Ministriles de Marsias are strictly speaking a formation of ministriles or wind instruments, which takes its name from the contest between the civilised string player Apollo and the ministril Marsyas, the barbarian Silenus with his tibia flute. This confrontation was evoked by Monteverdi and his contemporaries who arranged their works around the ministriles’ ability to imitate and sustain the human voice. And not just by musicians but also illustrious painters (Ribera, Rubens, Velazquez ...) and writers of the time. The group specialises in the performance of Spanish instrumental and, above all, vocal music and recreates, with the addition of singers and organ, the typical formation whose music filled the chapels of our churches and cathedrals, where the ministriles were a fixture from the end of the 15th to well into the 18th century and where our best music has its roots (Anchieta, Peñalosa, Morales, Guerrero, Victoria, Cabezón, Correa de Arauxo ...). As well as Spanish music, Ministriles de Marsias perform virtuoso Italian music in the stile moderno popular in Venice in the first decades of the 17th century, and the Italianate music of Germany (Schütz, Rosenmüller, Schmelzer, Fux) up to Bach and his The Art of the Fugue.

The Diccionario de Autoridades (first edition of the dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, published in 1732) defines the ministriles, rather late in their day, as wind instruments, of which the dulcian and shawm are illustrative examples. The ministriles category is supplemented by other similar instruments employing a mouthpiece, the cornett and the sackbut. At times, ministriles might call on the aid of recorders to add variety of timbre. The term ministriles altos is used to designate those playing other instruments in the public thoroughfare, like the dulzaina or combinations of trumpet and timbal. The population of ministriles, thus equipped, was not unique to Spain, just as other wind ensembles of cornetts and sackbuts were not confined to Italy, though it was there they attained their maximum splendour. But the deep, intense sound of the ministriles is, with the Iberian organ, among the most characteristic in Spanish music. The cultural importance of the ministriles owes to their prolonged existence in Spain, the many functions they performed, the mark they have left on other hugely popular musical formations (wind bands, the Catalan cobla), their distinctive sonority, and their stubborn insistence on imitating the human voice, with which they conjoined in secular fashion in churches and cathedral chapels. Marsyas is an aged satyr from Greek mythology, the player of a wind instrument, who challenges Apollo and his string instrument to a musical duel which he eventually loses. Apollo responds by skinning him alive. As members of the Ministriles de Marsías ensemble we see it as only proper to use these notes to review the Apollo vs. Marsyas contest in greater detail. For there is nothing less than a canon of texts from the times of the ministriles, authored by vihuelists and organists and drawn from the common literature and even Monteverdi, in which the ministriles, through no fault of their own, are metaphorically “flayed.” These texts reflect instrumentalists’ preconceived notions about the imitation of the human voice, and are framed by a wider debate within western society between nature and culture. Their Apollonian arguments, brandished in Spain by the most elevated of musicians, the vihuelists and organists, are of the kind that in Italy would usher in the seconda prattica. The ministriles, in contrast, got down to the basics of musical practice in their approximation to the human voice: sound quality, rhythm, phrasing, the ability to play in every tone and, as their music was also a discourse, ornamentation and diminutions.