Benedicto Sáenz 'Libera Me': Occidentalisms in Latin America Nineteenth-Century Sacred Music

Abstract

This article uses concepts of Occidentalism and the musical analysis of a funerary responsory by nineteenth-century Guatemalan composer Benedicto Sáenz (1807-1857) to examine possible reasons why music from nineteenth-century Latin America remains relatively neglected in the region and beyond, unlike the better explored repertoires from colonial times and from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Based on Latin American postcolonial notions of Occidentalism as the construction of the Western Hemisphere by Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and analysis of Sáenzs responsory Libera Me within the context of changing political, social, and musical trends in nineteenth-century Guatemala, I argue that nineteenth-century music in Latin America reflects local struggles to engage with two competing models of European modernity: the “first modernity” of the Spanish colonial empire and the “second modernity” of the Enlightenment, Liberalism, and the French Revolution. Responding to influences from both modernities, Libera Me expresses local European habiti that do not fit Orientalist narratives of Latin American Otherness or nationalist narratives of local distinctiveness which have influenced the musical historiography in the region.