'From Sonatas to Sonnets?' at the AHGBI annual conference

‘From Sonatas to Sonnets? The theory and practice of phylogenetics and its potential application to literary studies, with particular reference to the poetry of the Spanish cancioneros.’ (Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland (AHGBI) annual conference, Lancaster University, March 2026).
Since January 2023 Barry Ife and Jasper van der Klis have been working on the Leverhulme Trust-funded 'Texting Scarlatti' project, which uses phylogenetic software to analyse over 190,000 variants and sort over 3,300 musical witnesses into kinship groups. The idea for this project stemmed from Barry's early work on cancionero poetry. In this paper we return the compliment and ask whether the solution to a musicological challenge inspired by early modern Spanish poetry might work just as well for that corpus of poetry itself.