La música y el Atlántico

In a demonstration of what Hispanic studies can contribute to the enrichment of musicology, María Gembero Ustárroz and Emilio Ros-Fábregas have compiled a collection of essays that challenge notions of center-periphery and Europe as the sole source of influence in Western musical discourse. This collection explores the ways in which European thinking was actually molded, renewed, and transformed, thus creating and localizing new hegemonies that, while influenced by colonial ideology, provide new modalities to question the construction of hegemony and its “others.”This collection focuses overwhelmingly on the colonial period, and the information in some of these essays shows that, in many respects, colonial America remains a terra incognita. María Gembero Ustárroz, Lucía Gómez Fernández, and Marcelino Díez Martínez shed new light on the dynamics of traffic between Spain and America, emphasizing the importance of Cádiz as the ultimate point of contact with the New World. Gembero Ustárroz explores the migration of musicians from Spain to America, bringing new and important information about the origins, migration requirements, and accompanying entourage of some of the most important music figures in colonial America. In a most important contribution to the otherwise unexplored topic of lay musical sponsorship outside of ecclesiastical centers, Lucía Gómez Fernández talks about the musical patronage of the Medina Sidonia family in Cádiz. Gómez Fernández touches upon the issue of religious sensibility permeating musical patronage in terms of function, and the exchanges of musicians between the family’s court and the cathedral of Seville. In this regard, there is some resonance with the narrative presented by Mercedes Castillo Ferreira, whose study of music at the Abadía of the Vaca de Castro family alludes to the conservative orthodoxy of Habsburg confessionalism influencing musical practices during the first two decades of the seventeenth century.As a main theme in these four essays, the importance of Cádiz in the cultural exchange between Spain and the New World comes forth: it was the main port of departure and arrival to and from America, and the main center where the arrival of American news, tendencies, and products was first established. In this light, Marcelino Díez Martínez explores the musical connections between Cádiz and America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, showing the work of mutual influences in terms of musicians from the cathedral of Cádiz who either migrated or sent their works to America (e.g., Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla, Francisco Delgado), and in terms of American religious rituals that, once in Spain, were widely cultivated.On a different note, essays by Miguel Molina Martínez, Aurelio Tello, and Juan Pablo Fernández-Cortés touch upon issues of cultural syncretism. Molina Martínez considers how the building of the colonial city related to the reproduction of a cultural matrix by re-creating a social hierarchy of power that recognized the centrality of the crown. He shows how religious festivities, in their relationship with an urban framework, acted as a symbolic arena to stage the power relations among groups who negotiated their position in the colonial social hierarchy. Aurelio Tello’s study of Portuguese composer Gaspar Fernandes’s cancionero (roughly translated as songbook) considers this musical corpus as a testimony of musical life in New Spain during the seventeenth century. The contents of Fernandes’s cancionero attest to the virtual identity between the crown and the church. According to Tello, the cancionero’s sacred repertory — featuring Latin, Africanized Spanish, and Nahuatl texts used for important occasions, such as the welcome of a new viceroy — ultimately opens new inquiries about ethnic identity, social legitimacy, and religious performance by the different social groups composing colonial society. Juan Pablo Fernández-Cortés explores how cultural encounters across the Atlantic shaped musical practices according to specific sociocultural realities, thus challenging the assumed center-periphery narrative of Western music in the Americas. In this respect, he argues that it is not possible to regard the tonadilla escénica as an exclusive Spanish form due to processes of syncretism found in American tonadillas, as illustrated by the sonsonetes and cumbés that were incorporated in the tonadilla repertoire.All in all, the book represents a breath of fresh air to Hispanic studies. And although in this collection we still find descriptions that do not contribute anything new to the field (e.g., narratives of colonial religious music according to well-known secondary sources; issues of Italianization that do not problematize aesthetics and cultural ideology in light of the Bourbon reforms), the essays bring new insights and information that make the collection an important research tool. For example, Javier Marín López provides a thorough index of a recently recovered collection of villancicos and motets from the cathedral of Mexico under the name of Fondo Estrada, a collection well known to Mexican colonialists. Craig Russell and Ricardo Miranda explore the cultural importance of the matins service for the Virgen de Guadalupe in eighteenth-century Mexico in terms of its structural dimensions and its relevance to issues of cultural identity. Belén Vargas Liñán provides a fascinating problematization of salon music in Mexico during the nineteenth century in terms of its relevance to gender studies, while David Coifman brings to light the music of Jose Antonio Caro de Boesi (1758 – 1814?) as the oldest attributable musical corpus in Venezuela.The book closes with a section of more modern inquiries by María del Coral Morales Villar, Victoria Eli Rodríguez, and Gérard Borras. In keeping with the book’s theme, Morales Villar addresses the connections between Spain and Argentina in terms of the dissemination of singing techniques from the method El arte de desarrollar la voz y sus timbres (1915) by Catalonian singer Ramón Guitart-Besangèe. Eli Rodríguez explores the year 1959 as a liminal historical point of musical transformation in relation to the political changes that occurred after the victory of the Cuban Revolution. Gérard Borras offers a historical analysis of indigenous musical practices and organology in the Bolivian Altiplano and their change due to cultural and social transformations that occurred throughout the second half of the twentieth century.As the contents of the book suggest, there is still much to be considered in regard to the historical impact that the encounter between Europe and America had in Western musical practices. Not least is the realization that there is still a wealth of information waiting to be uncovered

Art · Humanities · Historical Art and Architecture Studies · Historical Studies on Spain · Spanish Literature and Culture Studies