Pandorgas through their Sources: Student Music in the Hispanic World during the Early Modern Age

Abstract

The term pandorga is defined at the Covarrubias dictionary of 1611 as “a crazy consonance with lot of noise resulting from a variety of musical instruments”. Numerous accounts of celebrations in the early modern Iberian world refer to the sounding participation of students by organising pandorgas, which consisted of burlesque masquerade parades in which several musical instruments were played in order to make noise and express joy along the city streets. Later on, theatrical genres such as the mojiganga were said to be accompanied by noisy “pandorga instruments”. This paper studies, from a musicological perspective, a variety of chronicles, lyrics of villancicos and theatrical texts, with the aim of (1) imagining the non-written music that sounded in a pandorga, (2) clarifying the changing meanings of the word, and (3) assessing the role that students’ pandorgas had in the urban soundscape in the early modern Iberian world.