Conference Agenda

Our Lady of Guadalupe of Mexico is one of the most popular and enigmatic Marian figures in the Catholic world. In 1531, so the legend goes, the Virgin Mary appeared to Juan Diego, an indigenous man, on Tepeyac Hill in modern-day Mexico City, asking him to request that the city’s bishop build a temple in her honor. Her image, imprinted on Juan Diego’s “tilma,” remains at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, a major pilgrimage site in the Americas. Despite her cultural significance, musicologists have paid little attention to her liturgy, examining only a few known polyphonic works and plainchants in Mexico. Yet in the eighteenth century, Spanish representatives of what was then known as New Spain sought approval from the Holy See to establish a feast in her honor, recognized officially in 1754 after the Concordat of 1753, and evidence of the Mexican Guadalupe’s devotion soon appeared throughout the Spanish Iberian Peninsula.

This paper argues that Guadalupan devotion in Spain was part of King Ferdinand VI’s effort to claim Our Lady of Guadalupe of Mexico, who had appeared miraculously on Mexican soil to an indigenous Mexican man, as his own and exert political control over his American colonies. This study will focus on previously unexamined eighteenth-century Spanish chant manuscripts found in Badajoz, Burgos, Madrid, Santiago de Compostela, and Toledo to explore the spread and adaptation of Mexican Guadalupan devotion in Spain. By analyzing textual and musical structures in these chant sources, this study shows how liturgical adaptation served both devotional and colonial objectives. These sources not only trace the expansion of the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe beyond Mexico but, more importantly, reveal how her liturgy functioned to reinforce religious and political authority in eighteenth-century Spanish imperialism. This research enhances our understanding of transatlantic sacred music exchanges and reveals how colonial authorities used liturgy as an instrument of governance.

The Russian Orthodox liturgical tradition prides itself on its conservatism; to this day, musical instruments are not permitted in services. Singing is allowed in the liturgy only insofar as it emphasizes, clarifies, or provides an emotional exegesis to the text being pronounced. This sentiment is contradicted, however, by the phenomenon of anenaiki and khabuvy—repeated nonsensical syllables (“ai-nai-ni-ai”, or “i-ne-khe-bu-ve”) that interpolate the liturgical text in particularly ornate settings of twelfth to seventeenth-century monophonic znamenny and polyphonic demestvenny chants. These syllables first appear in twelfth-century Kondakaria, liturgical books from northern Rus’ transmitting a musical tradition inherited from the Asmatike Akolouthia (‘Sung Office’) of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, albeit in a notation that can’t be deciphered. Anenaiki and khabuvy persist in the Russian Orthodox liturgy until the mid-seventeenth century, when they were removed as part of Patriarch Nikon’s comprehensive liturgical reform. Neither the process of the syllables’ transmission from Byzantium to Rus’, nor the history of their use in the Russian liturgy has yet received attention from scholars.

This paper is the first to consider the phenomenon of anenaiki and khabuvy and their functions in the Byzantine and Slavic liturgies. Two functions, particular to the seventeenth-century Slavic liturgy, will be the primary focus of the paper: 1) the conscious evocation of the twelfth-century Asmatic aesthetic, five centuries later; and 2) representation of the mystical language of otherworldly beings. I examine the Sticheron for the Annunciation, Blagovestvuyet Gavriil [Gabriel Announceth], tracing this hymn’s adaptation from its initial context in the thirteenth-century Byzantine Asmatic repertoire to the conscious evocation of the lost Asmatic aesthetic in seventeenth-century Slavic demestvenny and troestrochny polyphonic settings. The Slavic settings deliberately place the syllables into the speech of Gabriel as he announces his good news to Mary, as well as the speech of the serpent as it tempts Eve, thus demonstrating the late Slavic re-interpretation of intercalated nonsense syllables as the language of angels and demons. Explicit references to Kondakarian chant in seventeenth-century chant books called Demestvenniki confirm the deliberate use of the syllables to establish continuity between ancient forms of worship and the new Muscovite polyphonic tradition.

Following Constantinople’s fall in 1453, the Venetian-held island of Crete became a prime destination for Byzantium’s finest musicians. The island boasted a prominent Greek Orthodox population, enjoyed religious freedoms, was safe from Ottoman armies, and fostered a vibrant intellectual and artistic culture stimulated by the Italian Renaissance. The prolonged exposure to Italian culture and the re-establishment of the Constantinopolitan Byzantine culture led to the “Cretan Renaissance,” which gradually transformed approaches to Orthodox chant and eventually evolved into what is recognized as the “Cretan style.” Characteristics of the Cretan style include new chants for the Orthodox Holy Liturgy that reflect the structure and function of the Latin Mass, Greek translations and arrangements of the Latin Gloria in excelsis, new Byzantine modal signs and neumes developed to align with Italian musical practices, and, in some rare cases, even polyphony. Although the Cretan style became prominent during the 16^th and 17^th centuries, Orthodox chants underwent stylistic changes during the 15th century due to the contributions and influences of the protopapas and protopsaltis, the two highest offices in the Cretan Orthodox Church.

While some richly decorated and curated Cretan chant manuscripts from the 15^th century have survived, liturgical chant books have not. Supplementing the dearth of notated material from this period, a rich archive of notarial sources illuminates how the island’s population engaged with chant. In this paper, I concentrate on wills, which document the state of Crete’s Orthodox music in the decades leading up to this significant shift in style (ca. 1450-1500). Wills elucidates a rich culture of commemorative ceremonies for the dead according to Orthodox and Roman Catholic rites, revealing a dynamic process of hybridization with the protopapas at its center. This paper argues that Greek priests integrated Orthodox commemorative services with Latin ones, creating a cross-confessional liturgical culture that celebrated the dead according to both practices. As a result, a complex web of different ethnicities, churches, priests, and chants is created. Through this study, I contribute to the field’s understanding of how Cretan Orthodox priests engaged with an evolving chant culture, offering new archival evidence to support my claim.