5. Music in the Jesuit missions of the Upper Marañón

Leonardo Waisman

The 30 Guaraní pueblos of the province of Paraguay have always been the darlings of music historians of the Jesuit missions. From Muratori’s idealising panegyrics in the 18th century to the historiographic and musicological production of the 20th, the expressions of praise and awe at the musical achievements of the Amerindians guided and trained by a handful of priests have formed a continuous and unanimous chain of acclaim.¹ The appearance in the 1980s of the considerable collections of musical partbooks preserved by aboriginal communities in Chiquitos and Moxos has only widened the focus, without displacing it. Chiquitos, of course, belonged to the Jesuit province of Paraguay, although in historiography it had always played second fiddle to the Guaraní region.² Moxos, missionised from Lima in the province of Peru and neighbour to Chiquitos, shared the larger part of its musical repertory – although, as this author has remarked elsewhere, it developed some differential traits.³ In these three networks of towns (usually referred to as reducciones, that is, settlements where the natives were ‘reduced’ or disciplined to European lifestyle and religion) the missionaries succeeded in establishing flourishing musical practices, inspired by and adapted to the requirements of the divine services with their daily, weekly and yearly cycles. Although music-making was widespread in the missions, comprising informal instrumental groups for entertainment and more institutionalised ensembles for feasts and receptions, pride of place belonged to the semi-professional musical chapel of each pueblo, conducted by a chapel master and consisting of some forty singers and instrumentalists who played European-style music on instruments they had built themselves. Daily mass was accompanied by this chorus and orchestra, whose prowess was celebrated in neighbouring Spanish cities whenever they undertook ‘artistic tours’, calculated to impress dwellers of centres with much poorer musical forces.⁴ A good measure of the accomplishments of these musicians, initially taught by Jesuit musicians but with the practice later sustained by chains of Amerindian teachers and students, is a cycle of so-called Ofertorios for insertion into the mass (that is, not belonging to the mass itself, but intended as an enhancement of its rites) preserved in manuscript in the Archivo Musical de Chiquitos.⁵ The cycle contains over eighty pieces, ranging from single songs with basso-continuo accompaniment to full Psalms deploying virtuoso solo singers, massive choirs and brilliant orchestral passages.

In recent years musicologists and other scholars have begun to tackle other mission areas in Iberian America: V. Rondón has researched the so-called ‘Araucanía’ (Southern Chile);⁶ M. Holler and P. Castagna the settlements under the Portuguese Crown;⁷ E. Bermúdez and D. Farley the missions in the Orinoco Basin;⁸ and K. D. Mann those of New Spain (present-day Mexico and the southern USA).⁹ The picture which emerges from these studies can explain (though not justify) the discrimination in favour of Paraguay. To start with, the almost complete lack of musical scores preserved in those areas constitutes a signal discouragement to researchers in a discipline traditionally centred on musical works which has often had the objective of restoring music of the past to current musical practice. In addition, and more to the point, it emerges that in none of the regions studied hitherto had the practice of European music reached the richness of media and resources or the level of stability it enjoyed in that frontier area between the Spanish and Portuguese empires, where the Guaraní and later the Chiquito and the Moxo were taught and trained by the Society of Jesus. Nevertheless, the knowledge gained about these musical cultures, less distinguished from a European point of view, has allowed a comparative perspective which illuminates better the achievements and failures of the Jesuits in the establishment of western musical practices.¹⁰

The wave of exploration of the Jesuit efforts in different geographical and institutional locations, however, has not included the study of their actions and achievements in the Audiencia de Quito, known as Misiones del Marañón, missions of the upper Amazon, or Misiones de Mainas (Maynas), located in present-day territories of Ecuador, Peru and, for a short period, Brazil. In these tropical forest lands, the men of the Society of Jesus endeavoured to ‘civilise’ and convert to Christianity a variety of ethnic groups, such as the Jíbaro or Shuar, the Cocama, the Omagua, the Encabellado and the Yameo. In successive and somewhat discontinuous waves starting in 1639, they advanced downstream along several tributaries of the Amazon river, establishing villages, some of which survived and flourished for decades; many others were soon abandoned by their inhabitants, decimated by disease, or raided by the neighbouring Portuguese. In fact, the large-scale advance towards the middle course of the Amazon successfully undertaken by the Bohemian Jesuit Samuel Fritz was frustrated in 1710 by a Portuguese fleet which established the limits between the two empires at the juncture of the Yavarí and Amazon rivers – still today the border between Brazil and Peru. The closest Spanish settlements were the small city of San Francisco de Borja on the Marañón river and Lamas on the Mayo river (affluent of the Huallaga); the capital of the missions was established at La Laguna, on the last-mentioned river, a town with 1,000 inhabitants in 1735. Figures 5.1–5.2 represent the central area of the Jesuits’ efforts in these lands, in maps drawn by two of the missionaries, Juan Magnin and Samuel Fritz. The later fate of these reducciones was not happy: by the time of the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spanish lands (1767) only a few were well established and prosperous and after few decades even these had been deserted.

