La música y el Atlántico

Reviewed by: La música y el Atlántico: Relaciones musicales entre España y Latinoamérica Peter Manuel Edited by Maria Gembero Ustárroz and Emilio Ros-Fabregas. La música y el Atlántico: Relaciones musicales entre España y Latinoamérica [Music and the Atlantic: Musical Relations between Spain and Latin America]. Granada: The University of Granada. 2007. 605 pp. In La música y el Atlántico, editors María Gembero Ustárroz and Emilio Ros-Fabregas present 20 essays by musicologists of Spanish and diverse American backgrounds covering a broad range of topics. Several of the contributors are former students of the editors at the University of Granada, Spain. Most of the articles deal with aspects of Western art music, especially of the 16th to 18th centuries rather than vernacular music, and they involve archival rather than ethnographic research. As such, this volume may be of more interest to scholars of Hispanic Baroque and Classical music than to ethnomusicologists per se. In several of the articles, the main contribution may be the presentation of original primary data from such archival sources rather than the advancement of any particular argument or thesis, and the "conclusions" sections tend to be brief and provisional rather than grandiloquent. Nevertheless, collectively the articles remind us of the dramatic extent to which Hispanic music culture of the colonial period was a thoroughly transatlantic entity, and they provide much nuance and historical detail regarding the local and intercontinental flows and efflorescences of music within that culture. Following a succinct introduction by the editors, the articles treat the following topics: the typical patterns, motivations, and destinations of professional musicians who migrated between Spain and the Americas in the colonial period (Gembero Ustárroz); the musical activities patronized in the 1500s by the wealthy Medina Sidonia family of Andalusia, including their employment of enslaved Amerindian and Afro-Latin musicians trained in Western music (Gómez Fernández); the musical patronage exercised by an influential family of Granada during and after their enrichment in Peru (Castillo Ferreira); aspects of relations between cathedral music in Cádiz and in the Americas in the 1600–1700s (Díez Martínez); a villancico (the Hispanic rough counterpart to a cantata) composed in 1745 by Pedro Rabassa and evidently intended for performance in Mexico (Isusi [End Page 253] Fagoaga); the conception and mixed reception of Nicholas Slonimsky's 1945 Music of Latin America (Ros-Fábregas); perspectives on the role of cities per se as locales for music in Latin America (Molina Martínez); a set of early Baroque compositions in the Cancionero Musical de Gaspar Fernándes, compiled in New Spain (Mexico) in 1609–1616 (Tello); the music performed at three official ceremonies in Lima in the latter 1700s, including ensembles of indigenous performers (Molina); spatial aspects of cathedral music in Mexico (López Guzmán); 16th-century church music in New Spain (Roldán Herencia); a neglected collection of Mexican sacred villancicos (Marín López); a 1764 set of Mexican maitines, the most important genre of contemporary sacred choral compositions in that region (Russell); further socio-musical perspectives on this corpus (Miranda); Venezuelan composer J. Antonio Caro de Boesi (Coifman); the presence of Afro-Latin-inspired sonsonetes and cumbés in two 18th-century tonadillas escénicas (light music theater works) (Fernándes-Cortés); the representation of music in a 19th-century Mexican women's magazine (Vargas Liñán); a 1915 singing manual of Buenos Aires (Morales Villar); Cuban popular music since 1959 (Eli Rodríguez); and lastly, organological perspectives on a collection of highland Bolivian instruments (Borras). The volume is attractively and professionally produced, with many illustrations and musical examples. Peter Manuel John Jay College and the CUNY Graduate Center Copyright © 2009 University of Texas Press

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