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In pursuit of indigenous flavor, are today's performances misrepresenting their sources?
MANY EARLY MUSIC GROUPS have begun to include music from Spain and colonial Latin America in their repertoires over the last three decades. From their performances and recordings, a canon of colonial works has emerged that includes, at minimum, the villancicos A la jácara jacarilla and Ah, siolo Flasiquiyo by Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla, Convidando está la noche by Juan García de Céspedes, and Los coflades de la estleya by Juan de Araujo, in addition to the anonymous processional hymn, Hanacpachap cussicuinin.
The villancico, a genre built upon learned, paraliturgical poetry in the vernacular, has become the emblem of early modern musical practice in Hispanic churches. Some villancicos feature popularizing references, appropriated from the secular theater in Spain, that give voice to social "others" (Castilian ruffians, Africans, or Galicians) in order to dramatize religious stories by means of stereotyped gestures. Much of the performance community and its audience assumes that the stereotypical material in the villancico contains ethnographic description-"local content." In his important article "Latin American Baroque: Performance as a Post-Colonial Act?" (Early Musk 36 [3], 2008), Geoffrey Baker raises the ethical concerns of performing, without context, dialect villancicos that present Christianized African characters as one-dimensional children.
After years of scholarly work with repertoires from New Spain (colonial Mexico), however, I believe that the central problem of reviving this music-almost exclusively ritual music of the Catholic Church-is determining to what degree local content is present and how to translate that into historically informed yet socially acceptable performances.
The "music of New Spain" can refer to three distinct concepts. Theoretically, it encompasses all of the musical practices of the territory, including the religious, the popular, and the traditional (mostly improvised) musics of diverse peoples. Practically, it encompasses the surviving music manuscripts, choirbooks, and other documents from the 16th through early 19th centuries. Yet publicly, we hear the music of New Spain in the "Latin Baroque" style, a vibrant and creative performance practice codified around 1990 that uses the music of the notated tradition as a springboard for imagining the soundscape of the colonial society as a whole. It does so (almost always with improvised percussion) using the poetics of the early music movement...