INTRODUCTION
In his will of 3 September 1719 Juan de Navas, distinguished musician of the Madrid court, stated:
Declaro que el año pasado de mil setecientos y quince remití a los reinos de las Indias por mano de don Francisco Guidal residente en Cádiz, un cajón grande de diferentes papeles curiosos de música, en que tuve gran trabajo para su composición, y hasta ahora no me han pagado ni entregado maravedíes algunos de su venta, por lo cual mando se esté con cuidado y a la vista para que se cobre aquello que produjere la venta de dichos papeles.Footnote 1
I declare that last year, 1715, I sent to the Indies, with don Francisco Guidal, resident of Cádiz, a large crate containing assorted interesting pieces of sheet music, which I worked hard to compose, and for the sale of which I have not yet been paid even a penny, and thus I ask that you keep an eye out and charge anyone who puts the said sheet music up for sale.
This document, unknown until now, shows us that Spanish composers from the beginning of the eighteenth century were well aware that America was a possible destination for the music they wrote. Furthermore, in Navas's case there is a material coincidence between his words and known musical sources, since thirteen of his tonos are preserved in a manuscript at the Sutro Library in San Francisco that in all likelihood came from Mexico,Footnote 2 and the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile preserves one of the three known copies of his important zarzuela Destinos vencen finezas, performed for the first time in 1698 and printed the following year in Madrid.Footnote 3 Thus the preservation of these sources in America seems to derive, at least in some way, from the composer himself.
In the present article I aim to show that something similar occurred with music written for the baroque guitar and other instruments, although the sources I have found are less conclusive than those for Navas, and further that baroque guitar repertoire continued to be cultivated in Mexico City and Lima until the beginning of the nineteenth century, coexisting with more ‘modern’ music by composers such as Johann Christian Bach, Luigi Boccherini and Joseph Haydn. In the first section I examine documents from different archives, many of them unknown, showing that a wide range of music from Europe was known in the New World during the eighteenth century, and how different musicians, merchants and other individuals contributed to its transmission. In the second section I review two musical sources preserved in Lima and copied around 1800 that confirm most of the ideas presented in the first section and offer further insights on the reception of that music. All the manuscript documents and sources referred to in this article are collated in Appendix 1.
OLD AND NEW MUSIC FROM SPAIN AND CENTRAL EUROPE
Of all the music for baroque guitar composed in Spain, that with the strongest circumstantial relationship to America is probably by Santiago de Murcia. This connection is demonstrated by many facts. First, the manuscript known as ‘Códice Saldívar No. 4’, which includes works by Murcia, was found in León, Guanajuato, by the musicologist Gabriel Saldívar in 1943. Secondly, the manuscript ‘Passacalles y obras de guitarra’, attributed to Murcia on the cover, dated 1732 and now preserved at the British Library, was bought in the late nineteenth century in Mexico by the British collector Julian Marshall. Thirdly, a copy of Murcia's Resumen de acompañar la parte con la guitarra, preserved today at Los Angeles Public Library, was probably acquired in Mexico by Cornelius F. Borton. Fourth, the Resumen de acompañar is quoted by Juan Antonio de Vargas y Guzmán in a copy of his guitar book dated Veracruz (Mexico) in 1776. Fifth, manuscript 1560 of the Biblioteca Nacional de México includes several pieces taken from the Resumen de acompañar, in addition to a gigue by Corelli that also appears in ‘Passacalles y obras de guitarra’, these being the only two sources that preserve a guitar transcription of that piece; and sixth, the most recently found manuscript by Murcia, entitled ‘Cifras selectas de guitarra’ and dated 1722, was discovered by the present writer in Santiago de Chile.Footnote 4
This connection with the New World, and especially with Mexico, has led several scholars to conjecture that Murcia had travelled and died there,Footnote 5 but in recent studies I have proved that he lived in Madrid his whole life. Indeed, it was in the capital of Spain that he was born in 1673, got married in 1695, worked at the court from 1704 to 1706, gave his declaration of poverty in 1729 and died in 1739.Footnote 6 The only exception to this is provided by his Resumen de acompañar, which was printed in Antwerp in 1714, probably to elude the music-printing privilege that José de Torres held in Spain, as Juan José Carreras has recently proposed;Footnote 7 nevertheless, a little later Murcia asked Antonio Literes for an ‘approval’ that was printed in 1717 in Madrid, including the author's prologue. Consequently, it seems that Murcia did not travel to the New World, but his music sources did; and the many connections noted above with Mexico suggest that this was not by chance, but as a result of the contacts that Murcia had established with merchants and other people who traded and lived there.
