Códice de los Músicos

The Cantigas de Santa Maria (CSM) is one of the major monuments of European medieval culture. It consists of a vast, carefully organized collection of devotional songs in Galician-Portuguese (419 songs), in praise of the Virgin Mary or narrating miracles attributed to her. The poetry was written and the music composed or transcribed at the royal court of Castile and León, centred in Seville, under the direction of King Alfonso X, called el Sabio (the Learned). Staves with musical notation, provided for hundreds of songs written in three books between approximately 1270 and 1285, offer an enormous amount of information on musical practice, in a well-defined spatial and temporal context. The aim of this edition is, therefore, to present accurately the musical notation of the medieval sources of the Cantigas de Santa Maria (considering the limitations of the software used), endeavouring to record, when detectable, any modification to the earliest state of the musical writing in the given source.