Found this, while browsing for early music.
It’s not just the melody, but the mode?, rhythm and phrasing. Ornamentation, too.
Sure, not surprising there’s some similarity. Shared European folk heritage, and all that. But it’s pretty superficial. The phrasing and ornament are really not very ITM-like, though the overall rhythm and feel are a bit like a slide. Reminds me somewhat of the early Chieftains under Ó Ríada’s classical, art music influence.
Hard to tell the mode. It’s minor of course, but gapped hexatonic, so Dorian/Aeolian is indeterminate.
I’m no scholar on the Cantigas de Santa Maria, to be sure, but Googling around tells me that in that collection, only the relative pitch of the notes is generally agreed upon as being something we can nowadays rely on, and in the reliability spectrum, meter is with very few exceptions the least pin-downable of all factors in it. So, my money says that although the example we hear is likely a well-informed one, it is in all probability just an interpretation out of a range of possibilities, most particularly on the meter, rhythm, and phrasing end of things.
For all we know, someone from back in the day hearing this might say, “What the @^%#$ is THAT?”
But they would still find the bodhrán player annoying. 
This does sound like something you’d hear any day at a session, doesn’t it. Some things can never change.
It sounds kinda like Breton music.
The poster above talking about rhythmic ambiguity in the Cantigas de Sancta Maria is spot on. Further, most of the tunes tend to transcribe in shifting meters rather than regular ones (even though different transcriptions may vary). There’s some great stuff there. I did a bunch of transcriptions from MIDI files once that was very difficult. I think I’d rather have worked with the original mensural notation…
That said, I don’t much care for the example that started this discussion. It doesn’t sound Irish to me except perhaps in the vaguely general ways MTG mentioned, and to my ears it doesn’t sound very medieval either. I just sounds sort of…well…cutesy to me. YMMV
The pictures in the Cantigas suggest a very different and much more varied instrumentation than what you hear in that clip.
Modally, it’s only similar to Irish music because neither mediaeval Spanish nor Irish music differs much from the general western European norm.
Here’s a YouTube vid of Cantiga 1 (a bit easier for me to get my head around mensurally than others out there, FWIW). From .40 to 1.39 we get the chance to compare the singing in this interpretation to what is in the manuscript, and in doing so, the modern problem of taking that material and determining exactly how to get the job done becomes apparent. Interesting to me is that certain grace notes (as we might call them, anyway) are apparently written in, or at least one might see the logic in interpreting the notation that way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI4YaAlbywo&feature=related
Given the metrically indeterminate structure of the notation, I’m tempted to think that back in the day it would be assumed that a song would already be known in some basic way (either by oneself, or someone else as source) if one wanted to make right use of the notation. The notation alone doesn’t tell the fresh newcomer everything one might want to know, or at least it doesn’t do so in any way that the modern casual observer might recognise.
That is absolutely gorgeous, Nano. Thank you for that. I’ve just had to sit and play it straight through three times. Wonderful, wonderful music. Clearly, from the little that I’ve read so far on these things, there’s no telling how authentic that is. In fact, I would guess that it’s almost certainly inauthentic. For instance, how are we to know what instruments would have been played? I realise that the original manuscripts had illustrations, some of which were of musical instruments, but we don’t know how they might have been played or which instruments in total may have been used. And that’s before getting into all the ambiguities over metre and even, as far as I can understand it, pitch.
I’m going to try to just amend the thought behind that a tiny bit. I’m not sure whether it would have been the song itself that would have been known - after all, these were new compositions at the time - but the genre and the conventions behind the notation and behind the music itself would have been very well understood. So, if we say that, for a true understanding of the notation, it would be necessary to completely understand the idioms of the music and the conventions of the notation … why then, exactly the same applies to all music from the classical era of, say, Mozart and Haydn, just to pick one genre, and to all other Western music as well, as far as I can see. The biggest difference, it seems to me, is that we’ve lost what that original idiom was for these Cantigas, whereas the style, technique (to an extent), ornamentation, dynamics, tuning and a host of other features behind the classical music of Mozart and Haydn is still part of a continuing oral tradition, passed down from one teacher to the next in an unbroken succession to the present day.
I think musicologists de-construct and back-link the successive genres in a reverse direction. Of course, they have to allow for radical shifts in genre style, but there is always some inadvertent continuity.
