“Strong, enduring bodies with glorious voices”: Music and the Body in Ignaz Pfefferkorn’s Sonora: A Description of the Province (1794–1795) Diana Brenscheidt genannt Jost (bio) Introduction In Sonora: A Description of the Province, Ignaz Pfefferkorn, Jesuit missionary in New Spain in the 18th century, describes, among many other things, the use of music within mission life. Talking about the evangelization of the Opatas and Eudebes,1 Pfefferkorn narrates the following: I had nine or ten musicians, counting only those in the most important village of my mission area, three of whom I myself had taught to play the violin, the others of whom had learned from Spaniards to play quite well on the zither and the harp. I had trained them to play on their instruments in unison2 to accompany the church singing, an accompaniment which they performed competently and in pleasant harmony. Thus were sometimes sung the Mass, the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Salve Regina, and other devotional songs. For such singing I chose some of the best voices among my Indians and trained them so that they could render from memory the usual songs of the Christian service.3 Comments like these, praising indigenous abilities and ease to learn and perform Western religious music, can regularly be found in Jesuit reports from different regions. Whereas many writers have no doubt that, for the missionaries, “music was a powerful tool for establishing relations [End Page 507] with the natives and for paving the way for their conversion,”4 the reasons for this “success story,” and especially for a—as Leonardo Waisman critically remarks—supposedly indigenous “special predisposition for music,”5 are continually investigated and still under debate.6 While Waisman mentions that “the Jesuits, in collaboration with the Indians, managed to establish a splendid musical practice, far richer and more complex than anything that could be heard in the Spanish towns of the surrounding territories,”7 Kristin Dutcher Mann and Drew Edward Davies assume that the declaration given to the outstanding musical abilities of the native peoples might also have been mainly rhetorical, given that “[m]usical acculturation indicated success in evangelistic endeavors and might be rewarded with additional funding, resources, or promotion.”8 Within the context of this ongoing discussion, and seizing a comment by Daniele V. Filippi who writes that “[m]usic, with its direct, non-linguistic appeal to body and soul, could help bridge the often overwhelming cultural difference between Western missionaries and indigenous people,”9 I would like to elaborate on this idea by focusing on the body as a scale of analysis and thus utilizing, as expressed by Sebastian Jobs and Gesa Mackenthun, a “ ‘corporal’ lens”10 in order to analyze the role of music within mission life in 18th-century New Spain. Stressing the role of the “human body as an agent and mediator of cross-cultural communication,” the authors further assert that “cultural difference is often expressed in terms of physical difference or in conventions closely connected with the body.”11 The task is first to analyze how an 18th-century European conception of the body finds its expression in the perception and description of physical aspects of the indigenous population, and, second, to examine how these coincide with an understanding of music and music practice typical of the era. As this investigation is based on a text by a European Jesuit written for Europeans—or, more explicitly, a German-speaking public12—its main point of reference will be an early modern Western understanding of the body as based on humoralism and the sex res non naturales (six non-natural things) and, further, the impact this understanding might have had in the implementation and later evaluation of occidental music practices and routines in the missions. With its focus on “the human body as a site of musical production,”13 this article builds on the tradition of earlier investigations on the body in music.14 It specifically aims at widening our understanding of music in the missions of northern New Spain by investigating it through the [End Page 508] lens of the body,15 thereby advancing critical reflections on the possibilities and limits of cross...
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Jun 28, 2024
Rafael Carrasco-Moreno + 1
Open Access