Description
One of the most understudied yet potentially fruitful areas of research along the East-West axis connecting the Mediterranean and the Americas is the presence and use of plainchant in the newly conquered lands of sixteenth-century Nueva España. While many musical sources and collections remain unexamined, an increasing number of libraries are digitising plainchant manuscripts and prints, thereby making them accessible to scholars worldwide.
This paper examines a small corpus of fifteen manuscripts, containing both polyphony and plainchant, copied between 1582 and 1635 and now preserved in the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana. Previous studies by Robert Stevenson, Paul Borg, Robert Snow, and Victor Anand Coelho have primarily focused on the polyphony in these sources, attributed to Franco-Flemish and Spanish composers such as Isaac, Mouton, Morales, and Guerrero. Even though half of these manuscripts contain plainchant—some exclusively so—scholarship to date has merely acknowledged its presence without undertaking an in-depth investigation.
A closer study of the plainchant in these Guatemalan manuscripts not only provides essential context for the liturgical polyphony but also sheds light on the provenance of the liturgical repertory transferred from the Old World to the New. Furthermore, it offers unique insights into the methods employed by Spanish missionaries in their efforts to evangelise indigenous populations. Following the military conquest of the region by Pedro de Alvarado in 1524, the introduction of plainchant emerged as one of their principal tools in the conquest of indigenous minds.
| IMPORTANT | YES, I confirm I have read it. |
|---|