As usual with mission history, the main sources for study are the writings of the missionaries themselves, mostly in the form of edifying letters sent from their American stations or memories, descriptions and histories written mostly in Europe after their expulsion in 1768.¹¹ In the case of Mainas, one must add the useful and extensive compilation of information from writings of the former missionaries and conversations maintained with the exiles put together in Plasencia by the Jesuit José de Chantre y Herrera in the 1780s; and an ample section on the missions in Juan de Velasco’s History of Quito (1789).

Figure 5.1. Cours du fleuve Maragnon, autrement dit des Amazones par le P. Samuel Fritz, Missionnaire de la Compagnie de Jésus. Author Samuel Fritz (1656–1725). (Courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France).

Reading the accounts of the European protagonists of the missionary adventure one receives images of a harsh history: the project never outgrew the heroic phase, which among the Guaraní, the Moxo and the Chiquito lasted only a few decades. Page after page of these reports describes encounters with previously unknown ethnic groups, the founding of new villages and news about Amerindian groups deemed ripe for evangelisation but not yet Christianised. Mingled with these indicators of Jesuit hopes there are equally abundant stories of violence and destruction: clashes with ‘pagan nations’ and with Portuguese expeditions; countless rebellions by the aborigines dwelling within their system. Moreover, always hovering around was the menace of epidemics which decimated populations and often meant the complete disappearance of entire ethnic groups.¹² Few passages reveal the degree of stability which in other areas permitted the flourishing of European-style musical practices.

Amidst these unpromising circumstances, nevertheless, music was heard. Early on, the repertoire and resources were meagre. When in 1645 the Spanish Governor of Mainas province, Juan Antonio de Toledo, visited the northern outposts of the Jesuit project on the Napo River in order to formalise the natives’ subjection to the crown, he conducted veritable ceremonies of homage, complete with the oath of fealty of medieval tradition. The music for these symbolic rites was mostly provided by a few military drummers and fifers (cajas y pífanos), who travelled with the escort of the official and provided a continuous background of sound, only interrupted during the formal, archaic and exotic (for America) speeches in which the governor offered protection and the caciques swore loyalty. At the very end of these lengthy ceremonies the missionary led the entire assembly in singing the Alabado ‘according to their custom, instead of the Te Deum laudamus’.¹³ A Te Deum was prescribed for such a state ceremony in all Catholic countries; if the natives sang the Spanish praise of the Sacrament it was because it was the only liturgical item they knew: it was the earliest and most widespread song in all the Jesuits’ American missions.¹⁴

At the project’s very inception, father superior Gaspar Cujía established in the nearby city of Borja a kind of seminary for indigenous children:

In one of the many cases in which Jesuit chroniclers partially contradict each other, Franz Xaver Veigl, a veteran with 15 years in the missions, dismisses the usefulness of the centralised seminary, which he brands as ‘only a wish[:] the missionaries had no other resources than to make their own houses function concurrently as seedbeds [or seminaries]’, housing some orphans, some of the sons of the caciques and some children captured from ‘wild’ nations for their education and training.¹⁶ Testimonies as to the usefulness of these locally trained children abound. During the 1750s, in the town of Jesús on the Napo river, under the administration of Father Manuel Uriarte:

The villages being, as a rule, less stable, more numerous and smaller than those in other mission areas (averaging fewer than five hundred souls), there were never enough priests to attend to their spiritual and corporeal welfare. The boys who had lived or still lived with the Jesuit served as substitutes when he left to visit other settlements or to recruit more converts. The following passage, which refers to Father Francisco Real, is representative:

References to musical practices contained in the accounts by the missionaries seem to indicate, beyond their justified pride in the accomplishments of ‘their’ neophytes, that in the vast majority of cases they were describing monophonic singing, with or without instrumental accompaniment. The genre most often mentioned is that of coplas or coplillas in Spanish, Quechua, or a local tongue. By way of examples, we may point to Chantre y Herrera’s description of daily life, which included evening singing, by the children, of ‘several coplitas of the Four Last Things, of the Lord’s Passion and of the Sorrows of the Blessed Mary, sung by turns [on different days]’; or to Uriarte’s laudatory remarks concerning old Andrés Yabaguera, who ‘died in my arms … singing all the sacred coplillas that he knew and had taught’.¹⁹ In these, the verbal information conveyed seems to have been far more important than the musical expression of devotion.²⁰ One religious text which shows up repeatedly, often in conjunction with a harp accompaniment, is that of the Litanies of Loreto. Since that prayer is structured as a long series of similar versicles, each answered by a ‘choral’ response, and since the use of learned polyphony seems to have been scarce, we can imagine performances based on a slightly variable melodic formula supported by a simple harmonic accompaniment, in the manner of the medieval Spanish romances and chansons de geste.

