Cultivating Good Taste: Didactic Repertoires Printed in Eighteenth-Century Spain

Abstract Several collections of lesson books for practising mensural music published in Spain during the eighteenth century, known as canto de órgano , have been overlooked in musicological scholarship. These canto de órgano lessons allowed students to be trained in a wide variety of repertoire, from renaissance polyphony to modern-style monody. This article provides an initial overview of these printed collections and identifies noteworthy parallels with the didactic repertoires of other regions, such as Italian solfeggi. To that end, I present context and different Spanish opinions of the period on the usefulness of solfeggio collections and specific examples of collections that could serve as models of style. I analyse the way in which solfeo was practised, before proposing a classification. In assessing these works against other sources, I suggest that these lesson books were useful not only for the practice of reading music, but also for the cultivation of good taste in interpretation, improvisation and composition.