Latin American Baroque: performance as a post-colonial act?

Abstract

‘Ah, Mr Francisco!’ ‘At your command, Mr Tomás!’ ‘Do we have all the instruments tuned up together?’ ‘Yes sir, you could well tell your lady That the dark-skinned folk are about to appear, Falling about with laughter and dying to start dancing.’ ‘A siolo flasiquiyo’, Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla (1590–1664) I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears … Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) ‘A siolo flasiquiyo’, an example of the villancico sub-genre featuring ‘African’ characters known as the negrilla or villancico de negros by the Mexican composer Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla, has become a staple of the Latin American Baroque repertory, featuring, for example, on the best-selling recording Missa Mexicana by The Harp Consort and in the concert by the King’s Singers and L’Arpeggiata at the ‘Encounters’ Early Music Weekend at the Southbank Centre, London, in September 2007.1 Such villancicos de negros are widely seen as highlights of Latin American Baroque programmes: Ex Cathedra placed Juan de Araujo’s ‘Los coflades de la estleya’ on their website as the only audio sample from their first Latin American CD, New World Symphonies, and Andrew McGregor enthused about this track in his review for the BBC, describing it as ‘a pre-rhumba style call to come and have a night out at the manger, a celebration of black culture’.2 This sense that the historical performance movement has unearthed a kind of long-lost, Afro-Latin ‘world music’ is often conveyed by performers, through both performance style (for example, the prominent use of percussion and strummed guitars) and programme notes. The San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble writes of the negrito ‘Dame albriçia mano Anton’ by Gaspar Fernandes, maestro de capilla at Puebla Cathedral in the early 17th century: ‘The delightfully infectious rhythms and “non-tonal” harmonies of this song bear the unmistakable stamp of the African people’.3 The language of both critic and performers is revealing: both frame this music in terms of a more-or-less direct encounter with African diasporic culture of the past. Indeed, the King’s Singers’ performance of ‘A siolo flasiquiyo’ took place in a festival entitled ‘Encounters’. It is worth considering this term in a little more detail. What might modern audiences be encountering when they listen to performances of 17th-century villancicos de negros from Latin America? How might this relate to the historical encounter between European, indigenous and African populations that took place in Latin America from the end of the 15th century? And how is this historical encounter framed through ‘historically informed’ performances? There are contexts in which the idea of ‘encounters between musical cultures’ seems very apposite, such as the meeting of Heinrich Schütz and Giovanni Gabrieli that was the subject of another concert in the same festival. But Latin America was a colonial territory marked by great imbalances of power between colonizers, colonized, and imported slaves, and by extremes of domination, suffering, deprivation and violence. Many musical developments in the New World thus took place in contexts that were far less neutral than the word ‘encounter’: this concept may usefully serve to describe certain kinds of cultural interaction, both past and present, but it should be used with caution in relation to colonial Latin America, since its implication of a meeting of equals risks obscuring or de-politicizing the continent’s traumatic history. My intention here is to explore some of the ways in which a greater mindfulness of the realities of colonialism might impact on performing and listening to colonial Baroque music. What sort of 21st-century values might reasonably be brought to bear on the performance of music from 17th-century Latin America? Is it desirable to reframe colonial processes in terms of modern ideas of encounter and multiculturalism and thus present Latin American Baroque music as early ‘world music’? Or does attachment to the idea of Historically Informed Performance require us to be, well, a little more historically informed? For musicologists, one way of deepening our understanding of colonial music is to engage with the concepts of post-colonialism, treating the term ‘colonial’ as more than just a temporal marker and approaching the Baroque music repertory that fills Latin American cathedral archives as a colonialist product. We can examine how the functioning of colonial power depended on certain ways of seeing, hearing and thinking, perpetuated through cultural products; discuss not just the surviving notes but also the exclusions and silences in the colonial repertory; and analyse music notation itself as an example of ‘the imperialism of Western literacy’.4 Musicologists should also be drawn to ask: who performed negrillas? Black musicians? I very much doubt it. In most of the cathedrals in which these pieces are preserved, there were no African musicians (other than perhaps the odd brass-player): these pieces were almost always sung by white musicians, members of the middle or upper strata of colonial society.5 In which case, what sort of cultural encounter was going on? How ‘multicultural’ was the spectacle of white musicians imitating black musicians to a predominantly white audience? The negrilla minimized real encounter by substituting it with a fake one. This was the blackface minstrelsy of its time. The dominance of the Europeans and their descendants allowed them both to enslave and to speak for African Others, to present them as ‘typically African’ (in other words, joyful and interested only in music and dance, as in the first lines of ‘A siolo flasiquiyo’), and ‘to mask their silence with words’.6 The representation of non-Europeans reinforced the differences between Europe and its Others, and was thus part of the dual process of maintaining power over the colonized and creating consensus among the colonizers. The repeated, ironic citation of the ‘deformed’ language spoken by African slaves served to consolidate the power of those who wrote and spoke the hegemonic version of Spanish. The villancico repertory was one of the pillars of Ángel Rama’s ‘lettered city’, which bolstered the power of the colonial élite and marginalized the indigenous and African populations, and it was forged out of the very stuff of colonialism.7 