The scarcity of resources for European-style music is evident everywhere: for example, in the use of bobonas to summon the people to the central square.²¹ A key function in the endeavour to ‘civilise’ the natives, disciplining their sense of temporality and space, entrusted to bells, snare-drums (cajas) and shawms (woodwind instruments) throughout the Spanish colonies (and certainly in Jesuit Paraguay), was here assigned to locally developed instruments, built from locally available materials with local know-how. This, of course, is also a strong witness to the continued persistence of indigenous musical practices, less evident (although not totally lacking) in the Guaraní settlements.

A request made by the missionary Johann Baptist Julian in 1724 may reveal a side of music-making of which we know next to nothing in any of the mission areas: ‘I await eagerly the Jew’s harps promised by Father Jacobus Albelda; if he has forgotten, please send them at the first opportunity, for our Indians are very fond of this music’.²² It seems evident that these simple instruments were used for private or small-group music-making as a form of leisure; and that the priests used them as gifts or trinkets to endear themselves to the local peoples. The significance of an emerging dependence of the natives on European artefacts even for private recreation seems noteworthy.

The organisation of systems of musical education implemented in Mainas differed somewhat from those in the better-known mission areas and presented some similarities to those employed in the embattled frontier evangelisation of New Spain. The stable music schools which functioned in each Guaraní, Chiquito and Moxo town could not be established in the upper Amazon: it was the priest himself who had to impart musical knowledge and training in the playing of instruments with whatever tools and dexterities he was equipped. In this he might be aided intermittently by temporary visits by laymen from neighbouring cities who came for other reasons but happened also to be musicians. Thus Lieutenant Romero, who in 1756 was sent to Mainas by the ruling Audiencia in Quito to preserve order in the face of some skirmishes, ‘was very skillful: he made a guitar and a violin from two large gourds with their masts and a wooden soundboard, [both of?] which he played gracefully in the evenings, and he was entertaining’.²³

The missions among the Yurimagua took advantage of the musical abilities of the persons of mixed ethnicity from the neighbouring city of Lamas and of the ‘celebrated quality of their voices’. Although they practised their trade by ear, without knowledge of ‘solfa’ [musical notation], several of these singers were invited to the Jesuit villages and put in charge of the musical education of several children, with optimal results.²⁴

Alternatively, indigenous children were sometimes sent to the cities, where they acquired the necessary training from Spanish musicians. In the reducción of San Joaquín there was a celebrated harpist who had been sent by the missionaries to Quito in order to acquire his craft.²⁵ Employing different combinations of these resources, the Jesuits managed to develop, in some of the towns and during brief periods, richer musical practices. The sinuous trajectories of these processes of constructions may be gleaned from the course of events in San Joaquín in the decade of 1750–60:

The paragraph just quoted also serves to illustrate new developments which took place during the last decades of the mission. Already at the start of the narrative, the level of European musical practices appears higher than that common in the upper Amazon in previous decades: at San Joaquín there was a chapel master, Cosme (the only chapel master I have been able to find in the texts examined). However, his chapel consisted of four singers who could read music, but rather performed from memory the Latin hymns they had been taught by the missionary and an old Amerindian. Meanwhile, two boys from the missions’ capital, La Laguna, had been sent to Lima, the vice-regal capital, to learn from professional (most probably lay) musicians how to read music and to play the harp and violin respectively. When they returned to La Laguna, Father Martín Iriarte of San Joaquín was ready for action: he had taken under his wing two youngsters from the Omagua nation²⁷ and prepared them by teaching them to read and write. He then sent them to La Laguna, where they stayed for a year as apprentices to the Lima-trained musicians. The circuit was closed when these boys went back to San Joaquín and trained some of their fellow choirboys with their newly acquired skills. The result, wrote the missionary, was fit for comparison with the musical practices of the Guaraní Jesuit missions; thus we confirm that already at that time Paraguay constituted the reference for musical excellence.

