In recent decades, especially since the publication of the important ten-volume Diccionario de la música española e hispanoamericana (1999–2002), Spanish musicology has embraced a much wider range of topics than ever before, including Latin American music. The publication of the Diccionario, a principal research tool for Hispanic music, helped encourage a collaborative, international approach to studying Spanish and Latin American musics of many types. Spain's leading musicology journals now regularly include studies of Latin American music on par with scholarship on Spanish peninsular topics, including the Revista de Musicología, published since 1978 by the Sociedad Española de Musicología (SEdEM, founded in 1977); Anuario Musical (established in 1946), issued by the Barcelona-based Institución Milá y Fontanals (IMF), the prestigious research institute sponsored by Spain's Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)Footnote 1; and Cuadernos de Música Iberoamericana, published since 1996 by the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. The magisterial multi-authored eight-volume set Historia de la música en España e Hispanoamérica (2009–18) rightly includes Latin America in its purview, with a substantial representation. Within these organizations and in Spanish musicology in general, various groups of scholars are dedicated to studying a wide range of Latin American musics, such as the SEdEM working group Música y Estudios Americanos (MUSAM).Footnote 2 Moreover, many other special endeavors, conferences, working groups, and other organizations address the vast musical interchange between Spain, Portugal, Latin America, and spheres of Iberian and Latin American influence elsewhere in the world, including in the United States and the Philippines. A leading example is the IMF project Libros de Polifonía Hispana, which seeks to inventory sources of manuscript and printed books with polyphony from the Iberian Peninsula and Iberoamerica from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries, located throughout the world.
Another way Spanish musicology and the Sociedad Española de Musicología have supported an inclusive view that embraces Latin America is through the many scholarly conferences held regularly in Spain, with the participation of Latin American and Spanish (and other) scholars studying Iberoamerican topics. In addition, a number of books containing essays on a multitude of Latin American and Spanish topics that have been expanded from presentations given at these conferences have been published in recent years in Spain. Although published conference proceedings books do not seem to be an especially common practice in the field of musicology in the United States these days, such publications seem to be more usual in Spain and governmental agencies there provide funding for these books of scholarly essays.
This is the case with the musicological conferences held in the city of Baeza on the Campus “Antonio Machado” of the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía, which are associated with the Festival de Música Antigua de Úbeda y Baeza. This is the annual festival of early music focusing especially on Spanish and Latin American music, held in the beautiful and historic cities of Úbeda and Baeza, located in the province of Jaén in Andalusia, Spain, and noted by UNESCO for their very important Renaissance-era architecture. The Úbeda and Baeza Festival's accompanying international musicology conference especially features the work of leading researchers on Iberian and Iberoamerican musics.
The two books reviewed here originated in the conferences held in Baeza in 2013 (Músicas coloniales a debate) and 2014 (El villancico en la encrucijada). Other recent essay collections on Latin American music also came from Spanish meetings: The 2017 Baeza conference and festival (De Nueva España a México), and the 2019 MUSAM/SEdEM conference in Madrid (En, desde y hacia las Americas).Footnote 3 Two other valuable books of essays also examine the important topic of transatlantic musical interchange between Spain and Latin America (La música y el Atlántico and Cantos de Guerra y Paz).Footnote 4 This is a most impressive record, which highlights the vibrancy of this large research area, especially with its emphasis on studying music throughout the Americas and the international cooperation between scholars. Collectively, these six books represent a substantial body of work by a large number of researchers from many different countries on a wide range of topics supported by a variety of diverse research methodologies. They clearly demonstrate how significant the musical connections between the Iberian and Iberoamerican worlds have been over many centuries and how important they continue to be today.
Javier Marín López, the convener–organizer of the Baeza–Úbeda musicology conferences and early music festivals, edited two handsomely produced books: Músicas coloniales a debate: Procesos de intercambio euroamericanos, and El villancico en la encrucijada: Nuevas perspectivas en torno a un género literario-musical (siglos XV–XIX), the second with his co-editor Esther Borrego Gutiérrez. The important collection Músicas coloniales a debate is a luxurious, 715-page production, generously illustrated with images, tables, and musical examples, with a detailed index, extensive bibliography, and abstracts in Spanish and English—features that are not always included in volumes such as this. The book encompasses four centuries of musical life connected to political, social, economic, and religious histories throughout the Americas. With the section on music in nineteenth-century Cuba (with Puerto Rico and the Philippines, a Spanish colony until 1898), the chronological coverage extends from the early sixteenth through the late nineteenth centuries.
