Bailes, tonadas & cachuas: La música del códice Trujillo del Perú en el siglo XVIII [The Music of the 18th Century Codex Trujillo del Peru] by Adrián Rodríguez van der Spoel (review)

Abstract

Bailes, tonadas & cachuas: musica del codice Trujillo del Peru en el siglo XVIII [The Music of the 18th Century Codex Trujillo del Peru]. By Adrian Rodriguez van der Spoel. Translated and edited by Sarah Griffin-Masson and Servicio. The Hague: Deuss Music, 2013. [238 p. ISBN 9789080944589. 45. [euro]] Music examples, transcriptions, illustrations, facsimiles, bibliography. In terms of visual appeal, no source from late-colonial Latin America rivals the Codice Trujillo del Peru, a nine-volume encyclopedic work compiled between 1782 and 1785. Conserved at the Real Biblioteca del Palacio Real in Madrid and in partial copies at libraries in Colombia and Peru, this lavish work depicts the natural world as well as the fabric of colonial society through nearly 1,400 anonymous watercolor images, with little corresponding text. Known also as the Codice Martinez Companon, it was commissioned by Baltasar Jaime Martinez (1737-1797), a highly-educated religious authority of peninsular Spanish origin, who remitted it to King Charles IV of Spain following fieldwork undertaken while serving as Bishop of Trujillo. An exemplar of the Enlightenment prelate, Martinez advocated for the affairs of indigenous peoples, promoted education throughout his diocese, and supported other relatively progressive projects within the framework of the late-colonial Bourbon reforms. Whereas volumes 3 through 8 of the codex document the plant life, animals, birds, and fish of Peru, volumes 1, 2, and 9 concentrate on the viceroyalty's cultures. The images encompass professionally-drawn maps, portraits of colonial officials, scenes of everyday life at all social levels, and archeological ruins. Amazingly, twenty pieces of dance music also appear in the codex between folios 176 and 194 of the second volume, within a section that contains illustrations of dancers and performing musicians in various settings. Neatly written in score format, seventeen of the pieces are songs or sung dances and three of them are instrumental. Most of the scores contain music for violin, a bass instrument, and up to four voices, which are essentially tunes with simple accompaniments in standard tonal harmony. One of the pieces (number 6, Tonada de el Chimo) contains unpitched notation for percussion, and one other (number 5, Baile de danzantes con pifano y tamboril) seems to give notation for percussion, although the line is labeled Bass. Comprising three genres, bailes (dances), tonadas (Spanish lyric song of the late eighteenth century), and cachuas or qhachwas (historical duple-meter round dances of Peru), the pieces often feature syncopated rhythms, some of which are local in origin (Diana Fernandez Calvo, La musica en el codice del obispo Baltasar Jaime Martinez Companon in El obispo Martinez Companon: Vida y obra de un Navarro ilustrado en America, ed. Ignacio Arellano and Carlos Mata Indurain [Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra, 2012], 312). Since the musical notation is descriptive rather than prescriptive, and succinct in form, a certain amount of improvisation would be expected if performing from the scores, including embellishing the melodic lines, adding or changing instruments, and repeating musical sections. Writing during the 1950s about the musical content of the codex, Robert Stevenson noted that the pieces had received little serious attention from musicians and music scholars on account of their popular or folkloric nature, and thus concluded that what is therefore needed is a publication that will include all twenty items ... that will follow the order of the manuscript, and that will faithfully adhere to both the original notes and texts (Robert Stevenson, The Music of Peru: Aboriginal and Viceroyal Epochs [Washington, DC: Pan American Union, 1959], 159). This precisely describes Adrian Rodriguez van der Spoel's accomplishment in Bailes, Tonadas & Cachuas: The Music of the 18th Century Codex Trujillo del Peru [sic], a bilingual book and music edition that complements a similarly-titled recording sold separately (Bailes, Tonadas & Cachuas, Musica Temprana, dir. …