The activities of Father Iriarte point to another trait, shared by the Mainas project with the musical establishments in most Jesuit missions: the gradual (though sometimes belated) transformation of practices and repertoires following European tastes and fashions. Trained in music and fond of its practice, this Navarran priest felt a need to ‘modernise’ the instrumental ensembles accompanying the singing:

Nearing the middle of the 18th century most Spanish sacred musical establishments had made the transition from the previous century’s reliance on wind instruments (cornetts, shawms, sackbuts and dulcians) to the Italianate string ensemble. With his musical training, Iriarte seems to have achieved a change similar to that effected in Paraguay by the Tyrolean Anton Sepp 50 years before.²⁹

We should not, nonetheless, infer that music at San Joaquín was as rich as that performed in Yapeyú in Guaraníes or San Javier in Chiquitos. Instead of the 40-plus members of the leading chapels of those missions, the San Joaquín chapel numbered six, apparently all of them instrumentalists. Although at least some of them could read music, we hear nothing about the scores, copyists or written transmission which were an indispensable part of the establishment among Guaraní, Chiquito and Moxo. To help us to form some idea of the import and complexity of the practices at this late date, we can examine the paragraphs which Chantre y Herrera devotes to music. He begins with a defensive move:

It has not proved possible to find the source of such accusations in Jesuit literature concerning Mainas; perhaps these ‘some’ were outsiders. Chantre goes on to write on the efforts of Father Bernhard Zurmühlen on behalf of European church music, offering fairly precise information about the decades of the greatest flowering of those practices. This Westphalian Jesuit, whose name is usually given in Spanish as ‘Zurmillén’, spent the years between 1723 and 1726 among the Omagua and was named father superior of the Mainas missions in the 1720s; he settled in the capital of La Laguna around 1730 and died five years later. Chantre writes:

The paragraph includes several key points. On the one hand, it highlights the frailty of European musical constructions in Mainas: as soon as the father with a special commitment to music left the village, they went into decay or simply disappeared. On the other, it marks the outer limits of the level of complexity in its practices: three-voiced compositions, praised for their ‘sweetness’, ‘harmony’ and ‘good taste’. No complex counterpoint, no polychoral effects, no virtuosity – none of the sophisticated or ingenious appeal to the senses which we hear about in the Paraguay missions. Besides, it is clear that, in comparison to ‘European concerts’, the performing bodies remained far short of constituting a ‘full musical chapel’, although they could be listened to with equal pleasure.

A contrasting practice was established by a Tyrolean father, Franz Xavier Zephyris (1693/5–1769), first in the reducción of Concepción in Xeveros and then in San Regis of the Yameos, both situated in the so-called misión alta of the Marañón river (fig. 5.2). Its description suggests more colourful and sonorous performances, based on the polychoral principle: ‘[H]e introduced a choir of trumpets [clarines], cornetts [cornetines] and flutes and taught 12 boys, chosen for their good voices, to sing the Mass in two choirs; by allocating the instruments to one and the other, he succeeded in establishing a sung Mass that was applauded and celebrated by everyone who heard it, on account of its unexpectedness and of the rare accompaniment and new harmony’.³²

It is difficult to identify with accuracy the instruments employed by Father Zephyris. Chantre y Herrera does not show particular competence in music; and the arrival of real European trumpets (the standard meaning of ‘clarín’ in the 18th century) to these inaccessible villages seems rather implausible: although they were part of the instrumentarium of most towns in the more prosperous and musically rich mission areas,³³ the limited gamut of sounds produced by natural trumpets would have been of little use for the constitution of choirs to accompany children’s voices in a polychoral mode. Perhaps the reference here is to the ‘cane trumpets’ (clarín de caña) with which Father Uriarte celebrated the Resurrection in 1754 in San Joaquín.³⁴ The term cornetines is here translated as ‘cornetts’, the wooden, horn-like instruments still common in Spanish religious and civic music of the 18th century, but the term cornetas was also used by Jesuits as a synonym for bocinas, autochtonous trumpets made from a gourd and a mouthpiece of wood or cane. ‘Flutes’, of course, may refer to any flue wind-instrument, European, American or hybrid. Beyond this lack of precision, however, the text makes it clear that this ‘rare accompaniment’ bespeaks effects of liveliness, bustle and bright colours, rather than the sweetness and gentleness which characterised Zurmühlen’s projects.

Figure 5.2. Cours du fleuve Maragnon, autrement dit des Amazones par le P. Samuel Fritz, Missionnaire de la Compagnie de Jésus. Author Samuel Fritz (1656–1725).

