Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

This book makes an outstanding contribution to the music history of colonial Latin America from a perspective — urban and social — that in the Hispanic world has not received the attention it deserves. Previous versions of some chapters have been published as articles, but this volume presents for the first time an integrated vision of musical activity in Cuzco, the old capital of the Inca Empire, which had a predominantly indigenous population during the colonial period. The book, dealing mostly with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, begins with a chapter devoted to the urban sound-scape (with particular attention to the role of bells, processions, and domestic music), followed by a chapter about the Cathedral and the Seminario de San Antonio Abad (institutions whose music began to be studied by Robert Stevenson and Samuel Claro Valdés). The remaining three chapters discuss convents and monasteries, urban parishes, and rural Indian parishes. The book’s structure has some parallels with the classic Music in Late Medieval Bruges by Reinhard Strohm (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, rev. in 1999), but Baker does not discuss the music. He states that “focusing on musical practices rather than on musical works, we are better able to demonstrate the central role of music in colonial society, and thereby to combat any temptation to relegate cultural activities to the margins of historical inquiry” (p. 9). Notwithstanding the limitations of Cuzco Cathedral’s sources and the difficulty of access to them, the author utilizes a wide variety of administrative and legal sources from archives in Cuzco (Archivo Arzobispal, Archivo Departamental), Lima (Biblioteca Nacional del Perú, Archivo Arzobispal, Archivo General de la Nación), and Seville (Archivo General de Indias).One of the most original contributions in this book is the study of the unceasing musical activity in the eight Indian parishes surrounding Cuzco Cathedral and in the doctrinas de indios or Indian rural parishes of the Cuzco diocese. Numerous confraternities established in the parishes fostered performances by indigenous musicians, whose repertory included European polyphony as well as pieces related to Andean tradition. Parish musicians usually belonged to these confraternities. Following pre-Hispanic traditions, they received part of their salary not in cash but in kind and sometimes worked for free as a form of contribution to the community. By controlling parish music, the leading Andeans could promote their own interests, maintaining their preeminent position within the colonial social hierarchy. Thus “the development of European-derived music in indigenous parishes cannot, then, be slotted into a vision of colonial power relations based on the polarities of ‘Spanish domination’ and ‘Andean resistance’. There is ample evidence that its adoption was negotiated rather than straightforwardly imposed” (p. 236).A peculiarity in Cuzco was the scarcity of cathedral prebends for musicians. For this reason the cathedral music chapel depended upon local musicians (particularly singers) trained at the Seminario de San Antonio Abad. There were some Indian cantores (singers) who worked at the Cathedral, but Baker suggests that in this case the term referred to instrumentalists. It should be pointed out, however, that musicians were not always local, and that there must have been a certain degree of mobility, as suggested by the fact that the important composer Gutierre Fernández Hidalgo (not mentioned in Baker’s book) was chapelmaster at Cuzco after having served in other Spanish and American cathedrals. According to Baker, the Spanish model, with “a dominant cathedral capilla de música surrounded by weaker, dependent institutions,” was very different from the one in Cuzco, “where many churches strove for a high degree of musical self-sufficiency and no single group dominated the city’s musical life” (p. 88). This comparison, though, is somewhat adventurous, since studies are lacking about Spanish musical institutions other than cathedrals. Particularly relevant in this book is Baker’s study of women’s participation in performances (sometimes of challenging polyphonic works) at the Cuzco convents, and the importance of Indian women for the music performed in beaterios, in contrast to the apparently lesser musical splendor of performances in male monasteries, even though the latter were open to the participation of Indian musicians and others from the Cathedral and the Seminario.In the last section of the book, “Negotiating Harmony,” Baker proposes an idea documented several times throughout the volume: “To a large extent, it was indigenous elites who enabled the propagation of European music in the hemisphere” (p. 248). Since this is such an important statement, perhaps Negotiating Harmony (instead of Imposing Harmony) would have been another appropriate title for this most attractive book. Baker’s agile prose presents a vivid narrative of interest to both musicologists and historians, placing Cuzco on the map of Spanish and Latin American music history during the Modern Age.