Ars Longa: Baroque Music from Cuba and the New World

The famous Cuban novelist and musicographer Alejo Carpentier testifies, in La música en Cuba (ca.1954), and more explicitly in the article "El rescate de Esteban Salas" (1960), to the deplorable conditions in which he fortuitously found, around 1944, some folios of music handwritten by Esteban Salas y Castro Montes de Oca (Havana, 1725- Santiago de Cuba, 1803) in the Cathedral of Santiago de Cuba. his finding promoted the localization, transcription, study, interpretation, recording, and dissemination of the work of the most outstanding master of baroque music in Cuba, through the joint effort of performers and researchers. Esteban Salas’ opera omnia is the most important patrimonial source of ecclesiastical music in colonial Cuba. It reveals both the conservative tendencies in the liturgical-musical conception of the Catholic Church in Santiago during the composer’s tenure (1764-1803) and the aesthetic routes associated with liturgical celebrations in the late eighteenth century in the Hispanic world.

Historiography recognizes that, at the dawn of the eighteenth century with the arrival to the throne of Philip V (Philippe d’Anjou) – first king of the French dynasty of the Bourbons in Spain, who reigned between 1700 and 1746 – and the consolidation of his first and second marriages with the Italian aristocrats Maria Luisa of Savoy (Queen consort 1701-1714) and Elisabeth Farnese (Queen consort 1714-1746), the court’s musical tastes veered towards the Italian style. With the continuation of Bourbon rule over the Spanish domains throughout the eighteenth century, Spanish and Latin American composers took advantage of this aesthetic preference to “modernize” both their liturgical (in Latin) and para-liturgical compositions (in Spanish, imitations of other Latin languages, or multilingual).

The villancico, a poetic-musical genre of deep popular roots and documented acceptance throughout the Hispanic world, was central to the fusion of the sonorities, traditional poetic themes, and secular theater of Seville with the Italianizing – and discreetly Francophile – stylistic preferences adopted during the Bourbon dynasty. The corpus of Christmas villancicos and cantadas (cantatas) by Esteban Salas belongs to the Galant style. They are formally diverse pieces, where the composer shows a special interest in articulating musical resources from Hispanic vernacular culture with the vocal-instrumental virtuosity of Italian origin, and the Frenchified refinement of dances such as the menuet, popularized in Spain mainly by the work of Arcangelo Corelli and Alessandro Scarlatti. 

Traits of popular descent – in vogue in the Hispanic musical theater through tonadillas escénicas, seguidillas, and tiranas – such as the displacement of the prosodic accent in the melodic structure, as in Vayan una especies and Sobre los undosos ríos, or the rhythmic evocation of the aforementioned menuet, used and systematically fused with other, less austere genres such as the fandango, as in the verses of Vayan unas especies and Los cuatro elementos, are recurrent in Salas’ para-liturgical music. Likewise, many works display a notorious Italian formal assimilation (including recitatives, ariosos, and arias da capo) as Resuenen armoniosos los clarines and the cantata ú mi Dios entre pajas, whose literary texts were put together by Salas from printed materials from peninsular cathedrals in circulation throughout Santiago de Cuba.

On the impact of Italian musical aesthetics in the ecclesiastical context of the early 18th century, renowned Guatemalan musicologist Omar Morales Abril writes: “The introduction of the Italian style –traditionally associated with opera and the ‘indecencies’ of comedy theaters—into Spanish ecclesiastical music enlivened the discussion and caused discontent among the most conservative sectors of the Church in the first decades of the (…) century. (...) Criticism and prohibitions eroded the cultivation of the religious villancico to its gradual disappearance in the second half of the (…) century, although it survived for many more decades in some places, such as of Santiago de Cuba and Nueva Guatemala de la Asunción”.

Despite the progressive decline of the ecclesiastical villancico during the eighteenth century, its effectiveness and doctrinal functionality for the various cultures that converged in American territory (mainly indigenous, African, and Spanish) is evident in the large corpus of preserved compositions, which reveals practices and transcultural processes manifested in the literary texts and sonorities of this Catholic repertoire. 