In his excellent introduction, Marín López cogently summarizes the current state of research on Latin American colonial-era music and its transatlantic exchange, and shows how far scholarly investigation of this large topic has come in recent years. He defines the often-problematic adjective and historical marker “colonial” in his introduction.Footnote 5 He states that “The term ‘colonial music’ is used in a comprehensive and inclusive sense, referring both to the Iberian/European music that was imported by the colonizers, and to music created locally—regardless of the existence of an imported model—by several ethnic groups” (25). Marín López and his contributors recognize the effects of colonialism and the treatment of Indigenous and enslaved peoples throughout the hemispheric Americas and Caribbean, before, during, and after the struggle for and ultimate achievement of independence at different times in the histories of the countries that make up modern-day Latin America and the Caribbean. The editor and authors demonstrate how music was used in colonial societies as “highly elaborate discursive strategies for the representation of power and the construction of identities” (25).
The thirty-four essays in Músicas coloniales a debate are divided into seven large parts. Four chapters are in English and the rest are in Spanish. Part one, “Transplanting Traditions: Liturgy and Plainchant in the Indies,” is especially valuable because it covers aspects of the performance of plainchant in the Americas, a topic not often examined. The essays by Bárbara Pérez Ruiz, Dawn De Rycke, Lucero Enríquez Rubio, and Gerardo V. Huseby examine plainchant in New Spain (colonial-era Mexico) and the Jesuit missions in Chiquitos (Bolivia). The essays by Omar Morales Abril, Egberto Bermúdez, Ireri E. Chávez Bárcenas, and Alberto Álvarez Calero in Part two, “European Models and American Realities in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” investigate the interaction between peninsular Spanish and “New World” composition, music in Santafé Cathedral (Bogotá, Colombia), and historiographic considerations for baroque music in Latin America. Part three, “European Models and American Realities in the Eighteenth Century and Transit to Nineteenth Century,” by Bernardo Illari, Marisa Restiffo, John Swadley, Violeta P. Carvajal Ávila, Alejandro Vera, and Gonzalo Camacho Díaz, studies Jesuit missionaries and music in Bolivia, music in Córdoba (Argentina), music education for young women in New Spain, new musical styles in Valladolid de Michoacán (modern-day Morelia, Mexico), instrumental music, and musical iconography. The chapters in Part four, “Continuities and Changes in Insurgent and Republican America,” were contributed by José Miguel Hernández Jaramillo and Lénica Reyes Zúñiga, José Manuel Izquierdo König, Ricardo Miranda, Yael Bitrán Gorén, Francesco Esposito, and Drew Edward Davies. They look at the influence of Mexican sonecitos (folk and popular tunes) on the musical stage, musical composition at the time of Latin American independence, secular instrumental music and musical taste in Mexico, foreign touring soloists in Latin America, and nineteenth-century cathedral music repertories.
Part five, “The Nineteenth Century in Cuba,” by Victoria Eli Rodríguez, Verónica E. Fernández Díaz, Franchesca Perdigón Milá, Indira Marrero Guerra, and Enrique Encabo Fernández, focuses on an important topic that is not well known outside of Latin America—musical life in nineteenth-century Cuba, not only in Havana, the capital, but also in other cities such as Puerto Príncipe (modern-day Camagüey) and Santiago de Cuba. Part six, “The Luso-Brazilian Space,” by Rodrigo Teodoro de Paula, Suely Campos Franco, Alexandre Andrade, Marcia E. Taborda, and Paulo Castagna, also covers themes yet not well known in the United States—Brazilian and Portuguese musical interchange—and enlarges the Iberoamerican scope of this volume. Topics include royal funeral music, music in Holy Week, instrumental music in the Portuguese court during its Brazilian sojourn, guitar makers in Rio de Janeiro, and the Museu da Música de Mariana (Music Museum in Mariana, Minas Gerais, Brazil). Finally, in Part seven, “The Performance of Colonial Music Today,” Javier Marín López, Juan Francisco Sans, Javier José Mendoza, and Miriam Escudero examine the performance of Latin American colonial-era music today, especially through the many commercial recordings released in recent years.
