Conference Agenda

A standard label for Paraguayan Early Modern religious art, Barroco hispano-guaraní is both a product and producer of colonialist assumptions. Since Josefina Plá coined the term in 1964, Barroco hispano guaraní has been linked to the mestizaje (creolization) of arts that was said to have ‘evolved’ during the 16th century, as Europe took over the Paraquaria province. Since 1986, music has been held to evidence this process: that year, Luis Szarán discovered the works of Domenico Zipoli (1688-1726), perhaps the most significant composer of the Jesuit missions. To convert the regions’ indigenous people, Zipoli, together with Jean Vaisseau (1584-1623), Anton Sepp (1655–1733), Martin Schmid (1694–1772), and others, incorporated local music practices into their compositions. These adaptations typify the belief that composers’ amalgama hispano guaraní would ‘advance’ Paraguayan music-making. This way of thinking became customary in Paraguayan Early Modern religious art studies – it lurks beneath alternative names for ‘styles’ such as Barroco Suramericano or Barroco Misional – and was further promoted in Paraguayan music histories, turning the act of tracing the ‘South American Baroque’ into a means of epistemic colonization.

The term Barroco hispano-guaraní exemplifies a critically unreflective Eurocentric discourse in which the authority of the Old World over the New is assumed. To claim that mestizaje ‘drove’ and ‘advanced’ cultural production is false. Indigenous people led and contributed to Early Modern art production, including music; Paraguayan scholars, however, have yet to adequately acknowledge these peoples’ agency and authorship. As a first step towards critically analysing Barroco hispano-guaraní as a category, I look at its associated repertory and compositional procedures as a means of extending European power in the region. Rather than Spanish (hispano), Barroco hispano-guaraní musical authorities such as Zipoli and Sepp were neither native nor Iberian, and they worked according to Italo-Germanic methods. Since the 1990s Barroco hispano-guaraní productions have become part of Paraguay’s Early Music movement, conferring prestige and status on its musicians and audience. Can we expunge this music of its colonizing legacy? Perhaps not, but I think re-framing it as European is a crucial move toward a more ethical ‘revival’.

Within the phonocentric world-making project of early colonial New Spain, it is well established that sound—music—was among the most privileged vehicles for conversion of the Indigenes to Christianity. Located between dichotomous traditions of thought, music was both a practical and a theoretical pursuit, and Franciscan missionaries leveraged both elements in service of evangelization. However, overlooked has been the role of music as a means for distinguishing the human from the non-human in the Spanish colonial imaginary, which became a topic of concern in the first half of the 16^th century, evidenced by the papal bull Sublimis Deus of 1537. As Lewis Hanke has demonstrated, the Spanish Crown, in search of a theological justification for colonizing the New World, had two options: the humanists argued that the New World was not inhabited by humans, but by “animals without reason,” and was therefore terra nullius, open for the taking; the Franciscans argued that the Indigenes were human, and were therefore subsumed under the papal decree calling Christians to, “exercise on earth the power of our Lord and seek with all our might to bring those sheep of His flock who are outside into the fold committed to our charge.” The task for the Spanish friars, then, became adjudicating the humanity of the Indigenous peoples of the New World. In this work, I interpret the arguments of three early Franciscan missionaries—Pedro de Gante, Jacobo de Testera, and Bartolome de Las Casas—on the Indigenous capacity for musicianship as not only a means of evangelization, but also as salient evidence of logos, reason or rationality, the Aristotelian basis for the distinction between Man and beast. Thus, building on the work of Jacques Derrida & Sylvia Wynter, I argue for a reconsideration of the constitutive role of music in early Spanish theopolitical epistemologies of ‘Man’ by tracing the deployment of rationality in writings of the early Franciscan missionaries.

Villancicos were the most important genre of devotional singing in early modern Spanish cathedrals and parishes around the world. From the late sixteenth century, they defined the soundscape of the Christmas festival, as complete cycles of villancicos were required each year for the various liturgical services of the season. Designed to gloss the liturgy with vernacular texts, villancicos often used literary dialects and popular song and dance genres to facilitate the representation of local people of various races or ethnicities.

This paper traces the performance of blackness in Christmas villancicos in Puebla de los Ángeles in the early 1600s. Focusing on villancicos from the collection by Guatemalan composer Gaspar Fernández considers the linguistic, musical, vocal, and performative attributes used for the representation of black characters. Villancicos have been understood as part of the cultural legacy of colonialism intended to subjugate the colonized. I demonstrate, however, that villancicos served multiple and sometimes contradictory interests to different members of society, including the subaltern. Similarly, I challenge the assumption that habla de negro, the literary dialect that represented black speech, only served to reproduce racist essentialisms. Instead, I show how this repertoire recovers defiant voices and expressions of collective identity that amplify the lived experiences of free and enslaved men and women of African descent who resisted or negotiated the restrictive structures imposed by Spanish rule.

The legacy of black culture in Mexico has only been recognized in recent decades, but Puebla’s significant involvement in the African slave trade in the late sixteenth century radically transformed the social fabric of the city. Scholars have struggled to make direct connections between villancicos and the people they represent, especially when produced in cathedrals and other elite institutions in conquered territories. I show, however, that the representation of characters from Angola, Cape Verde, São Tomé, and Guinea in Fernández’s villancicos is a clear reflection of the new Afro-Pueblan society. Finally, the central role played in the performance of these songs by Juan de Vera, a talented enslaved black musician employed by the cathedral, unsettles persistent notions of villancicos as material and expressive culture in New Spain.