Figure 6. Cantada

The cantada also features a solo voice, but it shuns the Spanish estribillo-coplas-estribillo format and instead presents a recitative and da capo aria—or a string of them. Thus, a solo is folkloric much like a villancico, but a cantada is an elevated style steeped in Italian culture. Many of Sumaya’s solos, however, have a Italianate, semi-operatic aria and recitative followed by a spunky seguidillas to conclude the work. The seguidillas is the antithesis of the Italianate. They were performed by majos who wore slouch hats and capes and prided themselves in their “Spanish” culture and resented the wholesale importation of influences from France and Italy. The majo ridiculed those high-falootin,’ hoighty-toighty aristocrats (labeled with the pejorative terms curotaco or petimetre) who loved foreign refinements such as opera and the French danse à deux. Thus, the Mexican cantada contains a microcosm of this conflict between the majo and the curotaco, beginning with the Italian world but ending with the middle-class, down-home, spunky seguidillas that was considered muy español!