Curated presentations of arts from what is now Mexico have tended, since the mid-twentieth century, to situate objects from diverse periods and social registers within a longue-durée framework. For example, in 1940 New York's Museum of Modern Art exhibited Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art, a pioneering endeavour led by Mexican curators that brought together contemporary nationalist arts with Pre-Columbian sculpture and folk art. Indicative of President Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy toward Latin America as the globe hurtled into European and Pacific war, Twenty Centuries celebrated contemporary rusticity as much as historical art by supplementing the exhibit with folkloric performances and sales of crafts. Fifty years later, the Metropolitan Museum of Art reignited this perspective with Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, which offered an ambitious survey focused on the concept of cultural heritage. It featured a performance of Gulf-Coast marimba music at its opening reception. The concert scene also has embraced the longue-durée view of Latin America, if on a more modest scale than in the world of visual arts: for example, the Bard Festival presented Sacred and Secular Choral Music from Five Centuries in 2015 with music ranging from Hernando Franco (1532–1585) to Carlos Chávez (1899–1978), thereby revisiting the narrative of Twenty Centuries. In such surveys, an imagining of the folkloric as a timeless survivor of political change provides a thread of continuity amid the disparity of artistic traditions.
These historical museum exhibits provide relevant precursors amid which to situate the theme of the 2017 Festival de Música Antigua de Úbeda y Baeza in Spain: Mexican music during the four centuries between the arrival of the European conquistadores on the Yucatan coast in 1517 and the approval of the Constitution of 1917 following the Mexican Revolution. Supplementing an ample performance roster featuring up to four concerts per day over two weeks, an academic conference on this theme anchored the festival with the presence of scholars from prominent Mexican institutions such as the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and the Centro Nacional de Documentación e Información Musical Carlos Chávez, as well as from American and Spanish universities and institutes. About a third of the thirty-six presentations, most of which were given in Spanish, focused largely or exclusively on the eighteenth century, and several others discussed historiographical issues relevant to our understanding of the eighteenth century in a broader context.
On the second day of the conference, a session entitled ‘El siglo XVIII novohispano: perspectivas y prospectivas’ (The New Spanish Eighteenth Century: Perspectives and Prospects) brought together papers oriented toward source studies with others that approached music through economic, art or social history. For example, flautist María Diez-Canedo from UNAM presented a paper that offered a detailed analysis of a manuscript of instrumental music conserved at Mexico City's Biblioteca de Antropología e Historia. One of the few sources of instrumental music from New Spain, the document contains music by Locatelli, Misón and others. Diez-Canedo noted the stylistic diversity of the music compiled, that the scribal hand was consistent with manuscripts from cathedral archives and that similar repertory is listed in inventories of personal property from late eighteenth-century Mexico City. The following evening her ensemble, La Fontegara México, performed the repertory she had discussed at Baeza's Auditorio de San Francisco. Similarly engaged with performance, Susana Sarfson (Universidad de Zaragoza) updated the biography of Roque Ceruti, an early eighteenth-century Italian composer who worked in the Viceroyalty of Peru, and discussed several of his cantatas held at the Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia from the repertory of the Cathedral of La Plata in Sucre, including En la rama frondosa, which she had edited and recorded with the Capella Saetabis on a disc entitled Barroco boliviano (Sucre, Bolivia: Universidad Mayor, Real y Pontificia de San Francisco Xavier, 2012).
Lluis Bertrán and Oriol Brugarolas, from the universities of La Rioja and Barcelona respectively, focused on the circulation of musical instruments and musical supplies between Europe and New Spain following Charles III's liberation of the ports in their joint paper ‘Música para el Nuevo Mundo: circulación de instrumentos entre Barcelona y Veracruz entre 1778 y 1821. Estado de la cuestión’. They focused primarily on the sale of Iberian pianos and violin strings as chronicled in financial documents, an issue of interest owing to the paucity of surviving instruments in Mexico (other than organs) from the colonial period. Also addressing this problem of the lack of surviving instruments was Ricardo Rodríguez, a student from UNAM, who examined the visual representations of the bajón in New Spanish sources. Looking at several dozen mostly eighteenth-century paintings and sculptures, he noted the interpretative challenges posed by some images, such as impossibly upturned bocals that show angels literally blowing down into the top of the bajón. The classification scheme for musical iconography that he followed, developed by his mentor Evguenia Roubina at UNAM, may seem rigidly structuralist to some scholars; none the less, the potential benefits of systematically organizing images of musical instruments to improving our understanding of performance practice and instrument construction remained clear.
