Conference Agenda

Between 1610 and 1614, Guatemalan chapelmaster Gaspar Fernández (fl. 1596–1629) composed four villancicos in Nahuatl for the Christmas celebrations at Puebla Cathedral. These pieces, alongside two Marian hymns preserved in Códice Valdés, represent some of the few extant sources of vocal music in Nahuatl from central New Spain. Despite the scarcity of surviving music manuscripts, extensive literary and documentary evidence attests to the adaptation and integration of Nahua ceremonial dance songs as well as villancicos and religious dramas in Nahuatl into major Catholic liturgical festivals.

During this period, villancicos served as vernacular glosses on responsories and antiphons for the Mass and Office services on feast days. While the authors of the Nahuatl texts remain unidentified, these writings are far from mere translations of Latin liturgical texts. Rather, I argue that their use of Nahua metaphors and rhetorical procedures reflects the long-term process of “compromise and accommodation” (Burkhart, 1988) between missionaries and indigenous communities during the Christianizing project of central New Spain. This process is evident in sixteenth-century doctrinal literature in Nahuatl, which includes two collections of ceremonial song and dance texts: Psalmodia Christiana and Cantares Mexicanos.

In this paper, I situate the listening experience of Fernández’s villancicos in the context of doctrinal literature written by Catholic missionaries in collaboration with Nahua intellectuals. I argue that these villancicos not only incorporate Nahua expressions of the sacred but also reveal how indigenous communities engaged with Catholic liturgy and devotion. To examine the auditory experience of Nahua Catholics attending Christmas services at Puebla Cathedral, I contextualize the influence of doctrinal literature and the varied degrees of power and agency wielded by the Nahua population in Puebla. I also highlight instances where Indigenous communities strategically employed dance-song genres to express collective identities, epistemologies, and political influence in public festivals. Ultimately, I show that cathedral music not only adhered to Catholic principles but also conveyed Nahua notions of the sacred to a significant segment of society, thus affirming the role of Fernández’s villancicos in articulating a Nahua-Christian identity within the public festivals of New Spain.

This paper explores the criollo identification of Manuel de Sumaya (1680-1755) and how this was expressed in his musical works. While he has traditionally been viewed as a mestizo, only recently have scholars begun to examine the composer as a criollo—a person of European descent born in the Americas—and how his identification with this liminal social group may have affected his life and musical output. Criollos, believing that it was their right to govern Spain’s American colonies and knowing that they were looked down upon by peninsulares (native-born Spaniards), found themselves operating in a curious state of ambivalence that required them to mimic Iberian culture to gain acceptance while at the same time differentiating themselves as New World locals with competence and excellence not in spite of their local origins, but because of them. Building on work by José Antonio Mazzotti, Bernardo Illari, and Jesús Ramos-Kittrell, and engaging with Homi Bhabha’s notions of mimicry and ambivalence in colonial subjects, I will establish Sumaya’s position as an ambivalent criollo. I will then analyze his sacred cantada Si ya a aquella nave in comparison to one by his Spanish contemporary Joseph de Torres to show that Sumaya’s work in that genre is, to quote Bhabha, “almost the same, but not quite.” My work will strengthen the arguments of Illari, John Swadley, Drew Davies, and others that position Sumaya not as a groundbreaking revolutionary but instead as an innovative, clever composer steeped in traditional Spanish musical traditions who adapted European practices who left his own personal, Novohispanic mark through subtle compositional modifications.

Reputed as “the Brazilian Schubert,” Cândido Inácio da Silva (1799/1800-1838) stands as the country’s paramount song-composer of the 19th century. The present paper shall serve as a reminder, however, that Silva’s career as a composer of sentimental modinhas and humorous lundus coincided with the peak of slavery in Brazilian lands. Drawing on newly-digitized periodicals from the National Library Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, the present will both detail his involvement with the institution of slavery and examine the traces of this involvement in his scores. Emphasis will be placed on his lundu-song suggestively titled “My Lilly, whoever takes pleasure in you” (“Minha Lília, quem desfruta”).

The presentation falls into two sections. First, I shall demonstrate that, contrary to common perceptions that music professionals were destined to a life of destitution, not only did Silva own real state both within and on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, but multiple African captives as well. That Silva would turn in his defiant slave Alexandre Mozambique to the brutal Calabouço prison in 1835 runs against longstanding beliefs about the conviviality of master-slave relations in 19th-century Brazil.

The second section begins by addressing the poetic use of diminutives in the lundu “My Lilly,” a feature of racial and patriarchal discourse in Lusophone song and literature. This usage is particularly strident in the song’s final verses, where the poetic persona takes on the role of serial offender: “nothing is sweeter, my little loved ones” (“nada é mais doce, meus amorinhos”). “My Lilly” is further illustrative of the dissonant, contrametric structures that typified the lundu as a genre. Combined with the racially-charged lyrics, lundu rhythms rendered otherness audible to the affluent Brazilians who congregated around music in the safety of their parlors and salons. Yet the rebelliousness of Alexandre Mozambique makes for a vivid warning of the insecurities underlying social relations in slaveholding Brazil.