What did “Christmas previous” sound like, precisely?
Courtesy of a Chicago-area music scholar with a expertise for digging up the previous, native audiences would be the first in centuries to listen to a sequence of outdated carols that hint again to sixteenth and seventeenth–century Mexico and Guatemala.
The group behind the undertaking is the Newberry Consort, which performs outdated music utilizing devices and methods from the interval. The Consort hosts its annual “Latin American Christmas” concert events Dec. 13–15, culminating in a matinee on the Nationwide Museum of Mexican Artwork in Pilsen.
This 12 months’s program options one thing distinctive: The “spine,” in director Liza Malamut’s phrases, is 9 items studied and edited by Paul Gustav Feller-Simmons, a Ph.D. scholar at Northwestern College. 4 of the works have been written and carried out in a convent in Puebla, Mexico, between 1630 and 1740 and now reside on the Centro Nacional de Investigación, Documentación e Información Musical (CENIDIM) in Mexico Metropolis. The opposite 5 have been found in a chest within the Guatemalan highlands and are even older, courting between 1562 and 1635. These manuscripts are actually held at Indiana College.
That includes eight instrumentalists and 6 singers, this weekend’s performances will mark the primary time this music has been carried out for the reason that works have been rediscovered and catalogued by students within the Sixties. Moreover, these outdated carols will quickly be obtainable to anybody who needs to carry out them; Feller-Simmons is publishing an anthology of this music and extra in 2025.
“Paul has transcribed all of those to trendy notation. We’re very, very grateful to him for making these obtainable to us,” Malamut advised WBEZ.
How these carols have been reintroduced to the present-day vacation canon is a narrative of scholarship, endurance and modern-day musical archaeology, the sort practiced by Feller-Simmons, 35.
The digging began again when he was an undergraduate scholar in Chile, helping musicologist Alejandro Vera in his restoration of a uncommon manuscript by Santiago de Murcia, a famend composer of Baroque guitar music. Lately, he’s labored with one other scholar, Cesar Favila, on a undertaking documenting the centuries-old music of Latin American nuns.
Finally, Feller-Simmons’ analysis was an ideal match for the Newberry Consort, which wished to broaden the idea of its annual “Mexican Christmas” concert events to embody extra historic sounds of Latin America.
Identical to journey in these days, it took a while for musical fads to cross the Atlantic. The music of colonial Spain tended to be old school in comparison with what was occurring in mainland Europe. Even the earliest items on the Newberry Consort’s program, from the 1560s or so, comprise music extra akin to that composed in 1510.
“It will be like listening to swing right now,” Feller-Simmons mentioned.
A few of the music is signed by composers or copyists, whereas different items are nameless. However the manuscripts provide up clues that Feller-Simmons has labored to decode.
For instance, a few of the Outdated Spanish inscriptions within the Guatemalan manuscripts contained sufficient uncommon misspellings and syntax errors that he suspected their copyists have been non-native audio system — fairly seemingly a few of the numerous Indigenous People who transformed beneath duress by Spanish missionaries. Different songs within the assortment have been written within the Mayan languages spoken within the area.
Names additionally appeared within the Puebla manuscripts — of ladies, probably the nuns tasked with copying down the music. These signatures inform us so much about how the music was created and credited, Feller-Simmons mentioned.
“We are likely to privilege composers, sidelining the invisible labor of historic performers and different musical actors. This music was made for the nuns, copied and carried out by them in a feminine house,” he mentioned.
Gender roles in Indigenous cultures don’t simply map onto the patriarchal attitudes of colonial Spain. Catholic authorities forbade nuns from taking part in “improper” devices, like percussion or brass. Even these taking part in “acceptable” devices have been usually not “acceptable” to see: Some convents had nuns carry out behind the cloister for outdoor guests.
To emphasise the context of the convent music, Newberry Consort director Malamut, who can be a trombonist, could have solely feminine musicians play the Puebla items. However many of the program, just like the Consort itself, is co-ed.
“If we’re actually attempting to get as near actuality as doable, I wouldn’t even be on the stage,” she mentioned.
Deciphering these manuscripts, as Feller-Simmons has, takes time and endurance. Moreover the anticipated put on and tear, worms nibbled via a few of the sheets. It was much more difficult to transform them right into a performance-ready version. The music doesn’t exist in a full rating, with all of the traces printed on the identical web page. As an alternative, solely the person elements survived — that means researchers wanted to spherical all of them as much as reconstruct how the works may need sounded. The notation fashion and clefs used within the manuscripts are additionally archaic.
“Some historic performers can most likely learn from the manuscripts, however it’s not essentially the most comfy factor,” Feller-Simmons mentioned.
As is typical for the time interval, instrumentation can be by no means specified within the manuscripts. The Consort has made educated guesses about what devices may need been on the musicians’ disposal and the way they may have functioned within the ensemble. For that, Malamut scoured major sources — correspondence, receipts, transatlantic cargo lists — for clues.
“We’ve got lots of plucked devices: harp, guitars and typically even lute or theorbo may have been used,” she mentioned. There’s even proof of a bajón, kind of an early model of the bassoon.
“The convents would have used these devices to play the underside of the vary in the event that they didn’t have a girl who may sing that low,” mentioned Malamut.
How the Guatemalan manuscripts ended up in Bloomington, Ind., displays the fraught colonial historical past of the area. Catholic missionaries who returned to the Huehuetenango area’s parish within the Sixties have been proven some outdated chests in its holdings. Inside have been some 50 books of music, preserved and honored by space parishioners like relics. Interspersed within the books’ pages have been temporary accounts of native historical past, noting visits from church dignitaries and documenting births and deaths.
The books have been taken for analysis, however most have been offered off at public sale to collectors. Up to now, solely 19 of the 50 books survive and 17 of these ended up at Indiana College. Microfilm copies have been made from a few of the misplaced texts, however not all.
“They is likely to be someplace in some personal assortment, and so they don’t even know what they’ve,” Feller-Simmons mentioned.
Regardless of the exceptional detective work by Malamut, Feller-Simmons and others, some fundamentals — like when and why these items have been carried out — stay misplaced. One more open query is how a lot Indigenous Mayan devices and musical traditions mingled with Western ones. European written sources are unlikely to be goal or correct on that time.
So, what you’ll hear this weekend is a wonderful approximation of what one may have heard 400 years in the past. For perfomer–students like Malamut, that uncertainty comes with the craft.
“In a sure sense,” she mentioned, “we have now to respect that we’re by no means actually going to know.”
Hannah Edgar is a Chicago-based tradition author. Their work seems commonly within the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Reader, Musical America and Downbeat.
