At the time of Christopher Columbus’s first encounter of the “New World” in 1492, numerous indigenous cultures were spread from the northern Mexican mountains to the southern tip of South America and on the Caribbean islands. These cultures ranged from isolated and technologically primitive peoples to highly organized societies with advanced technological knowledge. Little is known about the musical activities or systems of these precolonial civilizations, but available sources do afford glimpses into the roles of music in the most-advanced cultures. These sources include surviving musical instruments, dictionaries of Indian languages compiled by early European missionaries, chronicles written by Europeans of the 16th century, and, for Mesoamerica, a substantial number of pre-Columbian Mexican codices. (A codex is a manuscript in book form.) Some scholars have studied the musical cultures of isolated indigenous communities of the 20th century as a means to understanding the past; although such an approach may be somewhat useful, it is not wise to assume that traditions are continuous and uninfluenced over centuries.
The type of ancient Mesoamerican music that is best-documented is the ritual music of the courts (primarily Aztec and Mayan). Music performance (often allied with dance) is depicted as a large-ensemble activity, in which numerous participants variously play instruments, sing, or dance. The 8th-century murals of the Bonampak temple, for example, show a procession with trumpets, drums, and rattles.
To an extent that is remarkable in light of their numerous differences in other artistic and cultural realms, the different cultures from at least the 8th century to the early 16th century used similar instruments. Drums and wind instruments, primarily flutes, are commonly described in texts and found in artifacts. The teponaztli, a two-key slit drum played with a mallet, and the huehuetl, a single-headed cylindrical upright drum played with bare hands, occupied a special position in Aztec rituals and were considered sacred instruments. Many of the archaeological examples of these drums carry elaborate carvings with glyphs and drawings that reveal symbolically their ritual uses and functions. Comparable instruments served essential functions for the Maya.
Many flutes from Mesoamerican cultures survive. Among the Aztec they were known generically as tlapizalli. An especially intriguing type of flute found near the Gulf of Mexico coast consists of two, three, or four tubes sounded from a single mouthpiece. Such instruments prove the existence of harmonic possibilities, up to four notes simultaneously, but it is not known how they were used. Ancient Mesoamericans did not develop musical notation, and the Spanish did not transcribe music they heard. Surviving instruments provide some indication of sound quality and pitch but not any precise way of determining scales or melodies.
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In the Inca empire, extant evidence also documents the use of music in religious ritual contexts. The Inca inherited many of their musical artifacts and practices from pre-Inca peoples, such as the Moche, Chimú, and Nazca. As was the case for Mesoamerica, in the Andean region instrumental music seems to have predominated, with large ensembles performing on flutes and panpipes, accompanied by drums, including the characteristic small, double-headed tinya of the Inca. The end-notched vertical flute known in Quechua as the quena was held sacred. Early examples had four finger holes, but many later flutes had five or six; some scholars have drawn conclusions about scale possibilities from the number and placement of finger holes. Another group of Andean vertical flutes was called pincollos or pincullus. The panpipes (antaras) of the Nazca, adopted by the Inca, had from 3 to 15 pipes and could produce microtonal music.
Trumpets commonly appear throughout the region. The large conch trumpet was an instrument of war. The Bonampak murals of the Maya show long, straight trumpets that may have been made of wood or gourds. Incan trumpets, qquepas, could be made of conch shell, clay, or metal.
Many aspects of music were standardized, such as the appropriate use of particular instruments or functions of particular songs. For the Inca, Quechua language dictionaries reveal certain ideals and practices. Specific terms distinguished between correct and incorrect singing and between low and high voice. Taki, a term designating dance, song, or both, could be used to describe a song of lament memorializing the life of an emperor or a local chief. The Spanish reported that a cantar histórico (historical chant) was performed during the most important celebrations and at funeral rites. Exactly how the songs were performed is unclear, but the mestizo (half Spanish, half Incan) historian Garcilaso de la Vega mentions in his Comentarios reales (written within a century of the conquest of the Inca) that each song text had its own unique melody.
