Conference Agenda

Over the last decade, scholars in the field of sound studies have broached “aurality” as a phenomenological site where social and cultural values sensitive to the work power can be accessed and influenced (Samuels et al. 2010, Ochoa 2014, Madrid 2016, Steingo and Sykes 2019). The aural is a political arena not only because listening mediates the epistemological framework of signifying practices but also because, in so doing, listening negotiates meaning through a politics of embodiment. Thus, aurality posits sensation, affect, and embodiment as affective dimensions of knowledge production, a phenomenon in need of attention in early modern studies, as it pertains to issues of difference, representation, and domination.

Starting from the premise that listening was sensitive to dynamics of coloniality, this panel proposes an aural approach to Latin American colonial studies from three different and complementary angles. The first panelist explores sources for the teaching of Catholic doctrine in colonial Mexico at the intersection of writing, orality, and memory, a site which made the corporeality of listening central to representations of childhood in the colonial world. Through the cantada Mariposa de sus rayos (composed in Lima in the first half of the eighteenth century), the second panelist proposes the relationship of aurality and visual symbolism as central to the study of social and cultural colonial history, where the latter was critical to the interpretation of sound. The third panelist attends to the lives of formerly enslaved mulatto singers to explore how vocality allowed them to negotiate aural perceptions of race. By analyzing colonial categories of sound assigned to different races, this panelist points out the epistemic conflict that emerges when Black bodies voiced sounds perceived as “Spanish.” The three contributions are united by their common goal of shifting attention away from a solely aesthetic evaluation of acoustic phenomena to the complex readings and social re-evaluations that emerge from a politics of listening in the early modern colonial world. Coming from colonial literary studies, the respondent extends the approach to aurality by reinforcing new listening paradigms that go beyond textual, sonic, and visual limits.

In spite of its notoriety and widespread dissemination in territories of Catholic creed during the early modern era, the practice of teaching doctrine through singing has not been broached in depth by musicology. On the one hand, the intrinsic difficulty of studying oral practices of which scant written testimonies remain poses a methodological problem. On the other, surviving sources complicate this challenge, as they call different disciplinary frameworks of study (e.g., history, literary criticism, theology) (Van Orden 2006, Filippi 2015). Thus, until today this study has centered mostly on religious philology, with a focus on the literary dimension of catechisms, the methods of learning the ‘primeras letras’, and the materiality of the catechetical books (Resines 1992, Infantes 1998). Musicology has yet to attend to the study of this historical practice, which though orally and aurally performed, remains buried by the silence of a lack of notated sources.

The teaching of Christian doctrine through singing was established quite early in colonial Latin America, and adapted to special missionary conditions by Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits (Castagna 1997, Bermúdez 2017, Ruiz Caballero 2019). Although it is a practice widely documented until the 19th century, there are hardly any traces left of specific songs used for this purpose. Based on the study of a large corpus of catechisms, this paper advances some hypotheses to pursue this study, with a special focus on the sections of doctrine which could have been sung, their possible rhythmic-melodic archetypes, and the context of their teaching. Theoretically, this study draws from Ana María Ochoa’s Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (2014) in order to understand the aural dimensions of doctrine teaching as a practice that animated sensory perceptions of meaning and which called for the agency of both native boys and missionaries. The paper also explores how this transcultural and multilingual sensorial practice emerged at the intersection of voice, orality, and writing. Ultimately, I argue for an understanding of the aural doctrine as a phenomenological soundscape where space, the body, and the collective appeared in complicity during processions and other public rituals.

While scholars working on music and difference have focused on the discursive capacity of sound to situate the presence of race historically (Bloechl et al. 2015), others have warned us about the essentializing parameters of bodily representation that sound can signify (Eidsheim 2019), and of the potential racialization that can emerge from studies seeking ‘the sound of otherness’ (Furlonge 2018). In the early modern European world, this tension informed a colonial epistemology, conceived around racialized aural ideas of order and civility (Agnew 2008). More specifically, sacred music seemingly organized society in strict aural categories, imposing an ethos of “harmony” central to European colonization (Baker 2008, Hicks 2017, Cashner 2021). The New World was an arena where social actors of different ethnic backgrounds moved nimbly through this tension, nonetheless, and their activity in the church calls for a re-evaluation of ideas about agency in relation to colonial power. In here, Black slaves could possess voices unavailable among white subjects, which were essential for the performance of plainchant and polyphony in liturgical practices. Giving voice to an aural referent of European domination, these singers would ultimately buy their freedom and live in a racially divided society as free men. By focusing on the activity of Luis Barreto and Juan de Vera —mulatto choristers who bought their freedom from the church in 17th century New Spain— this paper explores the voice as an aural register that dislodged the body from racial paradigms, while simultaneously complicating the possibility of subjecthood after serfdom.

While recent scholarship has shed light on the racializing practices of Western epistemology through a study of aural representations of difference, such studies have yet to account for how power shaped racial desire and for how such desire ought to inform our views of power and coloniality. Thus, this paper traces the presence of bodies that moved in an aural threshold between racialization and recognition, refusing to accept the materiality of exclusion, and making the voice a register of embodied possession, but also one of epistemological transgression.