Luis Milán on sixteenth-century performance practice

by Luis Gásser

Luis Milan (fl. 1536-1561) was a lutenist, singer, composer, and poet. His collection of lute tablatures, El Maestro, published in 1536, is the first book of instrumental music known to have been printed in Spain; and his novel El Cortesano (1561) describes performances at the Valencian court. Luis Gasser discusses Milan's attention to modality, his use of meter, and the ornamentation in his songs and fantasias, for which Milan provided both written-out figures and verbal instructions. With inferences drawn from both El Maestro and El Cortesano, Gasser provides for present-day musicians - as Milan did for his contemporaries - a text on sixteenth-century performance practice.