The Tyrolean Jesuit’s achievements perhaps constitute the refinement and complementation of a practice he had found upon arrival at the missions in 1724, which he condemned in no uncertain terms: ‘The playing of our Americans comes through as not much better than a brawl of cats and a dog. It consists of wanton lyres, harps, dulcimers, out-of-tune violins and shattered (bruchhafften) trumpets, which combine with each other so beautifully that in the middle of this din it is often impossible to make out the genre of the instruments. That is, one cannot tell whether it is a string or wind instrument or whether it is bowed, blown or struck’.³⁵ This goes beyond the designation of ‘colourful’. Zephyris did not, however, neglect the more basic kind of functional music-making which formed the core of the Mainas practices: he composed a long poem in the Quechua language (which most individuals of all ethnic groups would understand) on the central topics of conversion and devotion. Each subject was set in a different poetic metre and to a particular melody; each was sung, accompanied by a distinctive set of instruments, on its appointed day: Sunday, the coplas referring to glory; Monday, those of purgatory; the following two days, those of the Four Last Things; Thursday, the Blessed Sacrament; Friday, the Passion; and Saturday those in praise of the Virgin Mary. Thus, Chantre y Herrera recalls, ‘with the sweetness of poetry and the harmony of song, the essential truths of our faith were learned, and its most distinctive devotions instilled’.³⁶

Loud and boisterous instruments had also reached the Omagua and Yurimagua areas by that time: the San Joaquín visit of the interim governor of Mainas in 1762 was greeted by ‘marches, trumpets (clarines), drums and triumphal arches’. As in Xeveros, however, the tradition of communal (monophonic) singing remained central: the parade ended with the ‘customary singing of the Alabado, with much pleasure and joy’. ³⁷

The descriptions of masses recounted by Veigl (a missionary much lauded for his musical accomplishments)³⁸ seem to merge together all the different strands of musical practice we have reported: during the first part of Sunday mass the entire community sang ‘the usual prayers in a loud voice’; later, other prayers were accompanied by violin and harp or guitar; the choir then sang the Alabado. On Saturdays and high feast days one could hear part-singing by the choir to the accompaniment of trumpets and horns – one assumes in addition to the violins and harps. This would constitute a standard small, festal European orchestra of the mid 18th century minus kettledrums (which perhaps Veigl simply neglected to mention).³⁹ Since Veigl’s description is not localised in a particular village, he may be conflating elements from different performance traditions; or, perhaps, during a few years in a few of the Mainas reducciones musical practices could dream of equalling the splendour of Paraguay.

Bibliography

Bermúdez, E. (1998) ‘La música en las misiones Jesuitas en los Llanos orientales colombianos 1725–1810’, Ensayos, 5: 143–66.

Cardiel, J. (1984) Compendio de la historia del Paraguay (Buenos Aires: Fecic).

Castagna, P. (1999) ‘The use of music by the Jesuits in the conversion of the indigenous peoples of Brazil’, in J.W. O’Malley, G.A. Bailey, S. Harris and F.T. Kennedy (eds.), The Jesuits: Culture, Science and the Arts, 1540–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), pp. 641–58.

Chantre y Herrera, J. (1901) Historia de las misiones de la Compañía de Jesús en el Marañón español [c. 1780] (Madrid: Avelai).

Figueroa, F. de (1986) ‘Informe de las misiones del Marañón’ [1661], in F. de Figueroa et al., Informes de Jesuitas en el Amazonas, 1660–1684, 143–309 (Iquitos: IIAP-CETA).

Herczog, J. (2001) Orfeo nelle Indie: I gesuiti e la musica in Paraguay (1609– 1767) (Lecce: Mario Congedo).

Holler, M. (2010) Os jesuítas e a música no Brasil colonial (Campinas: UNICAMP).

Izaguirre, B. (1922) Historia de las misiones franciscanas y narraciones de los progresos de la geografía en el oriente del Perú, vol. 9 (Lima: Talleres tipográficos de la Penitenciaria).

Jouanen, J. (1943) Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en la antigua Provincia de Quito, 1570–1774 (Quito: Ecuatoriana).

Julian, J.B. (1727) ‘Brief aus Süd-Amerika. Numerus 281’, in J. Stöcklein (ed.), Der Neue Welt-Bott mit allerhand Nachrichten deren Missionarien Soc. Iesu, vol. 11 (40 vols., Augsburg and Graz: Heirs of Philip, Martin and Johann Veith, 1726–58), p. 84.

Lange, F.C. (1986 and 1991) ‘El extrañamiento de la Compañía de Jesús del Río de la Plata (1767)’, Revista musical chilena 165: 4–58 and 176: 57–96.

Magnin, J. (1989) Breve descripción de la Provincia de Quito y de las misiones de Succumbios y de Maynas [1740] (Quito: Sociedad Ecuatoriana de Investigaciones Históricas y Geográficas).