The Seminario de Música en la Nueva España y el México Independiente at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, also known as the ‘MUSICAT’ project (www.musicat.unam.mx), presented a panel entitled ‘Deconstrucción de mitos en torno a la música de la Catedral de México’ (Deconstructing Myths regarding Music in Mexico City Cathedral) that intended to offer brief correctives to chronic historiographical problems. It had been given in Mexico City two weeks prior as part of ‘Música y Universidad’, a programme celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the MUSICAT project as well as the tenth anniversary of the adscription of the UNAM Mexico City campus as a UNESCO World Heritage site, and four of the presenters were connected to Baeza by simultaneous live video feeds from Mexico City and Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil. In ‘El Colegio de Infantes de la Catedral de México: ¿una escuela de música?’ (Mexico City Cathedral's Colegio de Infantes: A Music School?) Ruth Santa Cruz of UNAM used documentary research to chart the career paths of students in the Mexico City cathedral school during the eighteenth century. She showed that among varied outcomes, many students attained chaplaincies or other functional positions in the cathedral, but none ever rose to the position of chapel master. Dianne Goldman of Elmhurst College, whose paper was read by Carolina Sacristán, queried the idea of multi-movement responsory cycles from the late eighteenth century, such as Ignacio Jerusalem's Matins for the Virgin of Guadalupe, as singular musical works, showing how multiple musicians had assembled the cycle over time from existing individual pieces, contrafacts and new arrangements; in the case of Jerusalem, the large-scale intervention of chapel master Antonio Juanas created the complete ‘work’. Lucero Enríquez, the founder of the MUSICAT project at UNAM, questioned the concept of ‘splendour’ in approaching the music of New Spain, noting the relatively small size of the repertory in comparison to that of Spanish cathedrals in her paper ‘Cantidad-calidad-género ¿esplendores y operas?’ (Quantity, Quality, Genre: Splendours and Operas?). My own panel presentation, ‘Italia: ¿viajes e invasiones?’ (Italy: Voyages and Invasions?), given in person in Baeza (Drew Edward Davies, Northwestern University), questioned the centrality of Manuel de Sumaya's lost music to La Partenope (Mexico City, 1711) to our understanding of eighteenth-century music in Mexico. I showed through musical analysis that in other works from the 1710s, Sumaya excels as a contrapuntist, but he does not showcase the fluency with contemporary Italianate string writing that would have been necessary to have written a truly Italianate opera seria.
Papers presented on topics outside of the eighteenth century also tended to focus on historiographical issues. These ranged from a critical assessment of the work of ground-breaking early twentieth-century music critic Alba Herrera y Ogazón by Yaél Bitrán Goren (Centro Nacional de Investigación, Documentación e Información Musical Carlos Chávez) to an appreciation of Mexican theatres in twentieth-century Los Angeles by John Koegel (California State University Fullerton) to an exposition by Ireri Chávez Bárcenas (Princeton University) of problems such as exoticism and understanding the use of indigenous vernaculars that pose challenges to scholars and the history of scholarship of the seventeenth-century repertory. Moving into the digital humanities, Emilio Ros-Fábregas (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Barcelona) and Javier Marín-López (University of Jaén) introduced the audience to a new Barcelona-based online-database project Books of Hispanic Polyphony (hispanicpolyphony.eu) that compiles information on polyphonic choirbooks throughout the Iberian world; of the 1,193 sources and 4,481 works already encompassed by the database, 118 sources and 386 works are conserved in Mexico and date from throughout the colonial period.
Several outstanding performances of eighteenth-century music supplemented the academic discourse, most notably a programme by the Spanish group Concerto 1700, directed by Daniel Pinteño and featuring the soprano Aurora Peña. Their performance of Corpus Christi cantatas and instrumental pieces by José de Nebra, Diego Pérez de Camino, Vicente Basset and Antonio Soler highlighted the overlooked richness of Spanish galant repertoire, in terms of both the music and the fine poetic texts. Concerto 1700’s appropriate use of instruments, and Peña's well-reasoned ornamentation and fine diction, contrasted with some of the other ensembles, whose performances over-imagined the Mexican-ness of eighteenth-century repertoire with strummed guitar continuo and percussion. Indeed, a folkloric frame proved the rule rather than the exception among most of the musical ensembles performing New Spanish music, and in my view misleadingly gave the impression of an unchanging, transhistorical folkloric culture in Mexico. Other performance highlights included Il Giardino Armonico presenting a programme of Telemann, and two contrasting interpretations of Juan Gutierrez de Padilla's Missa Ego flos campi: one sung a cappella in a modern style by The Choir of Queen's College Oxford under the direction of Owen Rees, and the other with colla parte instruments and provocative, historically inspired vocal timbres and ornaments by Capella Prolationum and the Ensemble La Dansereye under the direction of Fernando Pérez Valera. Besides making for interesting aesthetic, historical and practical comparisons, these performances connected well to a paper by Luisa Villar-Payá (Universidad de las Américas Puebla), who argued that this mass formed part of the consecration service of Puebla Cathedral in 1649. The performance cycle concluded with a midnight concert of Sephardic songs in Úbeda's medieval Sinagoga del Agua.
The annual Festival de Música Antigua de Úbeda y Baeza is now on the map of major European festivals, and the vision for the programming that brought together such a diverse range of Mexicanist performers and scholars may be attributed to the extraordinary effort of Javier Marín-López, musicologist and director of the festival. These two hilltop Renaissance towns provide inspirational venues for engaging early music both intellectually and aesthetically, and this conference may well come to be regarded as a milestone in the history of Mexicanist musicology. None the less, I left the event conscious of the limitations of the multi-century lens through which Mexico is perennially viewed, and also convinced that in addition to the common longue-durée approach, music scholarship needs more micro-histories that are tuned to more specific conditions, institutions, cities and individuals in Mexico's long and complicated past. And lastly, despite the flourishing of early modern Hispanic repertories over the past two decades, additional research into continuo ensembles and other matters of performance practice remains necessary in order to provide practical support for those aspiring toward historically informed performances.
