Sarao en un Jardín: About the Program
By Guillermo Salas-Suaréz
Few people relate the concept of Baroque music with the vast territories of the Americas. Compared to the immediacy of a gilded altar at a colonial church, which are visited by hordes of tourists, the music from this period has a harder time reaching modern audiences. Reasons for this abound, but for now let us focus on one – that favorite target of postmodernism known as “the musical canon.” As 21st-century America is no longer allowed to turn its face away from ever present issues such as racism, misogyny, or homophobia, a new social consciousness has permeated into academia and cultural institutions that has pushed them to re-evaluate their ideological foundations. They realize that art is never apolitical, and that they too can contribute towards social justice through their own means and ends. As musicians and concertgoers, we have inherited a litany of names worth invoking on the concert stage. However, one may only need to raise the harmless question of: “what was happening elsewhere?” to realize that the world is indeed a large place full of diverse peoples. Today we are raising the question of “what was happening in Latin America?” because today we are ready to make room for the countless other voices who deserve to be heard.
When the Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra first approached me to curate a program of Latin American music, my first thought was, more than surgically presenting music composed in Latin America, how do I do justice to the actual artistic landscape of the region - at least according to our historical records? How can I present a slice of 18th-century music making in Latin America, instead of a catalog of unfamiliar names related to one another only by continental siblinghood? Why not exercise the modest practice of historical fiction and imagine what a musical event could have been like then? This is the aim of tonight’s concert.
Miguel José Calixto de Berrío y Zaldviar was born in 1716 in Mexico City, the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, a territory that englobed present-day northern California all the way down to Costa Rica. His family, of Basque origin, owned land in Zacatecas, Guanajuato and San Luis de Potosí, which they devoted to farming and mining. Through marriage, he became Count of San Mateo in 1749, and in 1774, in thanks for supporting Spain’s campaign against England, he became Marquis of Jaral. He died just five years later. An ambitious and sophisticated man, the Marquis followed closely the intellectual fads from Europe as a distinguished member of the enlightened Criollo elite. As musicologist Javier Marín López has shown, the Marquis made of his melomania a true feature of his public persona. A talented amateur violinist himself, the Marquis became famous as a host of saraos, or musical soirées, at his palace at the “Angel corner” in Mexico City - currently a branch office of the National Bank of Mexico. These events became safe spaces for the exchange of ideas free of the scrutiny of the Church or the State. The arts took a protagonist role as the main channel to display the host’s opulence and progressiveness. Some of the most respected musicians in the city became regulars and protegés, though to the dismay of the Cathedral clerics, who employed many of them full-time and who frequently reprimanded them for choosing “Marquis gigs” over their daily, more pious, duties at church. Anonymous paintings like Sarao en un jardín (the artwork attached in this program, today held at the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico) give us a glimpse of what these gatherings looked like: a mixture of social classes engaged in music and dance at regal abodes, while others chat and flirt as food is being served.
Throughout his life, the Marquis amassed an extraordinary private music collection. According to an inventory of his possessions, the collection included 37 instruments: 25 violins, 3 violas, 2 cellos (violones) by distinguished luthiers such as Amati, Stradivari, Guarneri, and Stainer. A Mexican folk double bass known as tololoche, 2 guitars, horns, 2 flutes, and a portative organ complete the instrument assemblage. The music library held around 1,300 works by old masters like Corelli and Valentini up to the modern style of Haydn and Johann Christian Bach. The majority are Italian, with a few French, Catalan, and Germanic sprinkles, authors of trios, solo sonatas, menuets and dances, concertos, overtures, symphonies, divertimentos, quartets, and duos. Not always are specific music pieces mentioned by their name; instead, the document tends to list sheet music as “5 books with 12 sonatas by Coreli [sic]” or “6 quartets by Aidem [Haydn.]”
The music selections in tonight’s program come from this loose inventory. We may not be able to identify exactly which Corelli sonatas the Marquis owned, but it is less important to know such minutiae than to recognize which composers and styles he favored to perform. Inspired by the listing “9 trios by David Perez,” we open the program with the programmatic overture “La Tempestad del Mar” [The Sea Tempest]. In just under 6 minutes, Davide Pérez takes us from the fury of a storm, through the peace of a rainbow, to a concluding celebratory dance (bailete) - not unlikely events at an actual sarao. Pérez (1711 - 1778) was a Neapolitan composer who found success in opera in his native Italy before he relocated to Lisbon to claim the position of royal chapel master. The present piece is found in a manuscript at the Durango Cathedral in Mexico, dating from ca. 1750, and transcribed by Drew E. Davies.
