CHANZONETAS: Gaspar Fernández & Alonso de Bonilla

In 1614, Alonso de Bonilla y Garzón (ca. 1570-1635), a poet from Baeza (Jaén), published his first great literary anthology, Peregrinos pensamientos de misterios divinos en varios versos y glosas dificultosas (Peregrine Thoughts of Divine Mysteries in Varied Verses and Difficult Glosses), printed by Pedro de la Cuesta. This thick book, which includes 688 poems, constitutes one of the earliest and more complete examples of the literary style known as conceptismo (concept poetry). This is reflected in its title, in which peregrino is synonymous with the weird and strange, with the veiled and ingenious, and with that which can be interpreted in a variety of ways or has inexact meaning. Despite a lack of knowledge about him today, Bonilla was one of the forefathers of conceptismo, a literary movement that established a witty association between words and ideas known as “concept” or agudeza. His mastery was already praised in his own time by Lope de Vega. However, even Bonilla himself might not have expected that in the same year of the edition of his book, the creole composer Gaspar Fernández (1563/71-1629) would write music to some of his poems to be sung at Puebla Cathedral (Mexico), where he worked as the chapel master, on Christmas Eve 1614. This monographic recording offers for the first time the texts written by Bonilla that were set to music by Fernández for performance at Puebla Cathedral, in a variety of vocal and instrumental combinations according to the practice of that period.