The Spanish colonial cities of Cuzco (Peru) and Manila (the Philippines), though geographically distant from each other and different in many important ways, shared a number of commonalities. Far removed not only from each other, but also from the Iberian Peninsula, both had been indigenous political capitals before the arrival of Europeans; perhaps partly for this reason they became important centers of Spanish economic and political power and Christian missionary activity. Both were home to relatively small concentrations of Europeans surrounded by and attempting to control a much larger number of indigenous inhabitants who, although at times resisting aspects of the colonizers’ culture, also adopted other aspects for their own purposes, sometimes adapting and transforming them in the process. The cathedrals of both cities were at the geographic, religious, and musical center of each city, but other institutions of religious and musical importance, such as parishes, monastic communities, and confraternities, vied with the cathedrals for attention and contributed to the cities’ soundscapes.

Given the broad similarities between colonial Cuzco and Manila, it is not surprising that these two books examining the relationship of colonialism and music would have much in common. In addition to the use of musical theoretical concepts as ways of understanding the role of music in colonial societies reflected in their titles, both make use of methodologies that, although now common in historiography and musicology, are still somewhat novel in the study of music in the Spanish Empire, but that can help elucidate the relationship between music and other aspects of culture.

Following in the steps of Reinhard Strohm's Music in Late Medieval Bruges and the collection of essays in Music and Musicians in Renaissance Cities and Towns, Geoffrey Baker's Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco brings to bear the tools of urban musicology to reconstruct an urban soundscape for Cuzco and its environs.Footnote ¹ In contrast with earlier studies that focused on the examination of music in urban spaces in the New World, Baker's approach de-centers the study of major institutions and their archives, controlled as they were by the Hispanic elite.Footnote ² Although he certainly sheds important light on such institutions as Cuzco Cathedral and the Seminary of San Antonio Abad, he broadens the focus to include the geographical and social margins where indigenous musicians and patrons played important roles. The examination of interactions between musicians and musical institutions at the center and on the periphery of the city reveals a set of urban networks interacting in complex ways as elites and subordinates attempted to use music to bolster their status and to open up “spaces of opportunity” for themselves respectively (11). Following a postcolonial tendency to stress the agency of the colonized, Baker suggests that European music was not simply imposed on a passive indigenous population, but rather was cultivated by Andean individuals for the social, economic, and political opportunities and attractions it offered them.

As part of his strategy of deemphasizing the role of the Cathedral and Seminary of San Antonio Abad, Baker examines sources that do not come primarily from the archives of these central institutions, which have been crucial to earlier scholarship. Rather, his research emphasizes a broad range of sources, including the records of parish churches and confraternities in the Archivo Arzobispal de Cuzco, notarial records and account books in the Archivo Departamental del Cuzco, and other sources in libraries and archives in Lima (Biblioteca Nacional del Perú, Archivo Arzobispal de Lima, Archivo General de la Nación) and Seville (Archivo General de Indias).

The first chapter of Imposing Harmony sets the stage for the rest of the book, giving an overview of the rich and colorful city soundscape in which civic rituals both enacted and contested the ideal of harmony and order at the heart of the Spanish approach to colonization and urbanization in the New World. Following a well-established pattern inherited from the Roman Empire and rehearsed in the reconquista (Reconquest) of the Iberian Peninsula, Spanish colonists used cities as tools of empire. Urbanization enhanced Christianization, and the implicit order of the urban environment was expressed and implemented by the colonists through musical harmony. The participation of indigenous Andean musicians in the city's colorful soundscape could be interpreted by the colonizers as an affirmation of the new social order, but it also simultaneously contested it.

Although the importance of Cuzco Cathedral and the Seminary of San Antonio Abad have long been known, Baker's account, drawing as it does from records held outside those institutions, differs from and in many ways expands on earlier studies.Footnote ³ Cuzco's musical life, initially dominated by Iberian musicians, was greatly altered beginning in the seventeenth century by its relationship with the seminary, who served as its “musical ambassadors” to other institutions such as Cuzco's monasteries, convents, and parish churches (87). This distinctive relationship with the seminary seems to have been an important factor in the localism and stasis of the cathedral's musical establishment. Coupled with the scarcity of prebends for musicians, the dependence of the cathedral on seminary students helped remove it from the network of cathedrals in Spain and Spanish America through which musicians often moved. Baker argues that Cuzco was different from the Iberian model (specifically that of Seville), in which cathedrals dominated city musical establishments, and he believes that Cuzco Cathedral was instead integrated into a network of urban musical institutions. However, more studies on peninsular and colonial musical institutions other than cathedrals are needed to support this distinction.

Baker's study of convents and monasteries in chapter 3 follows the model of Kathryn Burns's pioneering work on Cuzco's convents and women's religious communities known as beaterios, and he draws extensively on her research.Footnote ⁴ He develops a picture of these women's communities in which a remarkable variety of music performed at very high standards was used by European and criollo (creole) women to display their faith, and by indigenous elites to “construct an honorable Christian identity” (127). In contrast to the rich and varied musical life of women's religious institutions, Cuzco's male monasteries appear to have been somewhat lacking in much music other than chant, although more research might turn up evidence to the contrary.

Music in the city's parish churches and in the Andean villages known as doctrinas de indios in the bishopric of Cuzco are the focuses of chapters 4 and 5. Musical positions in the Cathedral were not generally available to indigenous musicians, but quite a different situation prevailed in the parish churches. Although the eldest sons of caciques, following a pre-Conquest indigenous pattern, generally took up positions of political leadership, the younger sons of the Inka nobility seem often to have become maestros de capilla (chapel masters). Their noble heritage, coupled with the prestige of an ecclesiastical position, appears to have given the role of church musician a relatively elevated status.