The reconstruction and evocation of the pre-Columbian musical past in Mesoamerica and the Andes remain speculative. Significantly, Spanish chroniclers active in Mexico in the 16th century noted that there was some affinity between the Spanish and the Indians with regard to the emotional tone of music. In particular, a song that was considered sad by the Indians apparently had the same sense for Spaniards who did not understand the text. Such an affinity might at least in part explain the ease with which the Indians assimilated the European musical system.
Like the Mesoamerican and Andean peoples, the Caribbean Indians used music in ritual observances. Early Spanish observers reported that the areito music-dance ceremony in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico involved the performance of chants in call-and-response style, accompanied by rattles of the maracas type, scrapers (güiro), and a hollow slit drum (known as a mayohuacán). Any possibility of musical continuity from pre-Columbian times into the colonial period in the Caribbean islands was lost with the rapid decimation of Indian populations caused by the spread of European diseases, the conditions of forced labour, intertribal wars, and mass suicide.
Colonial period (1492–1821)
Early European influences
The Spanish and Portuguese brought their Roman Catholic religious music to the colonies. They built modest churches in the mission towns and sumptuous cathedrals in the main urban centres, and they performed and taught the official music of the Roman Catholic rites. Gregorian chant and Spanish sacred polyphony entered the repertory early on. Popular religious music also began to be cultivated very early and exerted strong influence on subsequent folk music. The whole Christian calendar of feasts was introduced and combined with native celebrations. The Indians had a strong ritual musical tradition and adapted Christian religious music very readily. Patron saints and their commemorative days became especially important, and the community fiesta emerged as an essential event through Latin America.
Numerous Catholic devotional songs were translated into Indian languages, and the Iberian medieval church theatre, with its affiliated dances, was introduced to the native populations. For example, Iberian dances of Christians and Moors (danzas de Moros y Cristianos), representing stories of the medieval Crusades, were incorporated into similar dances in Latin America, where the Moors were transformed into native infidels. These were combined with preexisting Indian dances and songs. To the present, numerous dances with religious subjects, such as conversion and resurrection, are an integral part of the folk tradition; examples are the danzas de la Conquista (“dances of the Conquest”) in Mexico and the congados (“dances of the Congo”) of Brazil. These dances continue to incorporate both indigenous and Christian religious elements.
The Spaniards and the Portuguese also brought numerous genres and styles of secular music from their homelands. Song and dance genres abounded for the main types of life-cycle celebratory observance as well as for all sorts of work and social occasions. Although dance genres of the Iberian Peninsula introduced in the colonies subsequently underwent considerable changes, choreographic traits such as shoe tapping (zapateado), finger snapping, castanet playing, and the use of scarves (danza de pañuelo) were retained in much Latin American folk dancing.
European art music as cultivated in the cathedrals and palaces of Spain and Portugal was introduced in the colonies as early as the 1530s. By the end of the 16th century the Spaniards had established cathedrals in the major cities. They had also founded universities and set up printing presses in the Viceroyalty of New Spain (with Mexico City as the centre) and the Viceroyalty of Peru (with Lima as the centre). Musically, the most active churches during the early colonial period were in Mexico City, Puebla, and Oaxaca (now in Mexico); Cartagena de Indias and Bogotá (now in Colombia); Quito (now in Ecuador); Lima and Cuzco (now in Peru); and La Plata (today Sucre, Bolivia); later Santiago de Cuba (now in Cuba), Caracas (now in Venezuela), Santiago de Chile (now in Chile), Montevideo (now in Uruguay), and Buenos Aires (now in Argentina) became important. In Brazil the Portuguese established convents and churches in Olinda, Recife, Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo. The discovery of gold and precious stones prompted the development of the Minas Gerais area in the 18th century, and churches and fraternal orders were established in Vila Rica (present-day Ouro Prêto), Mariana, São João del Rei, and Arraial do Tejuco (present-day Diamantina).
