Latin American ArchivesAuthor(s): ROBERT STEVENSONSource: Fontes Artis Musicae, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1962 JANUAR-JUNI), pp. 19-21Published by: International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres(IAML)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23504226 .

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RISM: THE WASHINGTON MEETING 19

In our judgment, it should be possible to increase still further American participation in

the International Inventory of Music Sources. Plans for a second participation campaign,

analogous to that of last October, will shortly be made.

Progress to date has been most encouraging, and indeed, has exceeded our expectations.

There is every reason to believe that the record can be still further improved.

ROBERT STEVENSON (LOS ANGELES)

Latin American Archives

After independence, one of the first proposals of the Mexican Congress was to dig up

Cortés's bones and burn them. To avoid this desecration the guardian of the Hospital de

Jesus at Mexico City had them removed secretly to a gravesite that from 1823 to the present

has never been found. This is a parable of what has happened to much Latin American

musical treasure. Not all musicologists in South America and Mexico are today violently

opposed to the colonial past; but when an official such as Sanchez Malaga, the head of the

National Conservatory at Lima, can say that Peruvian musical history begins with the

liberation by San Martin, we may be sure that there are still strong feelings abroad against

pre-1821 music, "all of which belongs to Spanish history, and is therefore of secondary

importance to the truly patriotic historian."

The archives of colonial music in Mexico were systematically investigated in the late

1940's by Steven Barwick, holder of a John Knowles Paine Travelling Fellowship from

Harvard. It was he who first attempted to catalogue the magnificent archive at Puebla. He

visited Oaxaca, Guadalajara, and Morelia with the same serious scholarly intent. In his

Harvard doctoral dissertation he tells how surprised the cathedral authorities at Oaxaca and

Guadalajara were to have him report such bibliographical treasure in their archives as the

Alonso Lobo Masses. Barwick was also the first to advertise the Convento del Carmen

Codex at Mexico City (Villa Obregön) that contains Guerrero's Beata Mater Mass, Victoria's

Ave Maris Stella Mass, in addition to a priceless collection of liturgical music by such early

Neo-Hispanic masters as Hernando Franco, Juan de Lienas, and Francisco Lopez. From

Barwick's microfilms of this codex Jesus Bal y Gay made his splendid transcriptions published

in 1952, and from Barwick's microfilms of the Puebla collection Alice Ray Catalyne made

her fine study of the music of Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla. Forites Artis Musicae published in

the 1954/2 and 1955/1 issues my enlarged catalogue of the Puebla Cathedral music (vil

lancicos not included) and my study of the Valdés Codex at Mexico City that contains the

earliest polyphony with Nahuatl texts (Nahuatl was the language of the Aztecs). The

Valdés Codex contains four masses by Palestrina, a fifth mass attributed to him but actually

by Pierre Colin, in addition to masses by Alonso Lobo and Juan Esquivel from Osuna and

Ciudad Rodrigo. The first colonial manuscript in South America to be studied with minute care was the

Fray Gregorio de Zuola commonplace book from Cuzco, obtained under somewhat clouded

circumstances for the Ricardo Rojas library at Buenos Aires. After Carlos Vega published

a monograph on the Zuola manuscript in 1931 (La Müsica de m Côdice Colonial del siglo

XVIJ) a heated controversy arose between him and another Argentine musician who

disagreed with his transcriptions. By great misfortune this Zuola manuscript now lies

buried in the house once Ricardo Rojas's mansion, and no scholar domestic or foreign is

permitted to see it. Even so, Vega's facsimiles of the music in it demonstrate its value. The

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20 RISM: THE WASHINGTON MEETING

earliest South American composer represented is Tomas de Herrera, organist at Cuzco

Cathedral in 1611. The Anales del Cuzco, 1600 d 1750, published at Lima in 1901, contain

extracts from the manuscript, and its authenticity is beyond dispute even if Dr. Ismael

Moya, present guardian of the manuscript, refuses to allow its being seen by scholars from

outside Argentina. To date, the best archive of sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century music in South

America has fortunately resisted the efforts of entrepreneurs of historical relics —the Bogota Cathedral collection. Victoria's 1600 Madrid collection, Francisco Guerrero's 1582 Roman

Masses, Palestrina's 1589 hymns, Zorita's 1584 motets, Aguilera de Heredia's 1608 Magni

ficats, and other early seventeenth-century publications by Croce, Belli, Burlini, and

Massenzio, join manuscript copies of Felice Anerio, Rodrigo de Ceballos, Juan Navarro,

Mateo Romero, Juan Bautista Cömes, Carlos Patino, Vicente Garcia, but more especially

Morales, to make the Bogota collection a historian's delight. The most important South

Americans in the Bogota archive were maestros there—Gutierre Fernandez Hidalgo (1584— 1586 at Bogota, 1588—1589 at Quito, 1597—1620 at La Plata—present day Sucre in Bolivia) and Juan de Herrera, chapelmaster from 1703—1738; or maestros at Cuzco (Cristobal de

Bersayaga), Quito (Manuel Blasco), Puebla (Miguel Mateo de Dallo y Lanas). A catalogue of

this collection made during my 1961 visit to Bogota now awaits publication. In the last years of the century the cathedral supported an orchestra that played Cannabich and Haydn

symphonies. Sigismund Neukomm (at Rio de Janeiro 1816—1821) is the last considerable

composer whose works were added to the Bogota archive before Bolivar set Colombia on the

course of nationhood.