The way in which Western culture was articulated with indigenous American cultures during the Viceroyal period is evident both in the cathedral (urban) musical production and in the repertory associated with the evangelizing practices of the Society of Jesus (rural), especially in the extensive Viceroyalty of Peru, Spain’s economic and political center in South America.

We should note that the Jesuits managed to establish an effective system of indoctrination in which music played a fundamental role. The musical archive in Chiquitos (Bolivia) conserves part of the abundant musical production of the Jesuit dominions. The aria in Chiquitano language, Zuipaquî – attributed to the Italian composer Domenico Zipoli (Prato, Italy, 1688-Cordoba, Argentina, 1726) – is one of the ones that most clearly reveals the reach of Italian aesthetics in 18th-century vocal-instrumental music production. In addition, this important patrimonial repository holds a collection of anonymous instrumental pieces such as the Sonatas chiquitanas, which display a clear Corellian influence.

In the Viceroyalty of Peru, the Codex Martínez Compañón is an important document of Hispano-American music, the product of the pastoral visit of Bishop Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón (Navarra, 1737- Bogota, 1797) to various northern Peruvian towns between 1782 and 1785. The Codex collects the bishop’s impressions of each town he visited, in revealing watercolors, annotations, and twenty musical scores of instrumental folk dances of indigenous descent, such as Lanchas para baylar. 

The assimilation of popular culture by high culture in the Hispanic world, which had begun within courtly practices since the Spanish Golden Age of art and literature (16th and 17th centuries), maintained its vitality throughout the 18th century. Some sources of instrumental music demonstrate sounds that circulated in both secular and sacred spaces. The unbridled rhythm of fandangos, zarambeques, and cumbés served as sound material for popular festivals and carols that mimicked mestizo and African cultures. 

Particularly, the popularity of bailes de negros (black dances) among the composers of the 18th century is manifested in pieces such as Cumbés for guitar by the Spaniard Santiago de Murcia (Madrid, 1673-1739), present in two American manuscripts: Cifras selectas de guitarra (Chile, 1722) and the so-called Códice Saldívar 4 (Mexico, ca. 1730). Morales Abril notes: “These dances and songs, pride of the blacks and joy for all, constitute the gift par excellence in the recurring theme of the visit to the Child Jesus in the manger.” 

The so-called negrillo guineo subgenre, which Omar Morales Abril classifies under the imitative villancicos, stands out among the villancicos for its incitement to gestural representation, laughter, and dance. Under this denomination, the Guatemalan musicologist refers to a type of carol relating to Iberian-American cultural diversity. Maestros de capilla represented the so-called “subcultures” in these compositions that shaped their referential context, identified by markers rich in aesthetic and ideological implications: the linguistic characterization of the characters, and the inclusion of mannerisms or “realistic” representations of the various sociocultural groups. The negrilla Afuela, apalta – composed by Chavarría (Bolivia, 1688-1719), Ceruti (Italy, 1683-Peru, 1760), and Tardío (Bolivia, 1694-1762) – highlights the hegemonic group’s stereotyped vision of the cultures of African origin, recurrently associated with jest, excessive joy, and dance. These aspects gradually took root in the criollo sounds, as can be heard in compositions such as the romance (Juguete-Guaracha) Convidando está la noche, by the maestro de capilla of the Cathedral of Puebla de los Angeles, Juan García de Céspedes (Puebla, ca.1619-1678). 

The program selected by the Conjunto de Música Antigua Ars Longa for this concert includes an important corpus of Catholic music written in the cathedral and reduction context of the Viceroyal America as well as instrumental pieces associated with the secular space. The convergence of repertoires from diverse Hispanic contexts, with emphasis on the villancicos by the famous Cuban chapel master of the eighteenth century, Esteban Salas, illustrates the multiple sonorities that provided the ideological sustenance to spirituality and power during the reign of the Bourbon dynasty. Ars Longa explores the expressive potentials (music-poetry) of the villancicos to highlight the inherent relationship between the interpretation of historical documents and the performers’ cultural heritage. The recreation of the sonic environment, the reference to rhetorical articulations between the literary text and the music, the careful use of instruments to enhance the narrative discourse, and the reminiscences to courtly and popular dances reveal the performative power of a historically informed practice adapted to contemporary sensibility. 

Yunie Gainza Desdin