Baker also examines the role of confraternities in this section. These organizations of lay members were important patrons of music, sponsoring masses for the dead as well as music for elaborate processions designed to raise their own prestige; but they were also often condemned by church authorities. Baker contends that music in the parishes was not only relatively independent from that of the Cathedral, but that it was also extraordinarily elaborate and well developed, serving as a focus of local pride and unity rather than as a link to the central authority represented by the Cathedral. Indeed, in these parish churches harmony, both social and political, as well as musical harmony, seems to have been negotiated by indigenous musicians more than imposed by Hispanic authorities.

Baker is clear that “harmony . . . was more than a vague metaphor to the early moderns, it was a concept that permeated understandings of society, of the physical world” (27). He takes care to ground his social and political application of the term in early modern usage. On the other hand, D. R. M. Irving's use of the concept of counterpoint in Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila is consciously metaphorical and analogical. He applies “its common musicological definition as a social analogy: that is, counterpoint within a colonial society involves the combination of multiple musical voices according to a strict, uncompromising set of rules wielded by a manipulating power” (3). Drawing on the methodology of contrapuntal analysis developed in Edward Said's seminal Culture and Imperialism,Footnote ⁵ Irving attempts to “look beyond the records of missionaries and colonial authorities, reading between (and beyond) the lines to question indigenous engagement with the production of historic texts, and connecting indigenous social structures and global systems to past and present processes of intercultural contact and globalization” (7).

It is the connection of colonial structures and music in colonial Manila to those of the rest of the Spanish Empire that makes this book of interest to readers of this journal.Footnote ⁶ As the westernmost of Spain's colonial outposts, the Philippines was governed by Spain through New Spain until the eighteenth century. From 1565 to 1765 (when the first Spanish galleon reached Manila from Cádiz directly, via the Cape of Good Hope), transshipment between Manila, Acapulco, Veracruz, and Cádiz served as a financial, political, and cultural lifeline linking Manila through to the Iberian Peninsula, via New Spain and the Caribbean shipping routes. Colonial, missionary, and musical practices in use in New Spain and the rest of Spanish America were also transplanted to the Philippines along with such musical commodities as instruments, sheet music, and theoretical treatises.

Colonial Counterpoint is divided into three main parts, each of which draws on musical concepts to describe the encounter between cultures. The first, “Contrapuntal Cultures,” examines the importance of Manila as a global city and its role in intercultural exchange. As in the Americas, missionaries used music as a tool of evangelism and Europeanization, but also sought to understand the indigenous populations of the Philippines through a careful study of their culture, including music. The picture that emerges of Manila during the early colonial period is one of extreme musical diversity, especially because its population—consisting of indigenous Philippine ethnicities and peninsular Spaniards; immigrants from New Spain including criollos, indigenous peoples, mestizos, and people of African descent; as well as Chinese and Japanese—represented so many distinct musical cultures.

Chapters 3–5, “Enharmonic Engagement,” make up the second part of the book. These chapters use the circle of fifths and the concept of enharmonic equivalency as metaphors for the spread of European musical styles in the Philippines and the development of syncretic genres such as the auit, loa, and pasyon. Irving convincingly details the ways in which Europeans mapped indigenous musical cultures onto their own interpretive structures, frequently derived from European classical antiquity and the Spanish experience with the Moors. On the other hand, his insistent use of musical theoretical terms as metaphors sometimes results in the stretching and layering of those metaphors to the point of awkwardness, such as when he writes that “Spaniards and Filipinos gradually tempered their cultural systems to incorporate an understanding of the other and locate a point of enharmonic interchange: their cultures modulated” (100).

In “Strict Counterpoint,” the final part of the book consisting of chapters 6–8, Irving compares political and ecclesiastical control to the enforcement of contrapuntal rules in early modern European music (157). Scholars familiar with music in the Americas during this period will be particularly interested in chapter 6, “Cathedrals, Convents, Churches, and Chapels,” which reveals parallels but also interesting differences between these institutions in the Philippines and their counterparts in Spain and Spanish America. In this section the author develops the concept of counterpoint in such a way as to argue that Filipinos used European musical styles as a means for inversion and subversion of authority. That is, whereas mastery by Filipinos of European-imposed musical practices reinforced Spanish colonialism, the appropriation and reinterpretation of those practices also allowed Filipinos to exercise a degree of self-expression, subversion, and protest that challenged that same colonialism in contrapuntal opposition. Although Irving's observations about the cultural dynamics (which are similar to those at work in the Andean context described by Baker) are undoubtedly on target, the metaphor of counterpoint may strike musicians as not particularly apt, given that they tend to think of contrapuntal “opposition” as characterized by cooperation and harmony rather than subversion and hostility.

Like Baker's study, Irving's Colonial Counterpoint tends to deal with music as process and cultural artifact rather than sonic event; multiple wars and natural disasters have left the scholar of Philippine colonial-era music with considerably fewer musical or documentary sources than those available in various Latin American archives. Irving's “reading between (and beyond) the lines” is thus sometimes as much a matter of necessity as of choice, as is the case with the sources Baker uses to draw inferences about the pueblos de indios outside the city of Cuzco. Nonetheless, Irving's work is an important one, shedding light on the musical culture of early modern Manila and the Philippines. Both it and Baker's Imposing Harmony represent significant contributions to an understanding of the role of music as part of colonial processes and relationships throughout the Spanish Empire.