The cathedrals became the most important sites of music performance and training. Cathedral chapelmasters composed not only Latin works for church rituals but also Spanish or Portuguese works for celebrations; for example, the polyphonic villancico (a Christmas song genre) became a significant part of their output in some areas. In Mexico City the first 16th-century composer of polyphony was the Spanish-born Hernando Franco, who wrote a Magnificat that reveals control of both the technical and the expressive aspects of contemporary Spanish polyphony. In the next century the Mexican Francisco López Capillas appears to have been the most accomplished and prolific composer of Latin music (especially masses) of his time; the Puebla chapelmaster Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla showed a special talent for composing polychoral pieces, including villancicos. Manuel de Zumaya, an early 18th-century Mexico City chapelmaster, produced the expected Latin music and villancicos in the European Baroque style; he also composed the opera La Parténope, produced at the viceroyal palace in 1711. By the middle of the 18th century, subsequent chapelmasters in Mexico City had enlarged the cathedral orchestra and introduced elements of the current, more homophonic (i.e., primarily chordal) Italian style.
In the Andean areas, noteworthy composers included perhaps the most significant 16th-century composer in Hispanic America, Gutierre Fernández Hidalgo; the 17th-century Lima chapelmaster Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco, who wrote the first Latin American opera, La púrpura de la rosa (1701; “The Blood of the Rose”); his contemporary Juan de Araujo; and the 18th-century composer José de Orejón y Aparicio.
The extant colonial repertory of secular music (i.e., functioning in a nonreligious context) is quite limited. Operas and other dramatic representations, as well as instrumental music, were cultivated, but few examples survive. From Mexico, three examples of tablature remain (one for organ, one for vihuela, and one a cittern instruction book). From Valladolid (present-day Morelia, Mexico), there are several pieces of 18th-century instrumental music, including two overtures (sinfonias) for small orchestra, attributed to Antonio Rodil and Antonio Sarrier. In Lima, the Coliseo theatre was especially active during the 18th century under the Italian Bartolomé Massa, some of whose stage music (in the form of the comedia) survives.
In Brazil most of the colonial repertory that remains is sacred music of the 18th century; an exception is the oldest known music manuscript from the region, which consists of a recitative and aria in Portuguese for soprano, two violins, and continuo, written at Bahia in 1759 and attributed to the local chapelmaster Caetano de Mello Jesus. In Pernambuco the composer Luiz Álvares Pinto is known for his Salve Regina and Te Deum (c. 1760). Numerous composers active in Minas Gerais in the late 18th century, including José Joaquim Emerico Lobo de Mesquita, Francisco Gomes da Rocha, and Ignacio Parreiras Neves, cultivated a pre-Classical homophonic style of church music. The greatest figure of Brazilian colonial music was the priest José Maurício Nunes Garcia, who was active in Rio de Janeiro at the beginning of the 19th century.
Early influences on folk music
The new musical cultures that emerged gradually during the colonial period grew from elements drawn from the cultures of indigenous peoples, Spanish or Portuguese Europeans, and sub-Saharan Africans. The various encounters and mixtures of all of these created an extraordinarily complex hybrid culture that reflected a social class system made up of Europeans (mostly Spaniards, with Portuguese in Brazil), criollos (European descendants born in the colonies), mestizos (mixtures of Indian with European or of black African with European or Indian), Indians, and those of African descent.
Throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, the foundation of mestizo folk music is overwhelmingly European, as a result of both the successful missionary work and the subsequent hegemony of the Europeans and their descendants. The missionaries, particularly the Jesuits until they were expelled in the mid-18th century, introduced European music and dance as aids to conversion and frequently adapted native songs and dances for Christian uses. Thus, they both precipitated and facilitated the creolization process of the 17th and early 18th centuries.
Even as Christianity was adopted, native religious beliefs were never completely abandoned. Religious syncretism among the Indian and the African-derived communities reflected their accommodation to colonization and slavery. As a strong marker of community identity, native religions and their corresponding musics survived to a much greater degree than has been generally acknowledged. That religious chants and dancing of Indians and enslaved Africans flourished under a colonial regime testifies to the power and resilience of music and religion.
