18th-century Peru

Abstract

If all modern performance of early music may be regarded as an ‘invention of tradition’, this is particularly true of Son de los Diablos: tonadas afro-hispanas del Perú (Alpha 507, rec 2003), recorded by Diana Baroni and Sapukái. Popular songs collected in the late 18th century by Don Balthasar Jaime Martínez de Compañón, Bishop of Trujillo (on Peru's northern coast), are here refracted through the lens of modern-day Afro-Peruvian music, itself a tradition self-consciously reinvented by Peruvian musicians and intellectuals in the 1950s. It is perhaps precisely because all Afro-Peruvian music has been reconstructed that the musicians on this recording are able to move so seamlessly and convincingly between Compañón's tonadas and the modern songs like No, Valentín (popularized by Susana Baca) with which they are interspersed on this recording. In this respect this disc is both hard to categorize, reflecting and connecting past and present practices, and unusual, in that the older tradition is actually better documented—thanks to the Enlightenment zeal of the Peruvian bishop—than the more recent, which had died out long before its mid-20th-century revival. Approaching it as an ‘early music’ recording, I was somewhat unconvinced by the opening: it has become a cliché to begin programmes with Bocanegra's Hanacpachap, and it is not clear that this Andean hymn dating from 1631 has a place in a recording of late 18th-century (and later) coastal popular music. Such a place is sought by erroneously describing the work as a ‘traditional Indian melody’, when it was probably composed by the Franciscan friar who published it, and certainly has much more in common with Spanish villancicos than Andean songs. But the first bars of the following Tonada El Congo swept away my doubts. This simple song, a mere skeleton on the pages of Compañón's collection, springs to life in the hands of Sapukái, Diana Baroni's sensual voice soaring over the plucked strings and percussion, the interplay between solo and chorus bringing out the African as well as the Hispanic features of the music. The disc never flags from this moment on, unfolding in the diversity of styles and colours so evident in the drawings and song titles of the Peruvian source, yet with the same coherence in overall design. By the late 18th century, after two and a half centuries of cultural mixing, hybrid popular cultures had emerged in Peru, and these are reflected in the dances that Compañón illustrates; similarly, in this recording, Spanish musical influences contrast, overlap and combine with African and indigenous, coastal with Andean. Hispanic harmonic structures, provided by harp and guitar, are fleshed out with the African-derived rhythms of cajón and batá, and highland influences are pronounced in the pentatonic melodies and Andean instrumentation (panpipes, quena, charango) of the cachua, yaraví and the Tonada El Diamante.