Conference Agenda

…And Points North (1987–90) is a solo speaking percussion work by Vermont-based composer Stuart Saunders Smith (b. 1948) that narrates the story of “a heart searching for the spirit of the North.” Though it is not well known outside of percussion circles, it is a work of great and unique expressive power that has received performances by such notable figures as Steven Schick and Ayano Kataoka. In this paper, drawing on perspectives from ecomusicology, philosophy, linguistics, decolonization, and sound studies, as well as extensive study of the score in preparing my own performances and original interviews with Smith, Schick, and Kataoka, I interpret …And Points North as presenting a death, or more precisely the disunion of body and spirit at the moment of death. Arriving at this interpretation, in turn, has led to another, metaphorical death that arises from my fraught relationship to the work.

Incorporating insights from Denise Von Glahn’s work on music and place, I examine the narrative of disunion by means of an analytical framework that attends equally to space, stage set, sound, and language. In a key moment toward the end of the work, the performer recites a poem by Smith, first in English, then in the Passamaquoddy language, which is spoken by a people group indigenous to Maine and Canada, not far from where the composer spent his childhood. I reveal new archival findings that shed light on how Smith’s poem came to be translated into Passamaquoddy, which I have made with the assistance of linguist Robert Leavitt, co-editor of the Passamaquoddy-Maliseet dictionary. I follow Indigenous author Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (2020) by placing …And Points North within broader conversations about cultural and musical decolonization, leading me to the conclusion that I may no longer be able to perform it.

The first sustained encounters between indigenous musicians and the art music scene in Mexico occurred in a type of ensemble conceived by composer and conductor Carlos Chávez: the Orquesta Mexicana. Within an ideological frame of settler colonialism (Wolfe, 2006) and cultural nationalism, Chávez used this ensemble to experiment with indigenous musical influences on the concert stage in the mid-20th century. In 2013, Rubén Luengas, a Mixtec ethnomusicologist, expanded on Chávez's idea to form the Pasatono Orquesta Mexicana (POM). Luengas's main objective was to challenge the ideologies of extractivism and assimilation (Veracini, 2010) to which Mexico's indigenous and traditional music had been subject.

This paper analyzes POM's aesthetics, compositional processes, and political strategies. I employ the framework of settler colonialism and assimilation to consider the possibility of performing "Indigenous + art music" (Robinson, 2020). Additionally, I dialogue with a proposal for indigenous autonomy in Oaxaca (Barabas and Bartolomé, 1999), the place of origin of POM, and the communal and cultural projects that sustain them (Díaz, 2004 & 2007). The objective is to observe how POM re-elaborates and reinterprets a repertoire extracted from the indigenous peoples of Mexico in Chávez’s Orquesta Mexicana. As tentative conclusions, I find POM is getting closer to musical sovereignty by 1) being comprised almost entirely of Indigenous performers, 2) composing new repertoire that honors Native practices, and 3) investigating the functions of the extracted repertoire and relying on the active participation of the bearers Indigenous musical traditions in the aesthetic decisions used to interpret them.

In 1808, friars Fernando de San Cirilo and Mariano de la Santíssima Trinidad wrote to the New Spain Inquisition to denounce Don Preciso’s Colección de las mejores coplas [Collection of the Best Folk Songs], claiming the collection was “offensive to pious ears.” The friars seemingly took great pains to document these so-called scandalous propositions, for such documentation, they suggested, was indispensable to show how this songbook “promote[d] obscenity to the extreme degree of provoking the act of copulation.” Explicit in this act of censorship is the paradox of describing with meticulous detail the very object the friars sought to silence. Inquisitors and their interlocutors’ obsession with speaking out against the immoral led to systematic efforts to chronicle the offending obscenities, thereby generating a veritable archive of desire.

Although the New Spain Inquisition was active for many years (1536–1820), calls for the censorship of “obscene” musics increased exponentially between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Drawing on source materials from the Inquisition’s collection preserved at Mexico’s Archivo General de la Nación, I suggest that this proliferation of denouncements signals the rise of a new sexual sensibility in the reception of musics identified as lower class, outrageously feminine, Black, and miscegenated. This shift might be best understood by taking into consideration the emergence of obscenity in the Inquisition’s judicial lexicon as a new category to regulate sexually transgressive musics and dances. Taking the denouncement of Preciso’s songbook as a point of entry, I look for traces of a performative mode of listening (Madrid 2021) captured in the notion of pious ears. I trace indexes of this specific aurality (Ochoa 2014, García 2018) to probe the power relations rendering sonic cultures obscene. In so doing, I elucidate the connections between these situated denouncements and the discursive forces that have attempted to regulate the realm of sonic and sexual encounters in the area we know today as Latin America.