Robert Stevenson

Written Sources for Indian Music until 1882

lthough not widely reviewed when in 1882 Breitkopf und Hartel published Theodore Bakers Leipzig dissertation, Uber die Musik der nordamerikanischen Wilden, it soon came to be accepted on both sides of the Atlantic as a definitive survey of the prior literature as well as a record of close personal research. In this paper, Bakers sources are reassessed and new material not known by him is for the first time evaluated in an ethnomusicological context. For access to rare materials, printed and manuscript, I thank the administrators and staff of the British Museum, Bibliotheque nationale, Newberry Library, Yale University Library, and Bancroft Library. As early as 1496 Christopher Columbus commissioned Ram6n Pane, a Catalonian cleric who had learned the language of Hispaniola,1 to describe Taino life. Pane mentioned a Hispaniola drum called mayohavau. Made of a stout hollowed-out tree trunk something less than four feet long and two feet in diameter, this slit-drum had two keys that reminded him of blacksmiths tongs. To its accompaniment the Tainos on the island sang their religious chants. Its sound carried a league and a half.2 Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo (1478-1557), a polite musician brought up at the Spanish court in Prince Johns company and within constant earshot of so famous a composer as Juan de Anchieta, met this same Haitian congener of the Aztec teponaztli on the island of Hispaniola in 1515, and made a drawing of it to accompany his precise description in Book V, chapter 1, of his monumental Historia general y natural de las Indias.3 In his experience, the Hispaniola islanders followed the peculiarly Mayan custom reported by Bartolome Jose Granado y Baeza4 of placing the instrument on the ground rather than on a wooden trestle. Their reason was that the sound carried farther.5 Oviedos drawing was first published in Spain at folio 46v, column 2, of his La historia general de las Indias (Seville: Juan Cromberger, 1535), and in Italy at folio 112v of the Italian translation published in Giovanni Battista Ramusios Terzo Volume delle Navigationi et Viaggi (Venice: Stamperia de Giunti, 1556). The term areito was used in Hispaniola for the call-andresponse dance song sung to the accompaniment of this two-keyed slit-drum. First met in a European publication around 1510,6 the term areito soon became indigenized in Spanish exploration literature to mean any New World

Mexican Colonial Music Manuscripts Abroad

By far the most sumptuous of Mexican colonial music manuscripts in a foreign library is the 226-folio choirbook cataloged M. 2428 in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid. Entirely devoted to the eight Masses (Super Scalam Aretinam a 5, Super Alleluia a 5, Pange lingua a 6, de Batalla a 6, Benedicta sit Sancta Trinitas a 4, Quam pulchri sunt gressus tui a 4, Re sol a 4, Aufer nobis a 4), and to the Magnificats in the eight tones by Francisco Lopez [Capillas]-who after several years as Puebla Cathedral organist spent his last nineteen years (1654-1673) as Mexico City Cathedral organist and chapelmaster. This luxurious Madrid volume contains works that are duplicated in Mexico City Cathedral and Tepotzotlan Viceroyal Museum manuscripts. When first cataloged by Higinio Angles and Jose Subirai,2 M. 2428 was not recognized as a manuscript of Mexican origin. Instead, they credited it to an obscure Montserrat monk named Francisco Miguel Lopez, who flourished a half-century later (died at Saragossa in 1723). Nor did they recognize the parody sources of the eight Masses-the fifth and sixth of which are based on like-named Palestrina motets, second and eighth on original motets by the Mexico City chapelmaster himself, seventh on a cancion by his putative teacher who was a chapelmaster at Ja6n Cathedral, Juan de Riscos, and fourth on the Janequin chanson La bataille de Marignan (1529). Subira published a facsimile of folio Iv of the Madrid manuscript in Historia de la musica espainola e hispanoamericana (Barcelona: Salvat, 1953), page 555. One facsimile, however, gives insufficient idea of the exquisite calligraphy throughout M. 2428. Incredibly beautiful initials abound. Thousands of pen strokes are used to draw backgrounds that are sometimes ships, trees, beasts, birds, fishes, other times knights jousting (folio 62v), fishermen busy on Lake Texcoco (15v), a peacock in the viceroyal aviary (63v), and a porcupine. In comparison with this atlas-size presentation copy of L6pez Capillass