As with the 2013 Baeza conference from which it originated, Músicas coloniales a debate is an international collaboration between individuals from Spain and Portugal, throughout Latin America, and the United States. It represents the many individual voices and scholarly viewpoints of Latin American researchers trained in and outside their home countries, and of European and U.S. scholars. It is an intellectually vigorous compendium, multifaceted in approach and theoretical method; it covers a large territory of geographic regions and topics and provides models for future research.
El villancico en la encrucijada, edited by Esther Borrego Gutiérrez and Javier Marín López, is beautifully produced and extensive (at 627 pages), with many villancico texts, tables, musical examples, a substantial bibliography, abstracts, and index. It includes twenty-two chapters deriving from the 2014 Baeza conference, and deals with one principal topic: The sacred and secular villancico genre in vernacular languages, especially Castilian Spanish, from the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century. Because the sacred villancico form was so widespread over several centuries in the Iberian Peninsula and throughout Latin America, and because the music of villancicos and their poetic texts circulated through the Iberian and Iberoamerican worlds for so long, most of the essays in this book relate somehow to the dissemination of the genre in the Americas, even if they are not specifically about Latin America. However, the studies by Drew Edward Davies, Anastasia Krutitskaya, Ireri Chávez Bárcenas, Javier Marín López, Claudia Fallarero, Bernardo Illari, and Carolina Sacristán Ramírez particularly address the villancico in its Latin American contexts, in centers of villancico performance such as Santiago de Cuba, Puebla, Mexico City, and Guatemala.
In their joint preface to the volume, editors Borrego Gutiérrez and Marín López discuss the main theme of the volume: The examination of the villancico as both a musical and literary form, in its sacred and secular guises. In his masterful introduction to the topic, “Towards a History of the Villancico: Historiographical Problems of a Musical Genre,” Andrea Bombi discusses the many advances in villancico research in the last quarter century, how the genre should be considered as needing to satisfy the literary tastes and demands of a stratified society, the participation of the laity in the festal calendar in which the sacred villancico was an important component, how the genre served pedagogical and propagandistic purposes, and how it responded to changes in society over time.
Numerous diverse topics relating to the villancico genre are covered in these twenty-two essays. Some authors closely examine individual villancico texts, as poetic compositions, and in light of the printing of these poetic texts as pliegos sueltos (single sheets or chapbooks with printed villancico texts), which were given out to audience members who attended villancico performances at religious services such as Matins or Vespers. Inventories of villancico collections are therefore included in some studies. Some essays demonstrate how specific villancico texts were set by different composers in different places in the Iberian and Iberoamerican worlds. The liturgical and paraliturgical uses for the villancico genre are examined, as are performance practice issues. The performance of villancicos by women musicians is considered in discussions of the use of the genre in female conventual religious houses. The twenty-two chapters in El villancico en la encrucijada chart the evolution, apogee, and gradual disappearance of the villancico as a musical and poetic genre, and present new information on and fresh interpretations of the dissemination and importance of this genre throughout the Iberian and Iberoamerican worlds. El villancico en la encrucijada expands our understanding of the richness and complexity of American and Iberian musics, and the many transatlantic connections between these two interconnected spheres.
The two excellent essay collections reviewed here will be of interest to a wide range of readers, and both books have already begun to shape the discourse on Iberian and Iberoamerican musics. Beyond and within Latin American studies, these collections can spark discussion and encourage further research in a wide, diverse variety of areas in American music: Colonial and postcolonial theory, studies in gender and religion, musical sources and their dissemination back and forth across the Atlantic and Pacific, paleography and codicology, printing in early Spanish America, and other topics. Both essay collections are invaluable additions to the literature on Latin American music and are very highly recommended.
John Koegel, professor of musicology at California State University, Fullerton, researches U.S. and Mexican musical theater and music in the context of ethnicity and immigration. His 2011 book Music in German Immigrant Theater: New York City, 1840–1940 earned the Irving Lowens Book Award of the Society for American Music, and his research on Mexican musical theater was supported by an NEH Research Fellowship. He is completing Mexican American Music from Southern California, circa 1830–1930: The Lummis Cylinder Collection and Other Sources for the Music of the United States of America series (A-R Editions and American Musicological Society).
