Studies about the music of Latin America and Spain from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries have focused most particularly on cathedral music, and in comparison mission music—the theme of the two books under consideration—has been neglected or underestimated until very recently.Footnote 1 These two books constitute a very substantial contribution to our knowledge about the music and musical activities on the northern frontier of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. This territory was under Spanish rule from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries; from 1821 to 1848 it formed the northern area of newly independent Mexico, and much of this territory has been a part of the U.S. Southwest since 1848.
Craig H. Russell's From Serra to Sancho: Music and Pageantry in the California Missions studies the music in the Franciscan missions in Alta California (the modern-day state of California), with an emphasis on the period between 1769 (when the San Diego Mission was founded by friar Junípero Serra) and 1848 (when California passed from Mexican to U.S. control). Russell recognizes the contributions made by previous scholars, among them William Summers and John Koegel, and rejects the idea of mission life represented in “the two extremes of California-as-paradise versus California-as-prison” construction. He prefers “more three-dimensional” historical approaches (11), such as those formulated by Robert L. Hoover and Samuel Edgerton, agreeing with the latter that “life and religious practice were negotiated [. . .] between the Franciscans and the Indians and were not a simple dictatorial mandate from Spain to its colonies” (12). For Russell, this approach plays out well when examining music in early California, because “If the intent of the missions was one primarily of subjugation or annihilation, it would make little sense to spend enormous effort building up choirs and orchestras at the various missions” (12). Russell addresses his study not only to scholars, but also to “enthused amateur sleuths,” as well as performers and conductors. He hopes that his book will help correct inadequate views of mission life in public school textbooks, and will remind readers that “American culture came to us not only from the eastern seaboard, but from Mexico and Spain as well” (18).Footnote 2
Russell's book “intends to row up both those rivers that [the late pioneering musicologist Robert] Stevenson sets before us—the biographical and the musical,” that is, “the Tigris and Euphrates of musicological fieldwork” (13). Russell centers the biographical aspect in the life of Franciscan friar Juan Bautista Sancho (1772?–1830), from Artà in Mallorca, Spain (his detailed biography occupies most of chapter 5) and, to a lesser extent, the lives of Junípero Serra and other Spanish friar musicians such as Narciso Durán, Florencio Ibáñez, Estevan Tapís, Pedro Cabot, and Felipe Arroyo de la Cuesta. In chapter 7, Russell also gives us the most complete biography currently available of Ignacio Jerusalem (1707–69), the Italian composer, active in Mexico City after 1743, whose music is represented in two California mission archives (Santa Barbara and San Fernando).
But the music itself has even more weight than biographies in this volume, because music is discussed in all seven chapters. Russell addresses styles in California mission music (chapter 1), and notation and music theory (chapter 2). He covers the different genres and works performed at the missions, especially the Veni Creator Spiritus, Salve, Te Deum, Alabado, and Alba (chapter 3); and the Gozos, pieces for Corpus Christi, Dies irae and the Veni Sancte Spiritus (chapter 4). He examines masses composed by Juan Bautista Sancho (chapter 5); and other masses in different styles and for specific occasions, including the Misa de Cataluña and the Misa Viscaína, the latter previously attributed both to the Catalan friar Narciso Durán and to the Basque friar Martín de Cruzelaegui (chapter 6). And Russell discusses the classic-style masses for voices and orchestra by Ignacio Jerusalem and Francisco Javier García Fajer preserved in the Alta California missions (chapter 7). Most impressive in this volume is the thorough identification, reconstruction, edition, and critical and contextual study of extant musical sources from late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century California.
Russell synthesizes the knowledge and information he has accumulated during years of research in many archives, in the United States, Mexico, and Spain, and he reveals an impressive command of a wide and specialized bibliography, not only about the California missions and their music, but also about the music performed at the time throughout Latin America and peninsular Spain. The author translates many Spanish documents into English, always providing quotations in the original language. Illustrated with many photos and musical examples, the book also includes numerous footnotes that often provide critical revisions of previous literature about issues discussed in the main text.
The appendices, available online, are an invaluable complement to the volume, and include a detailed catalogue of California mission music, photographs of missions and mission music sources, complete texts of primary documents, and musical editions of twelve works (four by Juan Bautista Sancho and two by Ignacio Jerusalem, and six anonymous works). Russell, also a performer and composer, reconstructs missing parts and supplies chordal accompaniments when necessary, accommodating the editorial additions to the appropriate style, and providing practical scores to facilitate effective performances. His editorial intervention goes far beyond what could be expected of a typical critical edition, but Russell includes many photographs of the original sources, allowing the reader to see the kinds of changes and additions he has made.