The teaching of Catholic religious music throughout the period left a permanent imprint on Indian, Hispanic American, and Luso-Brazilian folk music. Gregorian chant strongly influenced several folk song repertories, especially in the use of the church modes (scales) and in melodic and rhythmic approaches to sung recitation. Otherwise, the strong European foundation in these folk music traditions is evident in their instrumentation, their tonal harmonic system, and their approaches to ensembles. For example, imitative polyphony, including the canon, was incorporated into certain Indian songs. Among some Indian groups, such as the Tzotzil (Maya-speaking Indians of southern Mexico), three-part harmonic singing accompanied by harps, violins, and guitars became the norm.
Art music in the national period (1821–present)
The 19th century
Throughout Latin America, 19th-century art music was dominated by opera and lighter musical theatre, songs, and piano music, as was a large part of the musical life of Europe. During the first half of the century, most countries made an effort to encourage artistic activity. National music institutions, conservatories, opera theatres, and concert halls were established. Consequently, symphonic and chamber music became part of the culture, as did virtuoso performers, especially pianists. By the last decades of the century, musical nationalism had developed, as it had in Europe; its main expression was through the use of genres that were associated with national folk and popular characteristics.
A large number of Latin American pianist-composers cultivated salon music genres and European-style Romantic piano music. The most popular salon music composer in Mexico was Juventino Rosas, an Otomí Indian and author of a set of waltzes, Sobre las olas (1891; “On the Waves”), that became famous worldwide. With Romantic pianist-composers such as Tomás León, Ernesto Elorduy, and Felipe Villanueva, the first vernacular elements appeared in Mexican music. The last two especially cultivated the danza (or contradanza) mexicana, which followed the model established by the Cuban composers Manuel Saumell and Ignacio Cervantes. The contradanza stressed for the first time the typical syncopated rhythmic patterns of Afro-Caribbean dance music. The same phenomenon occurred in Puerto Rico with the danza puertorriqueña, cultivated especially by Juan Morel Campos.
Grand opera and Romantic nationalism flourished in Argentina and Brazil. Although opera had been produced in Buenos Aires during the 18th century, Argentinian opera and piano music were not extensively performed until the last decades of the 19th century. Francisco Hargreaves, for example, wrote the Aires nacionales (c. 1880; “National Songs”), in which he stylized such typical folk genres as the gato, estilo, vidalita, and décima. Brazilian opera was dominated by Antonio Carlos Gomes, the most successful opera composer of the Americas in the 19th century. He won international fame with his opera Il Guarany (produced in Milan in 1870), which had a picturesque libretto portraying Indian heroes and incorporating stylized indigenous dances. The first Brazilian to write a piece directly inspired by folk music was the amateur musician Brasílio Itiberê da Cunha with his A sertaneja (1869; “The Country Girl”). Romantic nationalism in Brazil is best represented by Alberto Nepomuceno. In several of his piano pieces, his String Quartet No. 3 (1891; subtitled “Brasileiro”), and above all in his Série brasileira (1892), for orchestra, Nepomuceno incorporated traits of popular dance music and attempted to depict aspects of Brazilian life.
The early 20th century
Latin American art music of the first part of the 20th century was eclectic, although the nationalist trend continued in the early decades. In Mexico, nationalism can be traced in the work of such composers as Manuel M. Ponce, Silvestre Revueltas, and Carlos Chávez, the major Mexican composer of the century. Chávez came to the forefront in the period after the Mexican Revolution, when a new search for national identity fostered an Indianist movement in the arts. In the ballets El fuego novo (1921; “The New Fire”) and Los cuatro soles (1925; “The Four Suns”) and in the orchestral Sinfonía India (1935–36), the composer evoked Indian music and aesthetics within a decidedly modern musical framework. Revueltas drew from the popular and folk music of contemporary Mexico while employing harmonies, rhythmic techniques, and orchestration characteristic of 20th-century art music.
