Historical and literary vestiges of the villancico in the early modern Philippines

Abstract

With the westward extension of Spanish imperial endeavours in the 16th century, the villancico was introduced to the Philippine Islands together with a large variety of sacred and secular musical forms. This paraliturgical genre would eventually take root at the very crossroads of social and racial structures in the colony, finding continual favour amongst the successive waves of immigrants from Spain and Latin America, whilst also being appropriated by the local population—whose preconquest practices included comparative verse-refrain genres—and in many cases being absorbed into indigenous oral traditions. In these respects, the villancico represented the multifaceted nature of many Iberian genres in the colonial milieu. It was, on one hand, an explicit symbol of cultural universality in the empire, as poetic texts that were popular throughout the Hispanic world could be set to music by various composers in different localities—the fame of works by the Musa Americana, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, for example, spread not only throughout the Americas and to peninsular Spain, but also across the Pacific to the Philippines. 1 On the other hand, the prevalence of the villancico in civic festivities and in the celebratory acts of religious and lay organizations also provided opportunities for local poets and chapelmasters to engage in demonstrations of their creative skills, whilst indigenous musicians and actors in the metropoles and provinces brought elements of theatricality into the ecclesiastical functions of the missions and parishes. 364Such profane behaviour within sacred contexts occasionally incurred the ire of a number of religious authorities, resulting in strictures promulgated by published regulations. Yet the repeated appearance of references to the genre in colonial historiography, along with the survival of locally composed texts and contextual descriptions of works, demonstrates that in the Philippines the villancico followed pan-imperial stylistic developments and gradually assumed a pivotal position in the musical traditions of the country. The existence of the genre at the periphery of the Spanish empire is a logical extension of musical practices throughout the early modern Hispanic world, but in the wider Asian context it proffers a unique case study, as the Philippine Islands were the most important European colony in Asia and are still the only predominantly Christian (Roman Catholic) country in the region. Thus an examination of the villancico and related genres in this territory allows for new perspectives on the pervasiveness of this musical practice and its dissemination throughout a vast geographical area in the early modern period.