The Earliest Polyphonic Imprint in South America

The first inventory of music books at Cuzco Cathedral reveals the arrival of Moraless sixteen printed Masses (Rome: Dorico Brothers, 1544) as early as 1553.1 By rare coincidence, the earliest polyphonic imprint nowadays to be found in any of the South American national libraries happens to be the same sixteen Masses of Crist6bal de Morales (ca. 15001553), the chief glory of Spanish music before Victoria. Under callnumber 503R. the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires prides itself in owning his Missarvm Liber Primvs in the 1544 Roman edition bound together with his Missarvm Liber Secundvs published by Moderne at Lyons six years later. No library in the United States, Great Britain, or Spain owns the 1544 imprint, and only the Sibley Library in Rochester possesses the Moderne 1550. The Buenos Aires copies of both books bound in one are unique, because they alone of all known surviving copies show illuminated capitals. The exquisite beauty of these painted initials at folios lv.-2, 16v.-17 in the 1544 and at 36v.-37, and 113v.-114 in the 1550 accords with the luxury of the original binding, on the front of which is stamped Opvs Missarvm Christophori Moralys and on the back F R.2 Only one leaf from the Moderne 1550 Masses has been cut out (fol. 108), and the 1544 is perfect. The fact that both the Mille regretz and Lhomme arme a 4 can be intimately associated with Charles V,3 and that the Aspice Domine takes a motet by his chapelmaster Gombert for its parody source, coincides with the extreme beauty of the illuminations painted in by hand throughout these three Masses. Only one other Mass, the Ave Maria in the 1550 collection, equals these three imperial Masses, so far as the painters brush is concerned.

The Bogotá Music Archive

AT LEAST FOUR COMPREHENSIVE ARCHIVES Of colonial music survive in the upper Andean nations: two in Peru, one in Bolivia, and one in Colombia. Ruben Vargas Ugarte, director of the Biblioteca Nacional at Lima in 1961, catalogued the music holdings of the Seminario de San Antonio Abad in Cuzco and supervised the cataloguing of the music archive in the archiepiscopal library at Lima (see The Music of Peru, p. 7o, notes 28 and 29). The extensive Sucre Cathedral archive-consisting of 617 tonos antiquisimos when catalogued at the end of the colonial epoch-still houses treasures unsurpassed in any Peruvian cathedral (The Music of Peru, p. 179). These three archives stress the I7th and i8th centuries. Bogota Cathedral, on the other hand, is the only site of the four at which liberal quantities of 16th-century music are to be found. Morales, Francisco Guerrero, and Victoria-the Spanish Renaissance trinity-are well represented. So too are Juan Navarro, master at Avila, Salamanca, Ciudad Rodrigo, and Palencia; Rodrigo de Ceballos, who worked principally at Seville, Cordova, and Granada; Nicolas Zorita, master at Tarragona; Juan Bautista Comes, of Valencia; and Sebastiin Aguilera de Heredia, who worked at Saragossa. Counterparting these giants of I6thand early I7th-century Peninsular art, Gutierre Fernaindez Hidalgo (b. I553) rises as their worthy New World compeer who worked successively at Bogotai, Quito, Cuzco, and Sucre (La Plata). In an essay on Colombian colonial music to be published in The Americas, Fernindez Hidalgos career in these four centers of colonial culture will be briefly surveyed. His colonial successors in the chapelmastership at Bogoti, Cascante, Herrera, Romero, and Lugo, will also be studied in a new effort to assess the absolute value of Colombian colonial music.

The "Distinguished Maestro" of New Spain: Juan Gutierrez de Padilla

STUDENTS of cultural life in the colonial Americas have long been aware of the achievements of such Mexican painters as the Juarezes, the elder Echave, and Correa. In architecture, similarly, certain names such as that of the Celaya master, Tresguerras, are widely known. But evTen competent Mexican historians have until recently categorized Neo-Hispanic music as a blank. The reasons for ignoring it, or for assuming that music in colonial Mexico, as well as in Peru, was epigonous and therefore culturally unimportant can easily be found. First, the music has lain for the most part inaccessible in cathedral archives where no critic could judge its artistic worth. Second, even had it been available, none of it was scored in modern clefs or drawn up into a form where it could be tried out. Third, competent singers and instrumentalists long ago deserted the churches of Mexico for the more commercially profitable arenas of stage, opera, and night club, with the result that performing groups were not encountered who were so much as interested in the musty past of Mexican music. Though a painting or a building can be appreciated, even when in ruins, music must, on the other hand, be made to live again through the medium of performance if its value is to be known. Fortunately the first two of the above listed reasons for dismissing neo-Hispanic music as a blank have recently lost force. Competent critics such as Virgil Thomson and Paul Henry Lang have visited Mexico and, after seeing some of the manuscript treasures,