The Caribbean basin developed its own musical expressions of nationalism. Cuban afrocubanismo (the rediscovery of Afro-Cuban culture and its music by poets, artists, and musicians) became the most suitable source of national expression for Amadeo Roldán and Alejandro García Caturla, the outstanding 20th-century representatives of nationalism in Cuba. Afro-Cuban instruments, rhythmic structure, and folklore in general were at the basis of their works, but their style was characterized by bold modern polytonal harmonies and imaginative polyrhythmic and orchestral effects. The best-recognized cultivator of musical nationalism in Puerto Rico was Héctor Campos-Parsi. In Venezuela, Juan Bautista Plaza utilized the música criolla of his country—including the joropo, vals, and merengue—and experimental composer Gustavo Matamoros, who took inspiration from American composer John Cage, created sound installations and soundscapes. Contemporary techniques, counterpoint, and Latin American influences were evident in the work of cellist and composer Paul Desenne.
In the Andean region, nationalistic traits in art music vary with trends in folk music. In Chile, for example, where folk music had limited indigenous influence, most 20th-century composers embraced European contemporary trends rather than musical nationalism. Typical in that respect was Domingo Santa Cruz, the most influential person in Chilean musical life from the 1920s to the 1960s. Guillermo Uribe-Holguín was Colombia’s most articulate nationalist composer. In Ecuador, Segundo Luis Moreno, a folklorist, and Luis Humberto Salgado wrote many works with a marked Indianist tendency. Nationalist Bolivian composers combined Indianist elements with a Romantic orientation; an example is Simeón Roncal, who wrote very popular stylized cuecas for the piano.
Several generations of Peruvian composers attempted to develop a national identity in their music by resorting to the characteristic pentatonic melodies and rhythmic formulas of highland Indian music. The Indianist trend (indigenismo) was followed by Daniel Alomía Robles, Manuel Aguirre, and Teodoro Valcárcel, the most successful of the nationalists. Even the Belgian-French composer Andrés Sas and the German-born Rodolfo Holzmann, skilled in the current international techniques, wrote many works that incorporated melodies based on Peruvian folk music traditions. Holzmann’s student Peruvian Celso Garrido-Lecca had a long and varied career in which he experimented with many musical styles.
The progenitor of Argentine national music in the early 20th century, Alberto Williams, exerted a fundamental influence in his country by relying on the music of the gauchos (cowboys of the pampas, or plains). This gauchesco tradition was evident in his Aires de La Pampa (1944; “Songs of the Pampas,” a collection of more than 50 piano pieces). Juan José Castro and Luis Gianneo drew on the folk music and folklore of specific Argentine provinces. But Alberto Ginastera established himself in the 1940s as the leader of the national movement in Argentine music, which continued to be based on the gauchesco tradition. Others in Argentina, such as Roberto García Morillo and Julián Bautista, cultivated neoclassicism. Some Uruguayan composers of the period, such as Luiz Cluzeau Mortet and Eduardo Fabini, also based compositions on gauchesco and other mestizo elements.
Like Ginastera, Heitor Villa-Lobos of Brazil was a truly international figure. Prolific and imaginative, he composed for many media and in many genres, and he developed a unique, eclectic style in celebration of the musical soul of his country. Other Brazilian nationalist composers of the period were Camargo Guarnieri and Francisco Mignone.
Although musical nationalism dominated Latin American art music in the early 20th century, the trend had its opponents. Some composers openly reacted by adhering to the latest international techniques and aesthetics. Examples include the Argentine Juan Carlos Paz, the most radical figure of his generation, and the Mexican Julián Carrillo, an early proponent of microtonality (i.e., the use of pitches that fall between the standardized notes of the Western scales). It seems clear that some composers sought international recognition through the intrinsic quality of their works, not through their relationship to indigenous music. The approaches were not mutually exclusive: many nationalist composers cultivated varying styles in works that combined national and international stylistic elements.
The late 20th century and beyond
Latin American composers by and large followed international trends in the 20th century. In Mexico, Rodolfo Halffter at different times expressed the neoclassic aesthetic, then used polytonality, 12-tone techniques, and serialism. (Both 12-tone and serial techniques entail a means of ordering pitches or other aspects of musical construction, such as rhythm or dynamics.) He influenced several of his students in the same direction, including Jorge González Ávila, Joaquín Gutiérrez Heras, and Mario Kuri-Aldana. Avant-garde techniques of the 1960s were used by Manuel Enríquez, Héctor Quintanar, Mario Lavista, and Julio Estrada, to name a few. Subsequent generations of Mexican composers have cultivated electroacoustic media in combination with traditional ones, as in the cases of Francisco Núñez, Arturo Márquez, Ana Lara, and Gabriela Ortiz.
