Conference Agenda

Music and ritual played an integral role at the royal court of the early modern kingdom of Kongo in vibrant manifestations of indigenous traditions, spiritual practices, social hierarchies, political power, and cultural identity in Afro-European encounters. The adoption of Christianity as the state religion in the 1490s led to the creation of an Afro-European Christian music influenced by both traditions. Yet while scholars have worked extensively on early modern cultural and religious histories of the Atlantic world, demonstrating the impact of African Catholicism emanating from West Central Africa on the emergence of African-Atlantic performance traditions, few musicological studies have focused on music and spirituality in 16^th- and 17^th-century Kongo and Afro-European musical manifestations of Christianity. Drawing on foreign travelers’ narratives, together with visual and textual components from missionary archives, this paper explores the role of music-making and musical instruments in indigenous ritual and religious practices in the kingdom of Kongo, and how these impacted on local Afro-European interactions and the development of a distinct Afro-European Christian music. First, it focuses on music in relation to traditional Kikongo spiritual practices, rites and ceremonies, which included chanting, song and ululation, especially in spiritual communion with nature. Second, it traces evidence of the incorporation of European sacred music (hymns, chants and litanies) alongside local rituals, Kikongo texts and instrumentation, which reflected the cultural syncretism developing after the advent of Christianity in the region and created a layered and dynamic hybrid sound. Lastly, it centers on Afro-Catholic performances, such as the sanga, which served as further musical expressions of this form of African Catholicism. Studies have analyzed the Afro-European visual and symbolic components of these ritualized performances, articulated in the choreography, dress and material symbolism, however their unique sound worlds have yet to be considered as another layer of Afro-European musical synergies. These transform our understanding of early musical practices in the region before 1800, African music and instruments in relation to spirituality and rite, and global interactions between Africans and Europeans unfolding outside of a colonial context which substantially contributed to the multifaceted and intersecting musical identities of the early modern world.

Some of the most colorful music from 17th century convents was written for the profession ceremony, in which a novice would take vows to join a religious order. A common text for this ritual was derived from a prayer attributed to St. Agnes, one of the early virgin martyrs. With the opening line “amo Christum in cuius thalamum introibo,” or “I love Christ into whose bedchamber I enter,” the prayer contextualizes the profession ceremony not only as an oath to the order, but as a wedding to Christ. In several orders, this text was sung or recited before the changing of vestments and the eucharist, formalizing the nun’s new status as a bride of Christ.

Two settings of the prayer of St. Agnes, one by published composer Lucrezia Vizzana (1590-1662) and another anonymous source found in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, while very different in character, utilize common rhetorical devices to highlight the emotional and theological apex of the profession.

BnF RES VMA MS-91, a newly-rediscovered anonymous manuscript, includes a setting of the Amo Christum for two sopranos and continuo, along with Marian motets, motets dedicated to female saints, and several settings of the Domine salvum fac Regem. These contents strongly suggest that the manuscript was used by a French convent in the mid-17th century. This Amo Christum uses a variety of compositional techniques, such as virtuosic melismatic writing, and metrical and tonal shifts to emphasize the dual nature of the relationship between the professing nun and her divine spouse, as well as the majestic reassurance of his voice.

Vizzana’s setting, also for two sopranos and continuo, points out the two same textual moments with the use of striking chromatic inflection and dissonance. The voice of Christ is denoted by a solo passage with Phrygian characteristics, while the dual nature of the nun’s status as a wife and a virgin is highlighted with dissonance and delayed resolution.

These motets shed light on how 17th century nuns understood their relationship with Christ as a marriage, and invites contemplation of the eucharist as physical union between the nun and her divine spouse.

Throughout the eighteenth century, Sephardic Jews in the Dutch Republic navigated a fragile and porous cultural positionality between Jewish and European intellectual traditions. In this milieu, music-poetic translation into Leshon haKodesh (the Sacred Language) became an instrument of communal acoustic self-fashioning, reinforcing Hebrew’s cultural prestige. As such, Amsterdam poet David Franco Mendes’ (1713–1792) Hebrew translation of George Frideric Handel’s oratorio Esther, re-musicalized in 1774 by Austro-Italian composer Christian Joseph Lidarti, exemplifies a unique mode of adaptation. For the (re)new(ed) Hebrew oratorio, I argue that translation functioned as a form of musical reclamation—an act of creative return, reinterpretation, and cultural reaffirmation. Focusing on Franco Mendes’s translation and Lidarti’s setting, I examine how translation transformed Handel’s first English oratorio into a distinctly Jewish artifact. Far from a passive act of linguistic translocation, Franco Mendes’s adaptation reconfigured Esther to align with the sonic and narrative contours of bom judesmo—a mode of dignified, devout, and cross-culturally legible Judaism. His strategic excision of Handel’s pro-regal Christian interpolations and retention of structural elements that underscored biblical heroism demonstrate an effort to integrate modern musical idioms into Jewish discourse while safeguarding communal specificity. By infusing Esther with the sensibilities of Sephardic musical poetics, Franco Mendes fashioned a text that transcended mere translation, becoming a sonic homecoming that reclaimed Jewish textual and cultural agency.

I further argue that the 1774 re-musicalization of Esther deepened this process of reclamation, embedding the Hebrew oratorio within the fashionable transregional soundmarks of the galant style. Lidarti’s setting reinforced the sonification of a modern bom judesmo, affirming the Sephardic elite’s use of music as a display of cultural capital. The Hebrew Esther did not merely reflect Jewish participation in Enlightenment musical hybridity; it enacted an assertion of interpretive sovereignty, where the oratorio became a vehicle for negotiating the tensions between tradition and modernity, religious specificity and musical universality. By situating the Franco Mendes–Lidarti Esther at the intersection of translation and adaptation, this paper demonstrates how Western Sephardic communities could harness translation as a musical strategy to redefine their place within the shifting cultural landscape of the eighteenth century.