Sardinia
adjunct section
entry Sept 2012
The Goigs
Goigs
are a characteristic
form of popular religious song on the island of
Sardinia. The songs are part of the musical
heritage of Sardinia as a result of the island
having been part of the Aragonese-Catalan state
known as the Crown of
Aragon that colonized Sardinia in the 1300s
and 1400s.*1 The word goigs ("joys") is Catalan*2 and though that
word may be still be used in Sardinia, the songs may
also be called gosos (image, below, left)
or gozos, or goccius, depending on
location.
In the form
that has come down to us, goigs are songs that
praise Christ, the Virgin and the saints, while at the
same time invoking a series of favors to protect
persons, livestock and the harvest. The songs are
usually sung collectively on the occasion of
pilgrimages, processions, novenas, and festivals in
honor of the local patron saint. The songs were passed
down orally and have existed in handwritten and then
printed form since the 1400s. Thus, in the period after
the passing of the Crown of Aragon, when the Catalan
language was threatened by the dominance of Castilian
Spanish, the goigs were, for much of the
population in Catalonia, the only chance to read
Catalan, even if some of the examples that have been
preserved are written in Castilian or in a hybrid
language.
Goigs a llaor de Mare de Déu de
Requesens, in Catalan and printed
in 1899 in Girona in Catalonia.
The most characteristic Catalan printed
format is laid out with the title at the top, then
a woodcut of the divinity being invoked below that
(the version on the right is a slight variation)
followed by two or three columns of text and,
finally, the responsory and oration in Latin, all
enclosed in a frame. That
format for the Catalonian version seems to have
been formalized by the mid-1600s. The Sardinian goigs
are similar in format, printed on single-page
leaflets or "flyers" with the text in columns, all
within a border/frame, but they rarely have
woodcut illustrations and the borders are usually
simple. They are much less ornate than Catalan
examples.*3
On the island, the songs have also been written in
various versions of Sardinian since the 1700s.
Using one of the
Sardinian terms,
gosos, this example invokes
Sant'Antiogu the Martyr, the patron
saint of Atzara, a small town 45 Km
SW of Nuoro in central Sardinia.
Although
the Catalan and Sardinian goigs are, by
definition, religious songs, they have a secular
origin. In terms of meter and the form of verses
and refrains, they derive from the olden dansa
and balada of the troubadours of the
Provence, where songs were sung in praise of
knights and ladies. Those forms were
differentiated by how parts of the text
repeated—small differences, perhaps, but ones that
found their way into the later religious texts.
James II of Mallorca seems to have been the
composer of the first religious goig (Mayre de
Déu e fylha) in 1305. Form and meter became
standardized in the 1400s and 1500s, and the
singing of these songs was widespread by the end
of the 1600s both in Catalonia and on Sardinia.
Most
of the texts are anonymous, although there are
some examples of texts by known poets. The format
of the printed goigs did not generally allow for
musical notation, so the melodies were handed down
orally, with some melodies doing service for
dozens of texts. It is difficult to judge whether
the music was composed formally, perhaps by a
known musician, or perhaps simply hummed into
existence by a farmer with a good ear. Although
musical notation is generally not printed on the
standard goigs pages, there do exist
artistic renditions of goigs leaflets
that display the music as well as text. One of
these, for example, is a ceramic tile display of
the Goigs a la Mare de Déu de Bruguers in
the town of Gavà near Barcelona (photo, right).
The 1800s saw the birth of
"goigistic" associations and collecting in both
Catalonia and on Sardinia, but there is apparently
still no systematic catalog of them all. There may
be as many as 30,000. There are prominent
collections of goigs in a number of
libraries in Catalonia, principally the Library of
Catalonia, the Public Episcopal Library of
Barcelona, the Library of Montserrat (near
Barcelona) and the Historical Archives of the City
of Barcelona. Sardinian libraries and associations have
examples, as well.
As a final note, we emphasize that not only
are the religious goigs still sung, but
have also re-embraced their secular origins; there
are now humorous and satiric texts, and political
and social ones, sung in the same specialized metric
forms and to the same melodies that have praised the
saints though the centuries.
notes:
*1. The export of such
traditions is not unusual or surprising. Bover I Font
(below) cites Ramon Muntaner (c. 1270 – 1336 ) the Catalan
soldier and writer who wrote the Crònica, a
chronicle of his life, including his time in the Catalan
Company, an army of Catalan mercenaries called Almogàvars.
Muntaner reported that the Catalan troops carried their
singing of goigs even to Constantinople. ^up
*2. Goigs is
the plural of goig. In modern Catalan, it
is generally understood to refer to this form of religious
song. The usual word for "joy" in Catalan—as in a "joyful"
person—is joia. Compare other Romance
languages: Spanish=joya, Italian=gioia,
Provencal=joia, French=joie.
They are all from the Latin, gaudia, which
presumably explains the retained initial g in the
Catalan goigs as well as in the standard
Castilian Spanish word for this kind of song—gozos.
^up
*3. When Bover I Font described
Catalan and Sardinian goigs almost 30 years ago, they were
all no doubt much simpler in terms of printed format than
they are now. If we remember that the singing of these
goigs is a living tradition, it is not surprising that
home printers and computers have made at least some
versions of them quite ornate, as even a quick internet search
will show.
^up
sources:
BOVER I FONT, August. 1984. "The
Sardinian Goigs" in I Catalani in Sardegna [The
Catalans in Sardinia], eds. Carbonell, Jordi and
Francesco Manconi, pub. by the Consiglio regionale
della Sardegna and the Generalitat de
Catalunya.
CIPRIANI, Roberto. "Diffused
Religion and Prayer" in Religions 2011, 2,
198-215, ISSN 2077-1444 www.mdpi.com/journal/religions.
further
bibliography:
-ALFORD,
Violet. "Valencian Cross-Roads" in The Musical
Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Jul., 1937), pp.
367-387.
Pub: Oxford University Press.
-ANGLÈS, Higini. "Hispanic Musical
Culture from the 6th to the 14th Century" in The
Musical Quarterly
Vol. 26, No. 4 (Oct., 1940), pp. 494-528. Pub: Oxford
University Press.
-ATZORI, M. "Rapporto tra
canzoni religiosi catalane e canti religiosi sardiI i
goigs e i gosos" (Relation between Catalan
Religious Songs and Sardinian Religious Chants: Goigs
and Gosos) in Studi Sardi, XXIV, pp. 575-591.
Pub: Univ. of Cagliari.
-STEVENS-ARROYO, Anthony M. "The Evolution of
Marian Devotionalism within Christianity and the
Ibero-Mediterranean Polity" in Journal for the
Scientific Study of Religion, Vol. 37, No. 1
(Mar., 1998), pp. 50-73. Pub: Wiley-Blackwell.
bottom photo credit: joan ggk
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