Vivaldi and Corelli are the most represented composers in the Marquis’ library. Some of Corelli’s Op. 5 solo sonatas da chiesa (church sonatas) are also preserved at the Mexico City Cathedral Archive, suggesting the kind of instrumental repertoire the chapel had at its disposal for the parts of the liturgy that required untexted music. Esteemed Cathedral violinist José Manuel Delgado would have been a likely candidate to have been the performer of these sonatas at church, and would later be invited to play chamber music at the Marquis’ palace. As we learn from his correspondence, Delgado was taken under the Marquis’ wing. The Marquis frequently hired him and supported him as he moved from Valladolid to Mexico City.
Within the library descriptions, we find the names of 3 Italians working in Mexico: Ignacio Jerusalem, Santiago Billoni and a certain Niccolini. After working in Spain as a theater musician, Jerusalem (1707-1769) worked as chapel master of Mexico City Cathedral, where he led the preeminent ensemble of the city, wrote new music for feast days, and taught at the church school. 16 works by Jerusalem are listed in the Marquis’ library, likely commissioned by the nobleman. Most of Jerusalem’s secular output is now lost, and the few symphonies that have survived require bigger forces than the ones we have tonight. To get a sense of his music, a combination of the Italian galant style written for a Mexican audience, we will be playing his Cantata Paraninfos celestes, along with two others by his colleague Santiago Billoni (1700-ca.1763): Mariposa inadvertida and De Joseph el imperio. These paraliturgical works come from the Durango Cathedral, where the Roman-born Billoni served as chapel master. 18 of his works are listed at the Marquis’ library. Given the geographical distance that separates the two cities (around 550 miles), we may assume that Billoni had less contact with the Marquis. Nonetheless, his profile as an Italian composer active in New Spain fit perfectly with the aristocrat’s aesthetic inclinations and as such, was an ideal candidate to patronize. Like the Corelli pieces described above, these three works on tonight’s program have also been transcribed by Dr. Davies.
Given the large number of anonymous listings and the two guitars in the Marquis’ library, it would be a disgrace to deprive the listener of the marvels of the Saldívar Codex. Discovered in 1943 by Gabriel Saldívar in the city of León, Guanajuato, the codex is a large tablature manuscript for 5-course guitar by the Spanish composer Santiago de Murcia (1673-1739) - so far only found in Mexico. Some scholars have suggested that he may have travelled to Mexico, but there is no further evidence that this was actually the case. Murcia was a cosmopolitan musician who was exposed to all sorts of styles and freely incorporated them in his own compositions. William Simms will perform four excerpts from this collection: the African-inspired dances Cumbées and Zarambeques, and the Spanish dances Jácaras and Fandango. Watch out for the percussive effects in the former and for the quintessentially Spanish flavor of the latter. Always down for some Fandango madness, I could not resist orchestrating the second half of Murcia’s and showcase the whole group in all their Spanish glory. In so doing, I attempted to amplify Murcia’s gestures and followed a few instrumentation prompts from the dean of classical fandangoes, Boccherini’s Guitar Quintet. To conclude our sarao, we will segue into (literally) yet more madness: Vivaldi’s ubiquitous La Folia.
The prospect of advancing performance practice queues from colonial times, for me, is an exciting and yet under-explored territory. I am indebted to the pioneering work of Robert Stevenson, Alejandro Correa Rodríguez, Javier Marín López, Drew E. Davies, and Jesús Ramos-Kittrell, whose research have paved the way to how we understand the music and society of New Spain. As a historical performer, the few assumptions I can make are inevitably linked to the practices we have developed from European repertoire, seen from the lenses of the colonial documents. Historical contracts, wills, accounts, and paintings are invaluable to cognize which artistic elements have been kept from the Old World and which elements from the New have snuck their way in. Perhaps the most blatant example tonight is the pervasive use of the guitar, itself of very Spanish heritage, that in turn became an indelible part of the identity of the Spanish Americas. The picture of how this music sounded is still being refined. As more details come to light, iconographic studies are conducted, the role of pedagogical methods surveyed, and the music’s internal evidence analyzed, the field offers rewarding avenues for research and performance. It is not here where its transcendence ultimately lies, however, but in its power to change the face of classical music as we know it. We hope you are as eager as we are to embark on this journey.