The Cuzco Cathedral archive once contained Morales's two Roman books of Masses, and

much other comparable treasure. Still today it houses Philippe Rogier's M/ssae Sex and an

important de Monte publication. But the best archive at Cuzco belongs to the San Antonio

Abad seminary, and was catalogued by Rubén Vargas Ugarte in his article "Un Archivo de

Musica Colonial en la Ciudad del Cuzco" (Mar del Sur, V/26, March—April 1953). Vargas

Ugarte, now head of the National Library in Peru, also gave the impetus for cataloguing the

music in the Lima archiépiscopal archive (R. Holzmann and C. Arrôspide de la Flor, "Catâ

logo de los manuscritos de müsica existentes en el Archivo Arzobispal de Lima", Cuaderno

de Estudio III/2 [1949, Catholic University of Peru]). The most renowned maestro at Lima in the early seventeenth century was Estacio de La Serna (or Laserna). Organist at the Royal Chapel in Lisbon before emigrating to Peru, he composed two tientos published in Santiago Kastner's edition of Correa de Arauxo's Facultad Orgànica, Volume II. A century later

Tomas de Torrejon while Lima maestro composed the earliest New World opera still extant, La Purpura de la Rosa (1701, libretto by Calderon de la Barca). The original manuscript at the National Library in Lima was described in my article "Opera Beginnings in the New World" (Musical Quarterly, January, 1959).

Vargas Ugarte now hopes to inspire another catalogue, that of the Lambayeque archive in northern Peru. This great historian, whom musicians interested in South American music cannot too highly praise, was also responsible for the first facsimile reproductions of the folk music gathered in the 1780's by Martinez Companon from Trujillo province in north Peru. For another service, he taught in Sucre in his youth, and has been able at various times to stress the unique value of the Sucre archive from first-hand acquaintance (see "Notas sobre la Müsica en el Peru", Cuaderno de Estudio, III/2 [Lima, 1949]).

At Sucre a mass by Domenico Zipoli was discovered during my 1959 visit and transcribed

during my 1961 visit. The foremost scholar and patron of musical antiquities in Bolivia is

perhaps Canon Julio Garcia Quintanilla, who has at various times served as archivist of the

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RISM: THE WASHINGTON MEETING 21

Cathedral, and whose excellent studies of colonial history in Sucre archdiocese contain

invaluable data for the musicologist. In The Music of Peru (Washington: Pan American

Union, 1960) I made known the treasures by Juan Hidalgo, Sebastian Duron, Baldassare

Galuppi, Michael Haydn, and many others at Sucre. Sucre at the end of the colonial period

vied with Lima and Bogota in maintaining an orchestra to play symphonies by Pleyel and

others (The Music of Peru, page 192). The musical messiah in Sucre history, Juan de Araujo,

bequeathed to the cathedral more than a hundred original compositions.

The greatest danger lurking in store for all this treasure is precisely such advertisement as

I am now giving it. Immediately, inquiries will be directed to the archivists whom I have

mentioned. They do not have staff nor mechanical equipment to handle requests from

scholars abroad, many of whom seem disdainful and haughty in their approach though never

intending offense. Carleton Sprague Smith, Steven Barwick, Alice Ray Catalyne, Lota Spell,

and Gilbert Chase will agree that Latin America cannot be approached with impatience nor

with importunate demands. Above all, the treasure should remain where it now reposes and

not be rifled, ultimately to suffer the fate that has overtaken the bones of the most famous

New World conqueror, a resting-place beyond human ken.

HELMUT KALLMANN (TORONTO)

RI S M Report about Canada

Canada is a large country; yet from the music librarian's vantage point it appears small

indeed. With the exception of one collection which was begun about 1800 and is now owned

by Laval University in Quebec, music collections of our public libraries, universities and

orchestras date only from the early decades of the present century. Musicology as a

specialized university study was established less than a decade ago. Consequently the RISM

material found in Canada represents accidental rather than systematic accumulation.

At the request of the Canadian Music Council a questionnaire was mailed in 1954 to some

100 libraries, archives, religious institutions and private collectors. As a result some 25

collections reported about 500 items during the next four years and more recently another

100 volumes have been reported. A large section of the Canadian RISM material consists

of eighteenth century song collections, both sacred and secular, and full scores of operas. The oldest volumes located date from 1499 (Missale Bambergense), 1542 (Pontificale Secundum Rituum) and 1562 (Istitutioni Harmoniche). It is hoped to obtain substantial lists

from Montreal in the future.

Two observations might interest national RISM committees or secretaries who are

investigating collections where RISM material is expected to exist in modest quantities only.

1. Once the person in charge of the collection has declared his willingness to help, by all

means ask him to list all his material at once, not one type (e. g. collections) this year, another next year. The librarian who takes the trouble to search his shelf list or his shelves

for one type of old music once (and, one might add, who takes the trouble to answer your

letter) may object to repeating the whole process again a year or two later. It is of greater benefit to approach him again a few years later to report on new acquisitions only.

2. Whenever possible, the RISM secretary or committee members should visit the various

institutions in person. Librarians who are not music specialists, archivists, organists etc. will

be only too glad to let you browse through their shelves or will lead you to dusty basements

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