Almost all of the California mission music sources are vocal in nature, and very little instrumental music survives, although it was regularly practiced there, as the surviving archival documentation indicates. As a guitarist himself, Russell probably wishes to understand better the role of this instrument in early California, and he affirms that “the guitar and harp combination was [. . .] a defining element of Spanish style” and that harps and guitars “were seen in sacred performance as well as in secular settings” (47). However, the guitar was not a common instrument in ecclesiastical music chapels, at least during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in peninsular Spain or in cathedrals in New Spain. Therefore, if in Spanish and Mexican California such a combination of instruments was used in a sacred context in mission churches, it would have been a local performance practice.
In a book of this magnitude, it is not unusual that some minor details stand correction. For example, in a letter of 1806 written by friar Narciso Durán, Russell identifies a musician named “Bails” with the composer “Francesc Valls” (48, 73n98, and appendix C-2, letter 2). However, “Bails” should be identified instead as the Catalan theorist Benito Bails (1743–97), author of the Lecciones de clave, y principios de harmonía (Madrid, 1775), precisely the work cited (as “Lecciones de clave”) in Durán's letter. Russell's engaging and didactic writing style includes some informal and humorous comparisons that might sound strange to readers, as when he compares the Mass Ordinary with “a pair of tube socks in a sporting goods store” advertising “one size fits all” (299), or when he defines the structure of a Gloria “as a sort of symmetrical club sandwich” (373).
Russell makes a great effort to compare California mission music with well-known works by European composers. For example, he compares the reforms in sacred music attributed to García Fajer to those of Gluck in opera (351). He places fragments of masses by Jerusalem side by side with excerpts from Beethoven's Symphonies nos. 5, 6, and 9 (365–66, 370). And he finds the orchestration of masses by Jerusalem and García Fajer “reminiscent of Joseph Haydn” (272). Even though these comparisons may not be entirely convincing, they show Russell's effort to transmit to a general readership his enthusiasm about the quality of mission music and composers whose works are rarely performed.
Craig Russell's From Serra to Sancho is a milestone in the historiography of mission music, and many scholars and performers will return to it frequently after the first reading. This outstanding study will be welcomed not only by readers interested in the early music history of the United States and Mexico, but also by scholars and performers on both sides of the Atlantic. Russell's study of singing styles and notation in California, for example, brings new light to the concepts and practices of canto llano (plainchant), canto de órgano (polyphony), and canto figurado (homophonic part-singing) present in cathedrals and other churches throughout Spain and Latin America. Russell traces relevant musical connections between Franciscan friars from diverse Spanish regions and the Alta California missions, showing a transatlantic musical exchange that was very different from the better-known ways of music circulation among cathedrals in the Hispanic world.
The second book under consideration, Kristin Dutcher Mann's The Power of Song: Music and Dance in the Mission Communities of Northern New Spain, 1590–1810, examines the use of sacred music and dance in the Franciscan and Jesuit missions throughout the entire northern frontier region of New Spain, from the foundation of the first missions there in the late sixteenth century until the end of Spanish colonial rule in the early nineteenth century. Almost no musical sources from this very large geographic region survive other than those from the California missions, and Mann does not study the music itself. Rather, she examines the uses and functions of music and dance in mission communities.
The structure of the book is clear, with an introduction that includes a useful revision of previous literature on mission life, followed by three large parts. Part I describes the musical traditions of indigenous peoples, based primarily on Spanish documentary sources (chapter 1), and those of Europeans settlers before their encounter with native peoples (chapter 2). Part II studies the chronological evolution of mission music from first encounter (chapter 3), up to the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 (chapter 4), and later during the post-Jesuit period, 1768–1810 (chapter 5). (Mann ends her coverage in 1810 at the onset of the Mexican war of independence, whereas Russell continues his narrative well into the Mexican period in Alta California, into the 1840s.) Part III has a thematic focus, studying musical activity in the restructuring of time (chapter 6) and in the restructuring of physical and social space (chapter 7). The book includes two maps with indigenous groups and major areas of evangelization in northern New Spain indicated. It would have been useful, however, to also have a map with the main missions highlighted, as well as an appendix listing the missions and missionaries cited in the volume.
Much of the documentary information in Mann's book has been collected from official reports (of missionaries and from the visits of church and civic officials), letters, diaries, inventories, and supply requests, which Mann consulted in archives in Mexico and the United States, as well as in the recent scholarly literature. The documentary sources she uses are not discussed nor described specifically, although there is a brief mention of them (84n48). The quotations of original texts are always in English, with no mention of the original language. Mann is aware of the “pictures of ideal mission life” presented in the official missionary reports and correspondence, and of the lack of alternative accounts from indigenous perspectives (258).