Mann, K.D. (2010) The Power of Song: Music and Dance in the Mission Communities of Northern New Spain, 1590–1810 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).

[Maroni, P.] (1889) Noticias auténticas del famoso río Marañón y misión apostólica de la Compañía de Jesús de la provincia de Quito en los dilatados bosques de dicho río, escribíalas por los años de 1738 un misionero de la misma, ed. by M. Jiménez de la Espada (Madrid: Fortanet), http://bibliotecadigital.rah.es/dgbrah/i18n/consulta/registro.cmd?id=6150 (MS., Madrid, Academia Nacional de la Historia) [accessed 30 May 2019.

Newson, L.A. (1987) Life and Death in Early Colonial Ecuador (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press).

Patiño, V.M. (1992) Historia de la cultura material en la América equinoccial, vol. 4 (Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuevo).

Rodríguez, D.F. (2010) ‘“Y Dios se hizo música”: la conquista musical del Nuevo Reino de Granada. El caso de los pueblos de indios de las provincias de Tunja y Santafé durante el siglo XVII’, Fronteras de la Historia, 151: 13–38.

Rodríguez, M. (1684) El Marañón y Amazonas (Madrid: Antonio Gonçalez de Reyes).

Rondón, V. (1997) 19 canciones misionales en mapudúngún contenidas en el Chilidúgú (1777) del misionero jesuita en la Araucanía Bernardo de Havestadt (1714–1781) (Santiago: Revista Musical Chilena y FONDART).

Ruiz, I., G. Huseby and L.J. Waisman (1994) ‘Un panorama de la música en Chiquitos’, in P. Querejazu (ed.), Las Misiones de Chiquitos (La Paz: Fundación BHN), pp. 659–76.

Uriarte, M.J. (1952 [1774]) Diario de un misionero de Mainas, transcription, introduction and notes by C. Bayle (2 vols., Madrid: Bibliotheca Missionalia Hispanica).

Veigl, F.X. (1785) ‘Gründliche Nachrichten über die Verfassung des Landschaft von Maynas’, in Ch.G. von Murr (ed.), Reise einiger Missionarien (Nuremberg: Johann Eberhard Zeh, 1785).

Velasco, J. de (1981 [1789]) Historia del reino de Quito, ed. by A.P. Diezcanseco (Caracas: Fundación Ayacucho).

Waisman, L.J. (2002) ‘La música en las misiones de Mojos: algunos caracteres diferenciales’, in W. Sánchez (ed.), La música en Bolivia de la prehistoria a la actualidad (Cochabamba: Fundación Simón I. Patiño), pp. 529–46.

— (2004) ‘La contribución indígena a la música misional en Mojos (Bolivia)’, Memoria Americana, 12: 11–38.

— (ed.) (2015) Un ciclo musical para la misión jesuítica: Los cuadernos de ofertorios de San Rafael, Chiquitos, 2 vols. in 3 (Córdoba: Brujas).

— (forthcoming) ‘Music for an endless conversion: a cycle of offertories from Jesuit Paraguay’, in I. Fenlon and M. Laube (eds.), Sound in the Early Modern City (Turnhout: Brepols).

Zephyris, F.X. (1726–58) ‘Auszug aus 4. Briefen’ [Popayán, 1724 and Latacunga, 1725], in J. Stöcklein (ed.), Der Neue Welt-Bott mit allerhand Nachrichten deren Missionarien Soc. Iesu, vol. 11 (1727) (40 vols., Augsburg and Graz: Heirs of Philip, Martin and Johann Veith), pp. 89–95.

_____________

1 These are mostly contained in short sections on the subject within books and articles with a wider focus. The only book-length treatment is J. Herczog, Orfeo nelle Indie: I gesuiti e la musica in Paraguay (1609–1767) (Lecce: Mario Congedo, 2001).

2 For an overview of music in this mission area, see I. Ruiz, G. Huseby and L.J. Waisman, ‘Un panorama de la música en Chiquitos’, in P. Querejazu (ed.), Las misiones de Chiquitos (La Paz: Fundación BHN, 1994), pp. 659–76.

3 L.J. Waisman, ‘La música en las misiones de Mojos: algunos caracteres diferenciales’, in W. Sánchez (ed.), La música en Bolivia de la prehistoria a la actualidad (Cochabamba: Fundación Simón I. Patiño, 2002), pp. 529–46; and ‘La contribución indígena a la música misional en Mojos (Bolivia)’, Memoria Americana, 12 (2004): 11–38.

4 It must be kept in mind that these were outlying cities (Buenos Aires, Asunción, Santa Fe), not the main musical centres of Spanish settlement such as Lima (Mexico) or La Plata.

