Playing in the Cathedral: Music, Race, and Status in New Spain by Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Playing in the Cathedral: Music, Race, and Status in New Spain by Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell (Translated by Malena Kuss) Playing in the Cathedral: Music, Race, and Status in New Spain. By Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell. (Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. [xiii, 228 p. ISBN 9780190236816 (hardcover), $65; ISBN 9780190612672 (e-book), $42.75.] Illustrations, glossary, bibliography, index. From its establishment as a scientific discipline, musicology has been considered as a part of the group of social sciences. In studies dedicated to colonial Latin America, however, musicologists have incorporated social aspects of music mostly as neutral and distant. In general, social context has figured mostly as a descriptive and contextual background of musical production, itself seen as a static and autonomous object understood according to its own terms. This has caused an artificial separation between two interacting ecosystems, namely the social and the musical, making it difficult to analyze the complex changes that took place in the function and nonverbal meanings with which colonial society interpreted musical practices based on specific cultural codes. Studies published during recent decades have revealed that issues of difference (whether race, class, or gender) have had and continue to have a deep impact on social dimensions of musical practices. Consequently, they must be incorporated into new narratives on both historical and critical analyses of music (Ronald M. Radano and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., Music and the Racial Imagination [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011]; Olivia Bloechl, Melanie Lowe, and Jeffrey Kallberg, eds., Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015]). The application of a sociocultural approach to studies of Latin American colonial music becomes particularly pertinent and necessary, given that the prevailing caste system at work in that region during colonial times catalyzed a multiplicity of jumbled and disjointed situations involving mestizaje, with dramatic implications for social hierarchies and, consequently, for the dynamics between musical practice and the dialectics of power. Examples of this approach include Juan Carlos Estenssoro's Música y sociedad coloniales: Lima 1680–1830 (Lima: Editorial Colmillo Blanco, 1989), Geoffrey Baker's Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), and David Coifman's De obispos, reyes, santos y señas en la historia de la capilla musical de Venezuela (1532–1804) (Madrid: Sociedad Española de Musicología, 2010), the latter centered on Caracas. Based on archival research and centered on Mexico City during the eighteenth century, Playing in the Cathedral: Music, Race, and Status in New Spain studies the complex processes by which Mexico City Cathedral musicians in the eighteenth century constructed their own status and configured their professional and social profiles in the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Spain (1535–1821). The book proceeds from the general to the particular. From a cursory review of previous literature (chap. 1), it proceeds to explore musical practices in different urban spaces of Mexico City, analyzing how the mere ascription to a Spanish institution such as the cathedral represented, in and of itself, a form of status construction [End Page 643] (chap. 2). Chapter 3 focuses on the Mexico City Cathedral itself and examines some of the rough edges of musical practice, understood as an object within a changing network of relationships and social meanings. For instance, it probes how music served as a means for certain musicians to acquire new status upon becoming priests, as in the case of Martín Bernárdez de Ribera. Chapter 4 explores tensions surrounding the election of Ignacio Jerusalem (1707–1769), an Italian musician from the world of theater, to serve as chapelmaster. Chapter 5 then describes how Jerusalem's appointment transformed the music chapel's repertoire and operation and how cathedral musicians found themselves obliged to invoke the ideals of decencia (decency/respectability) and calidad (social quality) as attributes associated with the imaginaire of lo español (the Spanish) upon the emergence of new ambulant music chapels in the city (such as the one led by Antonio Portillo, former member of the cathedral) that competed with the cathedral chapel, itself seen as a musical group representing the ecclesiastical cabildo. The volume ends...