Friday, August 2, 2013

The Bishop's Band Performs Colonial-Era Peruvian Music

By Tom Zajac

An international band of singers, musicians, and dancers performed music from an eighteenth-century Peruvian codex.

In April, the Bishop's Band played eighteenth-century music from Peru at the Hispanic Society as part of Americas Society's spring music program.

Now held in the Royal Library in Madrid, the Codex Trujillo del Peru is a set of songs and dances in a nine-volume collection of watercolor paintings. Mostly of flora and fauna images, it was presented to King Charles IV of Spain in the late 1780s by then Bishop of Trujillo Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón. The collection is the end result of a 32-month visita, or official journey that the bishop undertook through the grasslands, deserts, mountains, rainforests, and coastal plains surrounding Trujillo in his efforts to understand the people, geography, and resources of these regions. Volume II of the collection is devoted to portraits of people of all social strata, and includes paintings of dancers in colorful costumes and instrumentalists playing European violins, guitars, harps, bandolas, pipes, and tabors, as well as a number of indigenous and African wind and percussion instruments. Adjacent to these vibrant images in the manuscript are the scores of twenty pieces of music written in elegant classical-era hand. Each piece has a title that gives the form and a description (e.g., Tonada El Diamante or Tonada of the diamond) along with information about whether it is to be sung, or danced, or both, and often the name of the town where it was collected. The subject matter of the vocal pieces varies greatly; there are love songs, a sailors’ song, a song of penitence in a near extinct native language, a song in the voice of an African slave decrying his condition, and a devotional song to the Virgin Mary. Just as the paintings depict local customs, these musical works are transcriptions of what was heard by the bishop’s company in their travels and thus give a wonderful and rare snapshot of the traditions of late-eighteenth-century colonial music-making.

The Bishop's Band performs "Bayle del Chimo" (Robin Gilbert Campos, dancer) The collection is best described as an early ethno-musicological gathering of local songs and dances. One could imagine if the bishop were on his visit in the early twentieth century instead of the late-eighteenth century, he would have had a camera with him instead of an artist’s sketchbook and a cylinder or disk recorder with him to document the music, just as Bela Bartok did in his explorations of the Balkans, or John and Alan Lomax did on their journeys in the southern United States. The codex provides an incredibly rare opportunity to hear, frozen in time, a moment in the development of a regional music as it makes its way from the raw ingredients of European, African, and indigenous styles, to the true melding or “creolization” now thought of as Andean or Peruvian music. The program at Americas Society featured three sets of Bolivian music from very high art to simple folk art. In the first half, the audience heard three charming songs in the Canichanas Indian language from what was then the Bolivian Amazon. The texts welcome a visiting dignitary, the governor of the territories, who is traveling to announce and celebrate the coronation of Spanish King Carlos IV. At the beginning of the second half, the performers played three sacred villancicos from the Cathedral of La Plata, in what is now the modern city of Sucre. Although little is know about Roque Jacinto Chavarría, it is clear he was a student of Juan de Araujo, the greatest composer in South America at the turn of the eighteenth century. His two villancicos set beautiful poems full of vivid imagery.  [[nid:50102]]   Roque Ceruti came to the new world from Milan and helped to popularize the Italianate style that dominated Latin American music at the end of the eighteenth century. He worked in Trujillo and La Plata before receiving an appointment at the cathedral in Lima. His Según veo el aparato is a delightful and virtuosic Christmas villancico for two sopranos and two violins, with a celebratory chorus and chatty, breathless verses telling an atypical tale of Joseph and Mary. Immediately following, the audience heard a diverse selection of instrumental and vocal pieces of a more popular nature from a collection called the Moxos archives from another Jesuit mission in what is now northeastern Bolivia. This set included a beautiful classical violin duet, a haunting Christmas lullaby, and a pair of negrillas, folksy villancicos in pseudo-imitation of the music and words of the African slaves.

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The Bishop's Band Performs Colonial-Era Peruvian Music

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