Early Music America Summer 2013 - (Page 64)

INconclusion Finding “Local Content” in the Music of New Spain In pursuit of indigenous flavor, are today’s performances misrepresenting their sources? have begun to include music from Spain and colonial Latin America in their repertoires over the last three decades. From their performances and recordings, a canon of colonial works has emerged that includes, at minimum, the villancicos A la jácara jacarilla and Ah, siolo Flasiquiyo by Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla, Convidando está la noche by Juan García de Céspedes, and Los coﬂades de la estleya by Juan de Araujo, in addition to the anonymous processional hymn, Hanacpachap cussicuinin. The villancico, a genre built upon learned, paraliturgical poetry in the vernacular, has become the emblem of early modern musical practice in Hispanic churches. Some villancicos feature popularizing references, appropriated from the secular theater in Spain, that give voice to social “others” (Castilian rufﬁans, Africans, or Galicians) in order to dramatize religious stories by means of stereotyped gestures. Much of the performance community and its audience assumes that the stereotypical material in the villancico contains ethnographic description—“local content.” In his important article “Latin American Baroque: Performance as a Post-Colonial Act?” (Early Music 36[3], 2008), Geoffrey Baker raises the ethical concerns of performing, without context, dialect villancicos that present Christianized African characters as one-dimensional children. After years of scholarly work with repertoires from New Spain (colonial Mexico), however, I believe that the central problem of reviving this music— almost exclusively ritual music of the Catholic Church—is determining to what degree local content is present M ANY EARLY MUSIC GROUPS 64 Summer 2013 Early Music America By Drew Edward Davies and how to translate that into historically informed yet socially acceptable performances. The “music of New Spain” can refer to three distinct concepts. Theoretically, it encompasses all of the musical practices of the territory, including the religious, the popular, and the traditional (mostly improvised) musics of diverse peoples. Practically, it encompasses the surviving music manuscripts, choir- Music and dance at a One Flower ceremony (from the 16th-century Florentine Codex). books, and other documents from the 16th through early 19th centuries. Yet publicly, we hear the music of New Spain in the “Latin Baroque” style, a vibrant and creative performance practice codiﬁed around 1990 that uses the music of the notated tradition as a springboard for imagining the soundscape of the colonial society as a whole. It does so (almost always with improvised percussion) using the poetics of the early music movement of the 1950s1980s, the marketing practices of the music industry, and an imagination fueled by images such as the one on this page from the Florentine Codex. At its best, the “Latin Baroque” performance style celebrates community, indigenousness, and cultural diversity according to progressive 1990s values in North America and Western Europe. When the ﬁrst histories of music in Mexico emerged during the country’s “nationalist” period, authors such as Gabriel Saldívar saw colonial music as an evolutionary precursor to that of the modern state, rather than as the elitist institutional music much of it was. Later, the early music community created a “Baroque in the Americas” style with its own exotic quality. Both perspectives inspired the idea of multicultural cooperation and camaraderie that have little basis in the ofﬁcial, racial structures of the early modern Hispanic world. Working with primary sources against the backdrop of cultural history, I am struck by how New Spanish music—whether 16th-century polyphony, 17th-century villancicos, or 18th-century liturgical music—is overwhelmingly European in character and congruent with conservative European practices. The absence of local vernacular content overwhelms its presence in this aesthetically austere music. Nonetheless, it is possible to conceive of “locality” in colonial repertoire by returning to the manuscript legacy and skirting the nationalist and exoticist narratives. Three fruitful areas emerge: 1) music that allegorically represents other musics or dance; 2) music for local Continued on page 60

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Early Music America Summer 2013

Editor's Note
Reader Forum
Sound Bytes
Profile: Christopher Jackson
Musings: When the Music Becomes Ours
Recording Reviews
Early Music, 21st-Century Style
The Indigenous Musicians of Cuzco
Bird Quills, the Art of Touch, and Other Pleasures
Pallade Musica: A Swift Rise, All'Italiana
Book Reviews
Ad Index
In Conclusion: Finding "Local Content" in the Music of New Spain

Early Music America Summer 2013