It’s very difficult to come up with a totally, utterly new musical form, when your mind has been patterned with forms of the past.
It would be interesting to give a child (who had never heard any music 
) an easy musical nstrument, and see what happened…(Not going to happen. And a good thing, too.)
There is more oral continuity with sacred music than with secular. There are monasteries where the plainchant tradition is unbroken. Given that (in earlier centuries) secular music was very often derived from the sacred, maybe there has been more continuity than might appear initially?
(This is all supposition.)
It’s beautiful music, anyway.
What makes you say that?
I think he was takin’ the general lack of free radical monks…
I suppose, (all conjecture), that an enclosed community, who’s whole life centres around music as prayer, will take up new forms, but keep some of the old ones going too, as part of the liturgical year. Tradition, fondness, appropriateness.
Secular forms (all conjecture) would be more prone to succumb to new fads. This happens with pop music (even when not directed by producers’ ideas of market forces); sadly, ‘folk’ of various sorts, and other old forms, are now no longer main-stream.
There’s the added complication of the Church actively suppressing some forms of secular music as ungodly in the modal period, too.
Think I’m about to dig myself into an ill-informed dogmatic hole, here…
Yes, this is one - perhaps the only - answer to the dilemma that faced me, which was: Indeed, why have sheet music if you already know the song?
What strikes me hardest about your argument is that if these Cantigas are in fact reasonably rendered in metrically faithful and accurate ways, then those are some marvellously wild and crazy conventions going on, by my lights. I have no point of reference to them. They seem as random as shifting winds and are as foreign to me as bugs for dinner.
Yes, I agree. It’s a shame that neither of us has studied these manuscripts in depth. I wonder if modern notation would seem arbitrary and random to people who didn’t know what the conventions were? That’s what I’m having to assume, given the rest of my reasoning - @rse about t!t reasoning of course, but it’s the best I can do with this stuff, which I must admit, if I think about it too much more, could become the next obsession (don’t tell Deb 
).
Whoah, there, lad, not so fast. You go ahead. I’m quite satisfied to lean against the bar and make sage noises.
… while I pretend to have anywhere near the time, or the ability, to take this on … yeah, this’ll work …
… while I pretend to have anywhere near the time, or the ability, to take this on … yeah, this’ll work ..
Time…yes. Problem There isn’t enough.
Ability- well, why not? All one needs is a brain, and access to source materials. This too is a problem for me. Brain- maybe. Access to materials- absolutely. Not being a current member of a university, access is very limited. Anyone want to share an Athens number? 
(Insert freedom of knowledge rant here)
In a quick trawl via Gutenburg, came across an internet archive with some manuscript gems. Nothing much earlier than 16C, though;
Elizabethan Virginal book
Early secular Scots music, misc.
‘Ancient Scotish melodies’, with a '‘preliminary dissertation’ of 210 pages..
Re: 12C, this analysis of ‘Sumer is icumen in’, late 19C, score edited by W.. SRockstro.
Some marvellous stuff in here, irresistibly silly. (Easily distracted from Serious Scholarship)
"'The Englifh words are…admirably adapted to..the fimple paftoral melody, with it’s merry graceful fwing…Early Englifh poetry, when fongs of fpring and fummer, of birds and flowers, were fo popular…this Canon has been well-termed the ‘cuckoo-fong’. "
“For many years the Church difcouraged fecular mufic on the ground that it was written in the ‘wanton key’ (il modo lafivo) and was therefore an obftacle to devotion and a temptation to unholy thoughts”
‘We know, however, that minstrels with their folk-fongs not infrequently gained accefs to religious houfes in order to relieve the monotony of the monaftic life..’
In support of my earlier suppositions, though (this style is contagious-yuk):
‘English Benedictines…great proficiency in mufic…But fuch church mufic, fo affiduoufly cultivated, ftill retained barbarous combinations of found, and grofs violations of mufical grammer, and could not compare with the contempory fecular mufic either as regards melody or harmony’
Admittedly, this is not the most sound of sources. Fun, though.
There is an interesting foot-note about the monochord in the original MS, on pp.14.
Here’s the original MS
This seems to be the most recent piece of large-scale serious research on the Cantigas:
LOTS of detail about the relationship between text and music. And about 20 pages of bibliography.