1.1. PROBLEM STATEMENT: "LATIN AMERICAN BAROQUE" IS NOT LATIN AMERICAN

Over the past few decades, "Latin American Baroque" has become popular in the music industry as well as in the musicological world. It focuses on the performance and research of music from the colonial archives of Latin America, usually churches and religious institutions. Although the body of this repertoire is composed of European music or music written in standardized European styles, there is a widespread belief that this music embodies cultural cross-breeding or "mestizaje". The idea of baroque music being performed and composed "in the jungle" creates an expectation of exotism which is maximized by the general public Music Industry. In an article about the "Americanity of Latin American Baroque" Argentinian musicologist Leonardo Waisman comments:

The editors of booklets accompanying recordings and videos rave about the originality and uniqueness of American colonial music as "mestizo" music. (...) However, none of these musicologists, none of these promoters has been able - none of them has even tried - to base these grand statements on a technical-analytical discussion of the repertoires involved. (Waisman 2012, 5)

Researchers such as Geoffrey Baker have insisted on the absence of reference to the reality of the colonized ones. In his book about colonial music from the diocese of Cuzco, baker insists on the erasure of indigenous musical features, and on the need to examine the role of the colonized ones in the performance of colonial music, and not in the music itself:

“In the entire Cuzco repertoire—some four hundred works—there are no textual or musical references to the Andean population. These texts do not simply represent a bland presence, much less a “mestizo culture,” but rather mask an absence. The erasure of colonial reality in the musical repertoire is an act of violence, writing the colonial Others out of the script. While recognizing this type of (mis)representation as an integral part of the exercise of colonial power, we must also look beyond this music archive to gain a fuller picture of the place of music in Cuzco society.” (Baker 2008a, 37)

Research has proven that colonial music is far from representing the multiculturality promised by the commercial branding of Latin American Baroque. On the contrary, embedded in the power imbalances of colonial reality, music was actually used to reinforce the social structures that produced it, becoming an instrument of cultural oppression. The music of the Jesuit missions of Paragüay and Bolivia, popularized under the name of "Missional Baroque" offers a specially good example. Since the movie "The Mission" (1986) drew global attention to the subject, this music has become a usual component in Latin American Baroque concert programs, due to the abundance of sources found in the archives of Moxos and Chiquitos. We find this music presented from the idealized perspective of the Jesuits, which was amplified by the movie and promoted by authors such as Piotr Nawrot, the director of the most important Latin American Baroque Festival of Latin America, or programs such as "Bolivian Baroque" conducted by Ashley Solomon, which blend this narrative with a welfare-assistance character. According to this narrative, the missions represented the realization of a utopian world, in which music was its harmonious symbol. This way to present missional music contrasts strongly with the regime of control and punishment under which it was used (Vila 2007, 12). Filosophist Michael Foucault studied in detail the devices of control and surveillance operating in these communities, regulating every single aspect of life and allowing a few priests complete mastery over the minds and bodies of hundreds of individuals in the missions1. Through their publicity campaigns in Europe, the Jesuits presented American aboriginals as infantilized savages who are meant to be domesticated and civilized through the magical and divine powers of European church music (Toelle, 2015).

This research is an attempt to create a musical product that fills in a void left in written musical sources from colonial Latin America. Following the concepts of Postcolonial studies, this research acknowledges the erasure of the colonial Otherness (the colonized ones, objectified and defined as different and exotic), from the colonial discourse (the narrative documented by colonial authorities, which gives accountance only of the perspective of the colonizers, or the colonial Self), and proposes a way to creatively "restore" that erased colonial Otherness. Translating this concept into my field of Historically Informed Performance (the study of musical performance from a historical perspective) and the particular context of Latin American music from colonial times, colonial discourse is understood in this research as the musical repertoire documented in churches and religious institutions. The musical Othernes is understood as the non-European, mixed-race oral musical traditions which evolved during colonial times through the process of intercultural hybridization but remained unwritten. The inspiration for this research was drawn from Geoffrey Bakers´s famous polemic "Latin American Baroque: Performance as a Postcolonial Act?". The following quote was the main inspiration to embark on my own journey of creative reinvention:

"The idea of invention can also be brought to bear on the issue of repertory. The voices of subaltern groups have been lost because most of their music was not notated but was transmitted orally. A focus on elite, notated music perpetuates Western musical imperialism. By bringing lost popular music traditions back to life, by turning to reinvention and improvisation, performers may reinsert excluded cultures where they have been written out or have vanished from texts. The musicologist may identify notation as an example of the imperialism of Western literacy, but the performer has the possibility of doing something about it (...)" (Baker 2016, 444)

To the right, you can see a picture taken from the movie "The Mission", in which protagonist "Father Gabriel" protects the vulnerable guarani from the ferocious attack of Spanish conquerors. Below that, the same symbolic narrative of guarani people as vulnerable "buon savage" is embodied by the Bolivian Ensemble Moxos, and integrated into the welfare-assistance character of its fundraising program.

On their website:  https://ensamblemoxos.wordpress.com/ you can

see how the ensemble attempts to meet expectations of exoticization of first-world audiences: the presentation text reads "Ensemble Moxos: Where the Jungle Became Music - We ask you for help!", and: "Their shows, an amalgam of the crossbreeding (mestizaje) that took place between the music imported from Europe by the Jesuit missionaries in colonial times and the native expressions, captivate with their creativity and their careful choreographic display (...) The versatility distinguishes its young members, some twenty indigenous Moxeño Ignacianos, directed by Raquel Maldonado, who demonstrate their versatility on stage, each of them playing different roles during each concert." 

With this research, I would like to propose my own alternative to respond to the market´s expectations of exoticization. Just like Ensemble Moxos, I would like to speak to those commercial expectations, but instead of embodying the colonialist narrative, I would like to create a new narrative from the perspective of the colonized ones. Instead of performing the music of the colonizers, I would like to create a musical product through artistic research, a product that truly embodies musical cross-breeding, and that can be advertised as the music of the oppressed colonial Others without entering into the contradictions surrounding colonial repertoire.