In previous publications I have proposed two possible candidates. The first is Jácome Francisco Andriani, an Italian aristocrat resident in Madrid to whom Murcia dedicated his Resumen de acompañar, thanking him for taking his music from its draft stages ‘to the smoky lights of the press’ (‘a las ahumadas luces de la prensa’). Andriani, indeed, had many contacts in America, perhaps because he was ‘Director y administrador general de las rentas reales de las aduanas de España’ (General Director and Administrator of the Royal Income from the Customs of Spain). Further, during the 1710s he corresponded with his brother-in-law, Juan Francisco Ramírez de Castro, who lived in Mexico City, as well as Fray Juan Murillo, a Franciscan priest resident in Santiago de Chile, where the manuscript ‘Cifras selectas de guitarra’ subsequently came to light.Footnote 8
The second candidate is represented by Pedro and Íñigo de Garaicochea, two half-brothers to whom Murcia left part of his music papers in his declaration of poverty granted in 1729. Although they were born in the Philippines, they lived all their childhood in Mexico, and in 1728 they were still collecting the rents from the house that their father, General Juan de Garaicochea, owned there.Footnote 9
Although this remains conjecture, the census (padrón) of the parish of El Sagrario in Mexico City has enabled me to supply additional information that somewhat reinforces this second alternative: in 1730, one year after Murcia gave his declaration of poverty, Pedro de Garaicochea was living in Mexico City at the house of Juan de Najare, and in 1731, we find him living in the same city at the house of Francisco de Guevara.Footnote 10 The fact that in 1728 he deposited his will in Madrid suggests that he frequently travelled across the Atlantic, a fact that is undoubtedly connected to his having been a merchant, to the extent that a subsequent document mentions him as the owner of the ship ‘La galga’.Footnote 11
But besides Andriani and the Garaicocheas, on whom we have some biographical information, there is another acquaintance of Murcia who has never been identified: Joseph Álvarez de Saavedra, the recipient of Murcia's ‘Passacalles y obras de guitarra’, as indicated on the cover.Footnote 12 Craig H. Russell has suggested that he might be the same person as Joseph Álvarez del Valle, a knight of the Order of Santiago who resided in Madrid during the first half of the eighteenth century. According to the prueba de nobleza (proof of nobility) required for his entrance into that order in 1693, he was the son of Luis Álvarez del Valle y Fernández and Isabel González de Rellán de Saavedra.Footnote 13 Russell's hypothesis seems possible, since a knight of Santiago had to be someone financially and politically powerful enough to deserve such a dedication. There are, however, two counterarguments: first, we should accept that Murcia would be calling him by the third surname of his mother (Saavedra), instead of the two surnames of his father as in his prueba de nobleza, and second, it would be difficult to explain why his membership of that order was not mentioned by Murcia on the cover, as he does for Andriani in his Resumen de acompañar. For these reasons, it is worth considering another bit of information taken from the aforementioned censuses of El Sagrario: the marriage made between Joseph Álvarez and Juana Ignacia Saavedra, who lived in Mexico City around 1729–1736Footnote 14 and may well be the parents of Murcia's recipient. After all, since ‘Passacalles y obras’ appeared in Mexico, it is likely that Murcia dedicated this manuscript to someone resident there. I hope future research will allow me to complete this hypothesis with more conclusive facts about this person.
But Murcia was not the only composer who saw his guitar sources reaching America. On the basis of Inquisition records preserved at the Archivo General de Indias, Jania Sarno has documented the shipping to Mexico, in 1699, of Luz y norte musical, a book for guitar and harp written by the priest Lucas Ruiz de Ribayaz and printed in Madrid in 1677.Footnote 15 The same records show the shipping to Tierra Firme (the name given during the colonial period to the region including the isthmus of Panama, Venezuela and parts of Colombia) of a book without author information entitled ‘Zifras de guitarra’ in 1723.Footnote 16 In addition, another source of Mexican origin, the manuscript for cittern and guitar by Sebastián de Aguirre, also known as ‘Códice Saldívar No. 2’,Footnote 17 includes a sarabande apparently taken from Instrucción de música, the famous book for guitar written by Gaspar Sanz and published in Spain between 1674 and 1697.Footnote 18
The fact that Sanz's work was known in America around 1700 is interesting but should not surprise us, considering the connections we have outlined between Murcia and Mexico. But its continued circulation in America a century after being published may be more striking. In fact, a document I have found in the Archivo General de la Nación del Perú shows the sending of a shipment of books from Spain to Peru in 1779 for the use of don Pedro Muñoz de Arjona at Lambayeque, a village situated seven hundred kilometres north of Lima. Among those books were several ‘artes de canto llano’ (arts of plainchant) one of them attributed to Jerónimo Romero, and, what is more interesting, a volume entitled ‘Instrucción de Música para guitarra’ – in other words, the book by Gaspar Sanz.Footnote 19
It might be thought that the continued cultivation of music for baroque guitar in the late eighteenth century represents something exceptional, but once again, the presence of Murcia's music refutes this assumption: the inventory of goods of Dr José Ignacio Bartolache,Footnote 20 made in Mexico City in 1790, includes the Resumen de acompañar, confirming that this source was known there at the time. In this same inventory we find music from composers who were contemporary with Murcia or even earlier, such as Arcangelo Corelli, Pablo Nassarre or Pedro de Ulloa; but there are also later figures such as Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Pietro Locatelli or Ignacio de Jerusalem, as well as modern works listed generically as ‘Sonatas, Arias, Conciertos, y otras piezas’ (sonatas, arias, concertos and other pieces).