Even if one disagrees with Walter Benjamin’s sweeping statement that ‘there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’—which would of course implicate the entire Latin American Baroque repertory along with that of the colonial metropolis, Spain—it is harder to refute this argument in the specific case of the villancico de negros, which is a document of the barbarity of slavery at the very same time that it obscures the realities of this historical condition. Where does this leave the performer? Those who wish to sing this music must decide whether this repertory is inescapably linked to the often brutal historical context in which it was created or whether it can transcend its time. For all their aesthetic appeal—and villancicos de negros form part of most programmes today because they are among the most lively, vibrant pieces in the repertory—can these works be more than simply the tainted legacy of an ideology of racial superiority? And if we are to recuperate this music, how are we to approach its fake encounter in the context of the real encounter between performers and audience in the modern concert hall? Arguably, once we have lost our innocence about colonialism, an ‘innocent’ performance of colonial music is ethically problematic. We should therefore consider how post-colonial thinking might inform the performance of colonial repertory. If we are attached to the idea of Historically Informed Performance, then we ought to investigate how we might present such works without simply erasing their historical functions and retain the very real aesthetic pleasures of this repertory without abdicating our moral responsibility. This raises important questions about the limits of the notion of Historically Informed Performance. What does this term mean? Does it refer just to performance practice? What other sort of historical information should be brought to bear on performance? If the original history was a complex one of domination, resistance, negotiation and silencing, and the cultural product was thoroughly colonialist, should this history inform performance or should it be quietly put aside? Shifting the time-frame a little closer to ours, how would we feel if someone decided to put on a performance of blackface minstrelsy from the 1840s? It seems to me that a consideration of the performance of Latin American Baroque music underlines a tension between the urge to recapture performance practices of the past (the commonplace understanding of the term HIP) and the broader wish to be historically informed—which means, in our specific case, understanding how these same performance practices may have perpetuated social injustice. With the performance of villancicos de negros today, there seems to be an unspoken consensus that we actually need to be historically uninformed—to blot out the music’s history—in order to be able to perform it and for audiences to enjoy it. Is there an alternative? Can we conceive of a performance of colonial repertory that would be enjoyable—I have no urge to advocate puritanism—yet also historically informed and informing? Could performers engage with history rather than pretending that it does not exist, could they dialogue with, critique or refuse colonialist messages rather than retransmit them? It may be that a historically informed performance would need to veer away from the usual concomitant idea of historical correctness towards the idea of political correctness (without the negative connotations assigned by the political Right). To put it bluntly, a historically correct performance would be a racist performance. It may simply be that historical correctness and political correctness are incompatible, and that we have to make a choice. Some solutions to this dilemma already exist, though they may not have been conceived as such, in the ways that Latin American Baroque music is performed today. My aim is to suggest a reconceptualization of this music and its performance practices, to stimulate greater thoughtfulness rather than a radical revolution. A lot of present-day performances of colonial church music are influenced by the idea of ‘mestizo Baroque’, one that I find problematic from the point of view of historical correctness. What did Latin American church music sound like? For most of the colonial period in Latin America, formal musical interactions between colonizers and colonized were limited in scope: the latter were often brought in to play the instruments in churches (to do the manual work, like the bowlers in cricket during the days of the but in the sense of the were in the of élite The cultural in one only in this more to sound like and it was in the of the latter to because and like and because music was the sound of social If today there is a to in the colonial period it was that was the that could be on a of Latin American musicians was that they were from a cathedral I that most musicians in 17th-century Latin America were to the of their today. musicians were not interested in creating of and indigenous to sound like in the in which they the same as cultural to élite cultural whether or through the of was an of and a in the of a colonial élite which to the social The concept of on the other is to that of or that was to élite the first of the colonial The in ‘mestizo is a term today, the towards the of which the cultural of post-colonial Latin American but it was a much more negative and one that Latin to if at all The idea that cathedral music of the white this concept in aesthetic terms is simply This between modern political and colonial realities is in the of a like to the repertory of colonial as the legacy of a ‘mestizo musical his that an no evidence of such a culture in the music the idea that villancicos de negros or were by African culture is on a of the between and and their in colonial Latin there has been no consideration of what the of the African on the music of the villancico de negros might be, but rather a that since it is it must be I that African do exist, but that they are to be the of the villancico repertory, not just in the their way in from the music of the and I to be that there are musical of the villancico de negros that be in the evidence to me that between musical of 21st-century simply did not place in élite in colonial Latin America, for all that the in music was the It could be that the very of historical in the ‘mestizo aesthetic a to the performance dilemma since it a post-colonial rather than a colonial