"La musica de dos orbes": A Context for the First Opera of the Americas

Abstract

It could be argued that the history of music in colonial Latin America has been written only as a history of the progress and successful implantation of the music of the Catholic Church, and that the musical “history” of the colonies (and here I refer especially to colonial Peru, the largest of the administrative units in the New World) has been steered by the evangelizing project.1 Musicologists have found it difficult to draw forth secular voices—indigenous, criollo, or Iberian—from the first two centuries of the political and social history of the former colonies, and have met with limited success in attempting to recover performance traditions of any sort. The churches, cathedrals, convents, and missions in Lima, the administrative center of the viceroyalty, were the institutions whose evangelizing practices not only affected which musical repertories would be preserved, but also how the region's musical history might be recorded and interpreted. Music was a catechistic art that lent itself to the evangelizing project, and both material musical forms (the music written into choir books, for example) and audible, aural ones (such as instruction in European musical instruments and religious song) were engaged to bring native musicians and listeners into the cult of the Eucharist.2 Music heard, sung, played, and listened to was intended to enhance the “exposure to the natural appeal of Christian truths and teaching,”3 though indigenous musicians and listeners did not necessarily assign the intended significance to what they sang, played, and heard.4

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