My fourth book project concerns the teaching of music theory in eighteenth-century Jesuit missions among the Chiquitano Indigenous people. Located in what was then the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru––now eastern Bolivia––rural Jesuit missions fostered vibrant communities of choral and orchestral performance. Unlike the heavy Spanish counterpoint practiced in the cathedrals of colonial cities such as Lima or La Paz, mission music was characterized by a lighter, galant sound. This transparent and elegant style constituted a mixture of Italian, German, and French musical influences. Perhaps most significant is the ample evidence of Indigenous musical leadership in the missions. Local systems of apprenticeship trained Indigenous musicians in instrument building, singing, solfège, conducting, and composition. Their works, persevered in the Archivo Musical de Chiquitos in Concepción, include several large-scale operas and liturgical compositions written entirely in the Chiquitano language and attributed to teams of Indigenous composers.
In “Colonial Galant: Three Analytical Perspectives from the Chiquitano Missions,” (forthcoming in the Journal of the American Musicological Society 75/1 (Spring 2022)) I suggest how the tools of music analysis can help us better to understand the textures of New World colonial encounter. In this article I am specifically interested in the pedagogy of the galant style, asking how its streamlined simplicity, characteristic homophony, and simple melodic imitations contributed to an effective system of aesthetic imperialism. Here I am inspired by Kofi Agawu, who has demonstrated how tonality itself was a tool of colonialism in Africa.[1] The article shows how music analysis can aid in examining various forms of social behavior in the missions, such as the structure of music pedagogy and the group dynamics of public spectacle. In this, I aim to explain how the galant style helped to produce colonial subjects among the Indigenous population, and also to seduce them into a system of its own reproduction. Ultimately, the article provides a historiographical re-framing of the European galant style.
Solfège, or training in musical literacy, was another foundational element of music theory pedagogy in the Chiquitano missions. In “Teaching Music Theory in Colonial Chiquitania,” (forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory, ed. Daniel Jenkins), I take a close look at the evidence for a truly unique system of solfège that circulated through these eighteenth-century missions. I also draw this colonial adaptation of solfège into comparison with what we today call “public music theory”; both are attempts to reappropriate music theory’s systems and methods in order to create a literate musical public. Sounding a warning to the recent ebullient discourse which seeks to grow music theory’s audience, I argue that it was public music theory that erased Indigenous musicality in colonial Chiquitania.
These two essays represent the beginnings of a larger book project on music making in colonial Chiquitania. In the broader scope of the book, I’m interested not so much in how the context of colonialism shaped music theory, but in how music theory animated and gave form to colonial power. The book makes interventions, therefore, into both the history of music theory and in postcolonial theory, asking what these two fields might yet have to teach each other.
[1] Kofi Agawu, “Tonality as a Colonizing Force in Africa,” in Audible Empire, ed. Ronald Rodano and Tejumola Olaniyan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 334–355.