one (the rather than of A post-colonial performance would creating that of aesthetic and political rather than those of an the would be not on how these works but on how we would them to have Performance would be not a way of the indigenous or African in colonial music is since but rather of this is what are as of the of they are rather more about it. The of the post-colonial performance would thus in the of rather than that of historical would with the to the music an performance these works as if they were the of cultural encounter rather than of and thus the colonialism of the In a what is is not much a in performance style as a more a greater between performers and a of both historical functions and The idea of can also be brought to bear on the of repertory. The of have been lost because most of their music was not but was A on music Western musical lost music to by to and performers may they have been out or have from The may notation as an example of the imperialism of Western but the has the of about as L’Arpeggiata did in their Southbank concert with The King’s the here is with historical may be but it could be that the of is more important than the detail. form of in those who were out of the colonial and a from the Early Music to the of the Latin American has in the performances of this repertory by Latin American such as de la and the de the African and indigenous the as subject rather than of the music, rather than spoken It is in performances by such that one to ‘the unmistakable stamp of the African Where does this leave musicians? the negrilla as an example, this was not influenced by African music but rather through music. A historically informed performance would therefore the imitating a 17th-century imitating an Does this for an ironic that the power of the The King’s Singers’ performance of ‘A siolo flasiquiyo’ just such a the heart of the is the that and performers need not be of the colonial they can for as well as of performance that that or messages that are today. There are that might be from the performance of and In his of for an in order to with problematic questions of that are through performance are over no we one like this to our on such as Indeed, he that ‘to an to the for a of this in which the some of the most musical with … by with the music, by to musical of this should of the greater modern towards and have the to a modern through and and example of such was the of in the without was to the to that to a came the through about over the music came to an one of the you actually about what you are he one like it in an There a of it by members of the in the context of and … a but all we about ideology and the way it to the can we call for racial to without The the performance of music have been in evidence since it was as have the history of the in by from to to of ‘a of of the that are with the cultural and political values of the and its messages for and are also that with the of a little it has been ‘to or without in the to ‘a of or between the and of the and of this have to its as of or from the Is there not here for performers of colonial Latin American music to on? I have on the of the the also has a to It is worth with the post-colonial in which with the to and colonial but they explore in the are not simply as but as the and colonial they can be both and at the same time. We can about a post-colonial of a because can be a one which such did not the culture of for he the pleasures by the the of with towards it as of at the same time as it in of this the need to for and listen to the of the as well as the The of the is as important for as the is for since can serve as a or social if to out an ‘a of his most the to and a one in its It may be that audiences of Latin American Baroque music need to be to a of listening to the of one which the of and For a or such a process would be an not a of one which aesthetic with the of such ways of listening or performing of of music that it is the same as if the music were an that The a of this the and up the of the musical through a post-colonial to the Latin American Baroque repertory by an encounter with history and with the complex between culture and I have that performers need to be more of the at in the performance of the colonial Latin American repertory, to be historically informed and to this information on to If hearing the ‘the dark-skinned folk are about to Falling about with laughter and dying to start are allowed to that this ‘a pre-rhumba style call to come and have a night out at the manger, a celebration of black it is because some performers are to engage with the and of such audiences to that this ‘the unmistakable stamp of the African Where can of the history and of such cultural and thus point away from such it to performers to ‘historically their audiences and up for the of these The is to Latin American Baroque more than just early music or early ‘world more than just a for a of and a of It is to find a way of performing this music without abdicating and a to its less It is to be up about the history of this music and how this history may be today. Such an approach not to those who wish to their to the political and moral of I first out these ideas in a that I to a political to historically informed far as he was this was ‘a for solutions to a Is it a political to up questions of and in relation to white performers singing about how black slaves were actually that they whether to for or their refer the to the by Frederick a slave prominent and The real is who this in the first To describe such as slavery and and their through culture as ‘a a of who would feel about a modern blackface should for when with a 17th-century colonialism may be in Latin America, but its and of are the kinds of to black in are to be to a greater or in most of the today. The or of black to dance, and of is in Western simply to the historical of these kinds of without is to a of social in the It is a it and it from the ways that white have been singing about black for one on today would the of the or the of the Andrew it call it political it in What we need to do is find ways of it. The most today are like the that the in the how is it that been pretending the in the of Latin American Baroque performance? The is no doubt that there are very black in Early Music audiences in Europe and than the it may simply be that there is no one present with a in the to it. performers, audie

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