The ''Cancioneiro de Paris'' (in English: ''Paris Songbook'' - École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, manuscript Masson 56) is one of the four

Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries, characterized by an effort to revive and surpass ideas ...

songbooks of

Portuguese music Portuguese music includes many different styles and genres, as a result of its history. These can be broadly divided into classical music, traditional/folk music and popular music and all of them have produced internationally successful acts, with ...

from the 16th century. It is one important source of

secular music Non-religious secular music and sacred music were the two main genres of Western music during the Middle Ages and Renaissance era. The oldest written examples of secular music are songs with Latin lyrics.Grout, 1996, p. 60 However, many secular s ...

of the

Portuguese Renaissance The Portuguese Renaissance refers to the cultural and artistic movement in Portugal during the 15th and 16th centuries. Though the movement coincided with the Spanish and Italian Renaissances, the Portuguese Renaissance was largely separate from o ...

and the largest one of Portuguese secular Renaissance music. It contains 130 secular

villancico The ''villancico'' (Spanish, ) or vilancete (Portuguese, ) was a common poetic and musical form of the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America popular from the late 15th to 18th centuries. Important composers of villancicos were Juan del Encina, Pedro ...

s and

cantiga A ''cantiga'' (''cantica'', ''cantar'') is a medieval monophonic song, characteristic of the Galician-Portuguese lyric. Over 400 extant ''cantigas'' come from the ''Cantigas de Santa Maria'', narrative songs about miracles or hymns in praise of th ...

s. Out of them, 55 works are

polyphonic Polyphony ( ) is a type of musical texture consisting of two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody, as opposed to a musical texture with just one voice, monophony, or a texture with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords, h ...

(2, 3 and 4 voices), while the other 75 works have only their

melody A melody (from Greek language, Greek μελῳδία, ''melōidía'', "singing, chanting"), also tune, voice or line, is a Linearity#Music, linear succession of musical tones that the listener perceives as a single entity. In its most liter ...

copied. All works are anonymous, but it is known that some of them were composed by the Portuguese composer

Pedro de Escobar Pedro de Escobar (c. 1465 – after 1535), a.k.a. ''Pedro do Porto'', was a Portuguese composer of the Renaissance, mostly active in Spain. He was one of the earliest and most skilled composers of polyphony in the Iberian Peninsula, whose musi ...

References

16th-century books 16th century in music 16th century in Portugal Portuguese music history Renaissance music Renaissance music manuscript sources {{Music-publication-stub