproduced - sometimes with a distorted vision - in a good part of the historiography of the genre. In order to redirect the discourse and provide scientific tools for analysis and criticism, we have taken the statement of Milà i Fontanals as a premise and we have specified the relationships between the current goigs and the danses of the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries. The analysis of the poetic treatises and the Occitan-Catalan lyrical repertoire of the time has been key to understanding these relationships and how the verse structure proper to modern ‘goigs’ does not fully fit in questions of extension, argument and the role of the retroncha._x000D_ We must place the perfect fit at the end of the 15th century in the literary environment of Bernat Fenollar and the literary contests of Valencia. The printing press favored from the first moment the diffusion and the creation of works of the new genre that was consolidated. We have traced its traces in handwritten songbooks, on sixteenth-century stamped sheets, and in the earliest musical notations: one monodic and four polyphonic._x000D_ In Catalonia and Andorra, different lyrics of ‘goigs’ from the 15th and 16th centuries are still sung today and some of their melodic elements that were already present in the musical notations of those centuries can be recognized. The compilation of a corpus of half a thousand ‘goigs’ recorded in the last forty years, complemented by a similar number of musical notations written from the late nineteenth century to the present, have allowed for the first time to make a synthesis of the musical models of great extension of the country. The analysis of the musical structures of the recorded ‘goigs’ provides significant information on the mechanisms and oral musical characteristics of the genre, such as the singular alternation of melodic verses, the singing to voices and the rhythmic articulation giusto syllabic. The ethnomusicological study provides a global vision of the song of the ‘goigs’ in Catalonia and Andorra and, in turn, examples and tools for future research.

Date of Award	2 Feb 2021
Original language	Catalan
Supervisor	Jaume Aiats (Tutor)