Etherial Baroque: Jesuit Music of Paraguay and Bolivia

CD Review. Tupasi Maria: Chant Sacre de indiens Guarani, Chiquitos et Moxos and El Homenaje de los indios Canichanas y Moxos a la Reina Maria Luisa de Borbon (1790). Ensemble Louis Berger (first) and Capilla de Indias (second). K617/Harmonia Mundi.

One of the first posts I wrote on the Shrine was a review of several excellent recordings of the music of colonial Latin America, an undeservedly forgotten part of Catholicism’s vast choral repertoire. At that time I was only starting to become acquainted with the French label K617 and their marvelous series entitled Les Chemins du Baroque, a spectacular assortment of Spanish and French colonial sacred and secular works ranging from the polyphony of Montreal and the Abenaki missions in frozen Quebec to the refinement of the choirs of Mexico City and the exotic Jesuit baroque of the Paraguayan and Bolivian missions.

Simply looking at the names of early music compositions is a joy with the strange and wonderful associations their titles bring up. The Spanish Missa del Mappamundi, the ominous Hapsburg ditty L’homme arme or Guerrero’s extraordinary Battle Mass, whose name seems a wonderful class of sacred and secular, the Church Militant incarnate. K617’s catalogue does not disappoint; paging through it you find exotic and wonderful titles for music that, in most cases, you have no earthly idea what it sounds like.

What is one to make of an album advertised as being a selection of Negro Spirituals in Baroque Brazil, including, most extraordinarily, a setting of the Te Deum? Boggles the mind. Then there’s another Battle Mass, this one from New Spain, placed alongside some Sor Juana Inez poems set to music under the striking title Phoenix of Mexico. Or, on another album, there's a Peruvian church hymn with the incomprehensibly idiosyncratic title Salga el torillo—something like “Let the little bull come forth”? And how can one resist a recording of a Paraguayan Jesuit opera about St. Ignatius of Loyola—if only to find out what language they wrote it in, Latin, Spanish or some mishmash of exotic Indian tongues?

I’ve not listened to San Ignacio yet, because it seems to be out of print, but the other two Jesuit baroque pieces in the K617 repertoire are ornaments to any collection of sacred music. It’s hard to describe them, but I can try.

So, here goes. The hilarious journalist P.J. O’Rourke (Rolling Stone's alleged foreign correspondent) once described the interior décor of an eighteenth-century Paraguyaan mission as being “two thousand square feet of crazed whittling” painted in drug-trip colors. A less charitable soul would probably describe Tupasi Maria and Canichanas y Moxos as sounding like Handel and Monteverdi on Speed, but that would miss the point.

Tupasi Maria features a variegated assortment of native hymns, litanies, a mass by Bassani, and a grand Sonata Trio by the Argentine immigrant Zipoli. The choral pieces switch back and forth from track to track from vernacular to Latin and back again.

The period instruments were all carefully recreated by the Ensemble players, and preserve the pleasant rawness of the distant location without going sour. The hymns run the gamut from the extraordinary trumpets and almost Venetian drama of Chapie Zuichupa and the Latin Canite Plaudite to the solemn, sober, and spare Yai Jesuchristo, displaying the splendid and flexible capacities of the archaic tromba marina, a sort of droning monochord, to serve as accompaniment to a single mournful soprano.

The mass, Missa a la fuga de San Joseph, is as extravagant and sophisticated as one would have heard at that time in any chapel in Naples or Spain. As with the other pieces, the isolation of Paraguay allows anachronistic references from Renaissance polyphony and polychoral works to comfortably rub shoulders with every last flourish of the baroque. Indeed, European travellers as late as the 1830s, seventy years after the expulsion of the Jesuits, were greatly impressed by both the high quality of the baroque mass settings that were sung in these tiny villages as well as the technical skill of the choir and orchestra.

The other album, Canichanas y Moxos is perhaps more of an acquired taste, verging on the surreal at points, but I highly recommend it to the trained ear. The works performed are largely secular, and almost all written in the tongue of the Moxos; discovered in the Archivo General in Seville, they were written in honor of the festivities surrounding the wedding of Carlos IV and his queen Maria Luisa in 1790, twenty years after the expulsion of the Jesuits.

An unexpected treat is also included by several sacred works, one from Moxos, and the others from the cathedral archives in Santiago Cathedral. These are by far the most enjoyable. The best is the indigenous Corpus Christi song El dia del Corpus, where native flutes and ocarinas blend quite well with the baroque harmonies of the organs, dulzians and harpsichords. Then there is the more mannered Lauda Jerusalem, sitting mildly between the native pieces like a slightly bewildered Spanish viceregal official in lace cuffs, up until the final Gloria Patri when it breaks into an exuberant indigenous coda.

In the final work, the pleasant if generic piece Sagrado N. (you fill in the saint of the day, in this case, Sagrado Francisco), one gets the bizarre intrusion of Bolivian rattles and bird-calls. It seems that the mission Indians occasionally liked bringing noisemakers to Matins to interrupt the music in a sincere, if perhaps surreal and disruptive display of faith. This was not received fondly by the clergy, especially since sometimes uproarous dancing broke out. I suppose it shows that liturgical abuses never change.

While I enjoy the sacred pieces the best, the little songs from Moxos in honor of the king and queen are rather pleasant. Serving as the principal content of the album, they display an ossified baroque style, sometime vigorous and sometimes as gentle as a lullaby. Several instrumental works are also included, sounding like ethereal transcriptions of the heavier melodies of the European baroque. Their sound is frothy and even platonic, full of high violins, flutes and harps. Their notes seem to float over the barren chacos of Paraguay on the backs of splendidly naïve baroque cherubim.

The centerpiece, though, is the apex of the musical homage to the new queen, the so-called Loa. It brings together virtually every flourish from the indigenous and European repertoires with amazing concordance. Organs, maracas, rattles, violins and viols play together without the slightest contradiction. It stands as a monument to the cultural genius of the long-gone Jesuits who had taught the Indians to play with both native exuberance and European precision.

The rediscovery of these works, especially today when we are only beginning to understand the nature of the New Evangelization begun at Vatican II, speaks volumes about the nature of enculturation. Rather than simply intabulating mass texts into foreign tongues, clumsily trying to translate theological concepts into vernacular music, or, for that matter, dropping unadulterated European hymns on them, the Jesuits of Paraguay created a whole new musical culture intelligible both to Spanish creoles and Indian converts, a truly Catholic sound that merits comparison in its unexpected sophistication with the baroque of Europe.

Also, for that matter, that a handful of isolated Jesuits and Indians in a dirt-poor outpost of the Spanish empire could do light-years better than the average suburban parish with all the resources of the twenty-first century at its disposal, well, it says an awful lot.