Following the “new mission history,” Mann is interested in exploring “the reactions to Spanish attempts to impose colonial rule” (7). She insists many times and in different ways on the importance of music and dance not only as tools for evangelization and teaching, but also as a way to create collective identities, to control communities, and to encourage communication between groups. Aided by a rich bibliography in English about general history, anthropology, and ethnography, Mann connects mission music with the daily lives of indigenous populations and the dynamic changes occurring therein, showing the essential role of music both for the missionary agenda and for indigenous peoples with their diverse reactions of adaptation, integration, resistance, or revolt.
Compelling sections of the book include those devoted to “restructuring gendered space” (224–32) and indigenous responses to the use of music in the missions (95–98, 243–51). Mann shows that women served as temastianas (catechism teachers) and cantoras (singing leaders) in Franciscan and Jesuit missions in Sonora, Nueva Vizcaya, Baja California, Texas, and New Mexico (the Franciscan missions of Alta California were an exception to this rule). She concludes that “in northern New Spain, women had more latitude to participate in the liturgy than their indigenous, mestizo, and Spanish counterparts in both New Spain and Europe” (229). According to Mann, “ethnogenesis, or the continual re-creation of culture under colonial rule, was a common reaction” for indigenous people (244), and she demonstrates how many aspects of their original music and dances were integrated into Christian festivities. Mann also cites examples of music involved in Indian revolts, and mentions cases of the “sabotaging [of] the religious music” by mocking liturgy and devotional songs (246–47).
From the musical point of view, chapter 2 is problematic because Mann's relatively brief summary of religious music in Europe from 1500 to 1800 is based partly on a general, outdated bibliography. Although as a historian she is to be commended for outlining the history of European sacred music as it relates to this large geographic and political area, especially because very few historians of the colonial era in the U.S. Southwest or northern New Spain have ever discussed music in their publications, this chapter nevertheless includes some inaccuracies and incorrect statements. It is difficult to accept, for example, that “Until [the] Second Vatican Council in the twentieth century, Roman Catholic liturgy changed little from the practices of the thirteenth-century Church” (45); or that in the late Renaissance “Unadorned chant, while still used in worship, was replaced in royal chapels and cathedrals with part-singing” (49). Mann states that villancicos were “based on popular tunes with dance-like rhythms” (51), although these features were not the general rule. She also believes that in the Counter-Reformation, “musical instruments, such as the harp and guitar, that were associated with pagan music, were excluded from Catholic worship” (52)—a statement she bases on Tridentine rules, but certainly not on the evidence of music chapels performing in sacred spaces, which usually had a harpist in Spanish domains after Trent. (The author herself mentions the use of harp in the missions on page 85.)
The literature cited by Mann about music in general and music in Spain and Latin America in particular is very limited. For example, when discussing features of the villancico (51), she does not mention the collection of essays edited by Tess Knighton and Álvaro Torrente, published in 2007,Footnote 3 nor does she cite the basic reference work on Spanish and Latin American music, the Diccionario de la Música Española e Hispanoamericana.Footnote 4 Spanish terms such as requerimiento, cabecera, doctrina, visita, ramada, or repartimiento are not explained, and others are defined only after having been used several times without explanation. For example, the New Mexican kiva is not defined until page 219, as “places where sacred Puebloan rites took place,” though the term had appeared previously on pages 67, 93, 98, and 113.
Trying to delineate the “differences in Franciscan and Jesuit evangelization” (126–29), Mann suggests that “Jesuits tended to sing hymns and devotional songs in Latin, or translate them into indigenous languages, while Franciscans such as [Antonio] Margil composed hymns in their vernacular Spanish language” (127). As seen in Craig Russell's book, Franciscans in Alta California also used music in Latin profusely, and Mann does not present evidence to the contrary for other Franciscan missions. Therefore, her attempt to differentiate the use of languages in sacred music between these two religious orders in northern New Spain does not work, at least with the information she discusses.
These problematic details aside, the rich potential of ideas brought together in Mann's book opens new vistas in our understanding of mission music that can also be applied to other missionary territories throughout Latin America, and it would be worthwhile to connect the information she presents with the specialized literature on other Latin American missions, such as the Jesuit establishments in Bolivia.
The books by Russell and Mann, although very different in scope, content, and methodology, will help integrate mission music into current historical and musicological discussions, and these two books have advanced exponentially our knowledge of musical activity in northern New Spain. Hopefully, future general histories of music will not forget this rich cultural heritage that is equally relevant to the musical histories of the United States, Mexico, Latin America, and Spain.