In Cuba, José Ardévol began to experiment with atonality and serialism after 1957; he profoundly influenced succeeding Cuban composers, most significantly Juan Blanco and Leo Brouwer. Blanco was particularly significant in the development of electronic music in his country; Brouwer was one of the most original figures of the Cuban avant-garde and an innovative writer for the guitar. Aurelio de la Vega, a longtime resident of California and one of the best-known Cuban composers of his generation, successively used a free atonal language, serialist techniques, electronics, open forms, and aleatory (chance) procedures, always in a personal and creative manner. Also noteworthy is the work of New York-based Cuban composer Tania León.
The Panamanian Roque Cordero holds a special place in Latin American composition of the late 20th century. After 1946 he wrote his most significant works in a serialist idiom, without rejecting traditional formal designs or rhythmic patterns reminiscent of Panamanian folk and popular music.
Of the Andean nations, Peru and Chile have seen the most significant participation in contemporary art music. In Peru, César Bolaños and Edgar Valcárcel particularly represented the progressive avant-garde in the 1960s and ’70s. In Chile, art music composition during the second half of the 20th century comprised a wide range of styles and genres. Juan Amenábar and José Vicente Asuar initiated the first experiments in electronic music in 1954. Juan Orrego-Salas earned the widest reputation outside his country. Gustavo Becerra-Schmidt, an unusually imaginative craftsman, cultivated serialist methods in the 1950s while maintaining classical formal concepts, then introduced aleatory techniques into some of his works of the 1960s and ’70s. Other Chilean composers who used serial techniques include Eduardo Maturana, Fernando García, León Shidlowsky, and Miguel Aguilar-Ahumada. In Colombia fewer composers have written in a contemporary musical language; among them are Fabio González Zuleta, Luis Antonio Escobar, and Jacqueline Nova. Mesías Maiguashca is the only Ecuadorian composer of his generation who pursued experimental aesthetics.
Argentina, particularly Buenos Aires, fostered the most dynamic musical life in late 20th-century Latin America. The Latin American Centre for Advanced Musical Studies at the Di Tella Institute, directed from 1962 to 1970 by Ginastera, promoted contemporary compositional techniques. He wrote his major works in the 1960s and ’70s, including the operas Don Rodrigo (1964), Bomarzo (1967), and Beatrix Cenci (1971), all considered examples of musical post-Expressionism in their use of sexually and emotionally charged themes. Other Argentine composers, representing a variety of styles, include Roberto Caamaño, Hilda Dianda, Francisco Kröpfl, Alcides Lanza, and Gustavo Santaolalla. Some prominent Argentines were active elsewhere, notably Mauricio Kagel, a resident of Germany; Mario Davidovsky, active in the United States; and Luis Jorge González, a resident of the United States. In addition, trends such as neo-Expressionism, post-serialism, and the use of electroacoustic media have had many followers, including Alicia Terzián, Horacio Vaggione, Oscar Bazán, and Osvaldo Golijov.
The most representative composers of contemporary compositional trends in Uruguay were Héctor Tosar, León Biriotti, Antonio Mastrogiovanni, Graciela Paraskevaídis, and Daniel Maggiolo.
In Brazil eclecticism prevailed, as seen in the works of César Guerra-Peixe, Cláudio Santoro, and Edino Krieger. The 1960s brought about radical changes with the São Paulo “Música Nova” avant-garde group, which included Gilberto Mendes, Rogério Duprat, and Willy Corrêa de Oliveira. Salvador, in Bahia state, became a dynamic centre for new music in the 1960s through the efforts of Ernst Widmer, who taught composition to a significant group that included Lindembergue Cardoso, Jamary Oliveira, and Paulo Costa Lima. Also noteworthy is the interdisciplinary work of California-based Brazilian composer and theorist Paulo Chagas.