5 See the complete edition: L. Waisman (ed.), Un ciclo musical para la misión jesuítica: Los cuadernos de ofertorios de San Rafael, Chiquitos, 2 vols. in 3 (Córdoba: Brujas, 2015).

6 V. Rondón, 19 canciones misionales en mapudúngún contenidas en el Chilidúgú (1777) del misionero jesuita en la Araucanía Bernardo de Havestadt (1714–1781) (Santiago: Revista Musical Chilena y FONDART, 1997).

7 M. Holler, Os jesuítas e a música no Brasil colonial (Campinas: UNICAMP, 2010); P. Castagna, ‘The Use of Music by the Jesuits in the Conversion of the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil’, in J.W. O’Malley et al. (eds.), The Jesuits: Culture, Science and the Arts, 1540–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), pp. 641–58.

8 D.F. Rodríguez, ‘“Y Dios se hizo música”: la conquista musical del Nuevo Reino de Granada. El caso de los pueblos de indios de las provincias de Tunja y Santafé durante el siglo XVII’, Fronteras de la Historia, 15 (2010): 13–38; E. Bermúdez, ‘La música en las misiones Jesuitas en los Llanos orientales colombianos 1725–1810’, Ensayos, 5 (1998): 143–66.

9 K.D. Mann, The Power of Song: Music and Dance in the Mission Communities of Northern New Spain, 1590–1810 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).

10 It goes without saying that the Jesuit fathers did not conceive of their role as that of promoters of artistic endeavours. Nevertheless, the aesthetic enjoyment of music which transpires from some passages in the writings of Knogler, Schmid or Paucke betrays a joy which seems to indicate that musical practices, in addition to serving as a tool of evangelisation, constituted promoters their own reward.

11 For a basic bibliography of the Mainas misión see: F. de Figueroa, ‘Informe de las misiones del Marañón’ [1661], in F. de Figueroa et al., Informes de jesuitas en el Amazonas, 1660–1684 (Iquitos: IIAP-CETA, 1986), pp. 143–309; M. Rodríguez, El Marañón y Amazonas (Madrid: Antonio Gonçalez de Reyes, 1684); [P. Maroni], ‘Noticias auténticas del famoso río Marañón y misión apostólica de la Compañía de Jesús de la provincia de Quito en los dilatados bosques de dicho río, escribíalas por los años de 1738 un misionero de la misma’ (MS., Madrid, Academia Nacional de la Historia), http://bibliotecadigital.rah.es/dgbrah/i18n/consulta/registro.cmd?id=6150 [accessed 30 May 2019]; M. Jiménez de la Espada (ed.), Noticias auténticas del famoso río Marañón y misión apostólica de la Compañía de Jesús de la provincia de Quito en los dilatados bosques de dicho río, escribíalas por los años de 1738 un misionero de la misma (Madrid: Fortanet, 1889); J. Magnin, Breve descripción de la Provincia de Quito y de las misiones de Succumbios y de Maynas [1740] (Quito: Sociedad Ecuatoriana de Investigaciones Históricas y Geográficas, 1989); M.J. Uriarte, Diario de un misionero de Mainas, [1774] transcription, introduction and notes by C. Bayle, 2 vols. (Madrid: Bibliotheca Missionalia Hispanica, 1952); J. Chantre y Herrera, Historia de las misiones de la Compañía de Jesús en el Marañón español [c. 1780] (Madrid: Avelai, 1901); J. de Velasco, Historia del reino de Quito [1789], edited by A. Pareja Diezcanseco (Caracas: Fundación Ayacucho, 1981); F.X. Veigl, ‘Gründliche Nachrichten über die Verfassung des Landschaft von Maynas’, in Ch.G. von Murr, Reise einiger Missionarien (Nuremberg: Johann Eberhard Zeh, 1785); and J. Jouanen, Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en la antigua Provincia de Quito, 1570–1774 (Quito: Ecuatoriana, 1943).

12 L.A. Newson, Life and Death in Early Colonial Ecuador (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), pp. 309–14.

13 ‘poniéndose todos de rodillas, entonó el misionero el Alabado en vez del Te Deum laudamus, que cantaron según costumbre’ (Chantre y Herrera, Historia de las misiones, p. 386).

