Conference Agenda

This paper examines the New Mexican musical repertory compiled by Juan Bautista Ralliere (1834–1915) as preserved and reactivated in two major sound archives of Hispanic music in the United States: the John Donald Robb and Rubén Cobos collections of field recordings (1940s–1970s). French-born Ralliere served as Catholic parish priest in Tomé, New Mexico, and its surrounding communities for more than fifty years. During this time, he compiled nearly one thousand sacred and secular melodies in manuscript notebooks and in his devotional songbook Cánticos espirituales, which appeared in at least fifteen music and text editions, attesting to its wide regional circulation. As John Koegel has shown, these compilations stabilized a preexisting vernacular practice in which Hispanic New Mexican, Mexican, French, and Anglo-American songs intersected. They represent the earliest systematic effort to collect and publish Nuevomexicano musical culture within the broader musical traditions of the U.S. Southwest (Koegel 1997).

Drawing on archival research in Ralliere’s manuscripts and the fifteen printed editions of his Cánticos espirituales, alongside comparative analysis of Robb’s and Cobos’s recordings and field notes, this paper traces the reactivation of specific alabados, devotional hymns, and secular songs across manuscript, print, and sound collections. The Robb archive, housed at the University of New Mexico and foundational to his published corpus (Robb 1980), reflects a large-scale institutional project shaped by Robb’s role as a composer and longtime dean of the College of Fine Arts at UNM. His approach privileges genre-based taxonomy and musical transcription. By contrast, the Cobos Collection, held at Colorado College, emerged from pedagogical and linguistic concerns informed by Cobos’s Mexican-born background and his sustained interest in language, dialect speech, and oral transmission. His recordings foreground contextual commentary, socially embedded performance settings, and repertory transmission within family and devotional networks, with particular attention to women’s central role in these processes (Levine & Chace 1999).

Building on scholarship that treats archives and recording technologies as historically situated mediating structures (Derrida 1996; Sterne 2003; Stoler 2009), I argue that these projects reframed Ralliere’s repertory according to distinct epistemic logics, actively participating in its authorization as regional tradition.

Throughout the twentieth century, several music archives were produced containing significant collections of U.S. Southwest Hispanic and Indian musics. Early collectors recorded and documented as much regional Indigenous (Indo-Hispano, Native and Genízaro) music as possible as they witnessed the local Spanish and Indian languages being replaced by English. Many understood their work as an urgent obligation to preserve music, verbal art, and other linguistic forms in order to safeguard the region’s musical-cultural legacy and U.S. national cultural heritage. This paper argues that these archival practices not only preserved music but also actively shaped “whose memory” became archived and how Southwestern musics entered musicologial and ethnomusicological discourse today.

The paper focuses on the John Donald Robb Archive of Southwestern Music, one of the largest collections of U.S. Hispanic and Indian Music. The archive contains approximately three thousand field recordings of Hispanic, Pueblo, Navajo, and Anglo folk repertories. John Donald Robb (1892–1989) was born in Minneapolis and trained as a lawyer at Harvard before turning to music and joining the University of New Mexico (UNM). At UNM worked as folk song collector, archivist, performing artist/studio cellist, conductor, and composer, and served as dean of the College of Fine Arts from 1942 to 1957 (Rivera 2015). Rather than approaching Southwestern music as a formally trained musicologist, Robb engaged these repertories primarily through his background as a composer and cultural administrator, positions that shaped both the scope of his collecting activities and the institutional framing of the archive.

Realizing his lacking knowledge of Mexican musicology, Robb’s most consequential intervention in the study of U.S. Southwest Hispanic music was his invitation, on behalf of UNM, to Mexican musicologist Vicente T. Mendoza and his wife, Virginia R. Mendoza in 1945. This collaboration addressed a key epistemic gap within the archive and resulted in two influential publications based on these collections (Robb 1980; Mendoza & Mendoza 1986). Situating the Southwest archival music collections within a critical, decolonial, and “Greater Mexican” framework (Paredes; 1958; Limón 1998), my paper examines how Robb’s professional profile and institutional authority shaped the organization, interpretation, and circulation of Southwestern musical knowledge.

This paper discusses the choices the presenter has made in performances of archival songs, largely from the John Donald Robb (Robb, 1980) and Jack Loeffler (Loeffler and Lamadrid, 1989; 1999) collections housed at the University of New Mexico. It argues that performing archival songs as relational practices helps reveal how musical meaning emerges through circulation and reuse, rather than through static notions of tradition. Responding to ideas of relationality in the work of archeologists (Buchanan and Skousen, eds., 2015), the presenter examines several songs, tracing their movement through space and time with a focus on the challenges inherent in contemporary performances that treat archival repertories as ahistorical.

The presentation is based on findings from a music course that centered the notion of musical flows in and out of New Mexico in multiple directions. The presenter suggests that centering musical flows allows for the conception of “meshwork” that does not separate the individual researcher from the objects of study, but rather leads to “knowing from the inside” (Ingold, 2013). For example, how does one account for elements in “old” songs that are not congruent with local norms, such as rhythmic patterns that have circulated in New Mexican folk repertoires long after they were invented in, say, Cuba?

The John D. Robb and Jack Loeffler collections function as welcome repositories of traditional music and help address historical gaps resulting from the limited documentation of Indigenous, Genízaro and Hispano individuals from working and lower economic classes. We note how “traditional” songs tell a history that is not written elsewhere and reflect aspirations to lives lived with dignity in the face of calamities and non-acceptance by a White mainstream structured around the Othering of individuals based on skin color and/or socio-economic status. In this instance, “White” refers to the hegemonic influences of Euro Americans, mostly Anglos, in New Mexico, in marked contrast to the dedicated work of Robb and Loeffler. The presenter suggests that the centering of musical flows allows for an inclusive integration of music, culture, and performance both within and beyond a New Mexican historical frame.