The five-course guitar, alfabeto song and the villanella spagnola in Italy, ca. 1590 to 1630

This study focuses on manuscript and printed sources of Italian vocal music from the period 1585-1630 that include poems in Spanish, defined as villanella spagnola. Its essential characteristics that this is a repertoire of Italian songs with Spanish texts that flourished in conjunction with the early practice of the guitar in the strummed style. Because most of this repertoire survives only as poetic texts accompanied by alfabeto symbols, the dissertation examines both the structural characteristics of the few surviving examples in full staff notation and the poetic and musical forms and detailed performance practice indications contained in the much larger body of alfabeto songs, narrowly defined as those consisting of a poetic text and alfabeto symbols only.