14 Among numerous references in contemporary accounts, the seven pages (pp. 93–100) devoted to daily life in the missions in J. Cardiel’s Compendio de la Historia del Paraguay (Buenos Aires: Fecic, 1984) of 1780 mention no fewer than four different occasions for the performance of this piece. The last one is especially interesting: ‘The entire music [chorus and orchestra] sings the Alabado, which is then repeated by the whole congregation to the sound of trumpets with a joyful and harmonious blare’ (p. 97). In other words, even when the villages had evolved sophisticated, rich musical establishments, the Alabado retained its attributes as monophonic communal song. In Mainas the Alabado was always sung in Spanish, whereas in most mission areas this was only one possibility among the many local languages or linguae francae (Chantre y Herrera, Historia de las misiones, p. 632).

15 Chantre y Herrera, Historia de las misiones, p. 139.

16 Veigl, ‘Gründliche Nachrichten’, pp. 319–20. The centralised facility dismissed by Veigl was to be located in Quito, not Borja.

17 Veigl, ‘Gründliche Nachrichten’, p. 420: The word mitayero clearly derives from mitayo, natives who served turns of duty for the Spanish overlords; missionary chronicles from Chantre y Herrera to A. Alemany in the 1880s apply it to native providers of food for the missionaries and for evangelising expeditions (quoted in B. Izaguirre, Historia de las misiones franciscanas y narraciones de los progresos de la geografía en el oriente del Perú, vol. 9 [Lima: Talleres tipográficos de la Penitenciaria, 1922], p. 324).

18 Chantre y Herrera, Historia de las misiones, p. 390. Father Real was savagely killed by some of his parishioners two years later.

19 Chantre y Herrera, Historia de las misiones, p. 641; Uriarte: Diario, vol. 1, p. 201. Although Uriarte here calls him Yamaguera, he spells it Yabaguera on p. 148.

20 For an examination of the diverse roles and advocations of music in Amerindian devotion under the Jesuits, see L. Waisman, ‘Music for an endless conversion: a cycle of offertories from Jesuit Paraguay’, in I. Fenlon and M. Laube (eds.), Sound in the Early Modern City (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming).

21 See, e.g., Uriarte, Diario, vol. 1, p. 80; and Rodríguez, El Marañón, p. 334. It is not easy to identify precisely what a bobona was. There is a certain confusion between that vocable and fututo, surely related to pututu, an Inca trumpet made originally from a conch shell, later from the horn of an ox. It is clear that it involved a hollow body (a gourd, the carcass of an armadillo) and a long tube fashioned from a cane. See V.M. Patiño, Historia de la cultura material en la América equinoccial, vol. 4 (Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuevo, 1992), p. 341.

22 J.B. Julian, ‘Brief aus Süd-Amerika. Numerus 281’, in J. Stöcklein (ed.), Der Neue Welt-Bott mit allerhand Nachrichten deren Missionarien Soc. Iesu, 40 vols. (Augsburg and Graz: Heirs of Philip, Martin and Johann Veith, 1726–58), vol. 11 (1727), p. 84.

23 Uriarte, Diario, vol. 1, p. 104

24 Chantre y Herrera, Historia de las misiones, p. 650

25 Chantre y Herrera, Historia de las misiones, p. 652.

26 Uriarte, Diario, vol. 1, p. 149; another version on p. 200 and a widely different account in Chantre y Herrera, Historia de las misiones, p. 653, who may be confusing fathers Iriarte and Uriarte (who served consecutive terms at the reducción of San Joaquín). I have privileged Uriarte’s first-hand report and suggest ‘lucir como’ be translated as ‘sound like’, although more strictly it should be rendered as ‘look like’.

27 San Joaquín was peopled mostly by two ethnic groups, the Omagua and Yurimagua.

28 Chantre y Herrera, Historia de las misiones, pp. 652–3.

29 See, e.g., Herczog, Orfeo nelle Indie, p. 186.

30 Chantre y Herrera, Historia de las misiones, p. 649.

31 Ibid.

32 Chantre y Herrera, Historia de las misiones, pp. 650–51.

33 Cf. F.C. Lange, ‘El extrañamiento de la Compañía de Jesús del Río de la Plata (1767)’, Revista musical chilena, 165 (1986): 4–58 and 176 (1991): 57–96.

34 Uriarte, Diario, vol. 1, p. 153.

35 F.X. Zephyris, ‘Auszug aus 4. Briefen’ [Popayán, 1724 and Latacunga, 1725], in J. Stöcklein (ed.), Der Neue Welt-Bott, vol. 11, p. 95. The description of Trompeten as bruchhafften, although obscure, also suggests cane rather than metal instruments.

36 Chantre y Herrera, Historia de las misiones, p. 651.

37 Chantre y Herrera, Historia de las misiones, pp. 626–7.

38 Chantre y Herrera, Historia de las misiones, p. 654.

39 Veigl, ‘Gründliche Nachrichten’, p. 311.