Conference Agenda

The role of music as an instrument of evangelization in colonial Mexico (New Spain) has been addressed from multiple disciplinary perspectives, including musicology (Saldívar, 1934; Stevenson, 1952), church history (Ricard, 1947), social history (Turrent, 1993), and cultural history (Gruzinski, 1988; Alcántara, 2008, 2010). While these studies provide an overview of the actors involved in the transmission and reception of music within evangelization and its social and cultural functions, they largely focus on the Central Altiplano. Moreover, they seldom explore aspects such as the specific genres introduced during the evangelization process and the sound culture that friars and clerics brought with them. This paper argues that music and collective singing were essential tools for friars and clerics to disseminate Christian doctrine and establish Catholic worship. However, rather than composing new melodies specifically for this purpose, evangelizers often relied on the sound culture they carried from Europe. This repertoire included religious melodies—both liturgical and devotional—as well as secular tunes. Through the technique of contrafactum, evangelizers adapted these pre-existing melodies to new texts or translations of existing ones, making them effective tools for conversion and catechesis.

Drawing from sources such as chronicles, songbooks, doctrine books, and other documentary evidence, I examine three case studies that exemplify this practice of musical adaptation for evangelization: (1) Cristóbal Cabrera, a cleric active in both Castile and the Bishopric of Michoacán in the sixteenth century; (2) Diego Basalenque, an Augustinian friar who worked in the same bishopric in the seventeenth century; and (3) the Franciscan missionaries who carried out their work in Alta California in the eighteenth century. Through these examples, I will demonstrate that the reuse of pre-existing musical material was a fundamental resource for indoctrination and that this practice was not confined to a single time period or geographical space.

During the late eighteenth century at Mexico City Cathedral, chapel master Antonio Juanas embarked on a significant project to complete the responsory cycles initiated by Ignacio Jerusalem in the 1750s and 1760s. Jerusalem’s cycles intentionally omitted as many as three of the responsory texts in favor of villancicos. To address this, Juanas created contrafacts—new texts set to preexisting arias and responsories by Jerusalem—thereby maintaining stylistic uniformity throughout the cycles, except in instances where Juanas composed entirely new sections.

Previous scholars, including Dianne Goldman (2014) and Drew Edward Davies (2019), have conducted initial studies of Juanas’ use of contrafacts to complete Jerusalem’s responsory cycles. Davies, in particular, has focused on comparing the texts of the original music and the final material in terms of cognates and preservation of sounds. However, until now there has not been a comprehensive study of the sources and their contrafacts. In addition, comparing the comments made by Juanas on the final page of both the old and new pieces and the music inventories, we can learn valuable information about where and how the music from previous generations of composers was stored.

Following Davies’ text substitution model, this paper will reveal how widespread the process of contrafacting music was at eighteenth century Mexico City Cathedral, explore the sources Juanas used for his contrafacts, note the differences between the source materials and the contrafacts, and analyze the new sections Juanas composed. By comparing these to his original compositions, I aim to understand how Juanas approached integrating his own music with Jerusalem's preexisting works. This analysis will shed light on how composers regarded the music of their predecessors and the practical necessity of completing the responsory cycles quickly and efficiently.

Since the Spanish arrival in New Mexico in 1598, the Franciscans remained the sole religious order in the region until the nineteenth century. Through the introduction of choral singing—both monophonic and polyphonic—and European instruments, they laid the foundation for the Catholic musical traditions of the U.S. Southwest (Spiess, 1964). However, the primary surviving musical sources from New Mexico date to the nineteenth century and are associated with the secular clergy and the Jesuits, who established a presence in 1867 (Burrus, 1980). Among these, one of the most significant is Cánticos espirituales sacados de varios autores, a Spanish-language hymnal first published in 1884 by the Jesuits at the Imprenta del Río Grande, compiled by French priest Juan Bautista (Jean-Baptiste) Rallière. With at least thirteen editions between 1884 and 1956, this collection of over 300 works—hailed as “the most important nineteenth-century Spanish-language hymnbook of the Southwest” (Koegel, 1997)—systematically compiles contrafacta from a diverse array of French, Italian, Canadian, Spanish, Mexican, Hispano-New Mexican, and Anglo sources.

This paper presents the first systematic identification and analysis of the sources that shaped this influential hymnal. I argue that its extensive use of contrafacta was a deliberate strategy to consolidate a transnational Catholic identity in the region. By adapting melodies from diverse traditions, the hymnal fostered cohesion among the region’s multilingual and multiethnic communities while reinforcing ties with the Holy See during a period of dramatic political, social and cultural transformation (Hanks, 2000). Moreover, these hymns transcended print culture; many were transcribed into personal cuadernos (songbooks) or committed to memory, thus entering oral tradition (Robb, 2014 [1980]). This underexplored modern use of contrafacta reveals the intricate musical exchanges that characterized nineteenth-century New Mexico, situating Cánticos espirituales within a broader transatlantic process of melodic appropriation and adaptation.