This coexistence of older and newer repertoire is quite characteristic of the Mexican situation, as similar documents that have been made known by other scholars prove: in the inventory of Marqués de Jaral, made in 1782, we find music mainly by Corelli and Vivaldi, but also by more recent composers such as Boccherini and Haydn;Footnote 21 and in the impressive and well-known inventory of José Fernández de Jáuregui's bookshop made in 1801, we find thousand of pieces by ‘modern’ composers such as Cannabich, Carl Stamitz, Johann Christian Bach, Boccherini and Haydn, along with a section of ‘antique music’ that includes works by Corelli, Albinoni, Vivaldi and Locatelli.Footnote 22 This also applies to the guitar repertoire. While Murcia's Resumen de acompañar was still available in late eighteenth-century Mexico City, the books that the merchant Francisco Rico took there in 1803 included twenty copies of Fernando Ferandiere's Arte de tocar la guitarra (Madrid, 1799), even though the inventory mistook the author's last name for ‘Fernández’.Footnote 23
However, I have been able to find new information related to Lima showing that the coexistence of ‘antique’ and ‘modern’ repertoire was not a feature distinctive to Mexico City. In 1779 the Galician merchant Antonio Helme, resident in Lima, received a shipment that included more than five hundred ‘overtures’ (‘oberturas’), trios and other musical works, distributed in several volumes, composed by figures such as Boccherini, J. C. Bach, Cannabich, Abel and others. There were also, among other anonymous pieces, four books with sonatas, arias, ‘arietas’ and overtures, twenty-six musical editions (‘26 estampas para la música’) and some instruments (two violins and two wooden flutes).Footnote 24 Thus in the same year that Sanz's Instrucción de música arrived in Peru, there were various symphonic and chamber pieces by much more recent authors arriving as well. (See Appendix 2 for a listing of the music contained in this shipment that was attributed to specific composers.)
A later inventory, made in 1787, complements the latter, as it shows the arrival in Lima of a shipment that included twenty-three symphonies, twelve quartets, eleven trios, eleven duets, eleven quintets, two overtures, four concertos, one sonata, one ‘nocturne’ and twelve arias, without authorial indications.Footnote 25 This document also includes 120 tonadillas, a feature that, along with the twelve ‘seguidillas and tonadillas’ included in Helme's shipment, shows not only a confluence between old and new music, but also between ‘foreign’ and ‘Spanish’ genres.
Finally, an interesting aspect of both shipments is that, with the exception of tonadillas and seguidillas, the music they included was listed under the label of ‘foreign goods’ (géneros extranjeros), implying that it had been printed outside Spain. This shows that at the end of the eighteenth century, merchants and members of the Lima elite were able to gain direct access to the most recent works printed in London, Paris, Amsterdam and Vienna, a fact that may be related to the progressive liberalization of trade that took place during the last decades of the eighteenth century under the reigns of Charles III and Charles IV.Footnote 26 But above all, it implies that these cities of central Europe were at that time the main referents in musical and cultural terms for the inhabitants of Lima, instead of Madrid or Seville; and this represented an alteration of the established order, according to which Spain had to be the zenith of the Spanish empire. I will return to this point later.
TWO CASE STUDIES: MANUSCRIPTS FOR KEYBOARD AND GUITAR
It might be thought that the discovery of composers such as Sanz and Murcia in such late eighteenth-century inventories indicates their presence, but not necessarily their performance; in other words, their appearance in merchants’ shipments or private libraries could be interpreted as a sort of erudite collecting that would not necessarily have reflected the musical practice of the moment.
At least two extant musical sources refute this assumption. The first is a manuscript for keyboard (hereafter LIMA1) preserved in the Franciscan Convent of Lima.Footnote 27 Judging by the handwriting, it was copied at the beginning of the nineteenth century for the use of Josef Maria de Flores y Basquez, an unidentified musician whose name appears at the end of the book. As is the case with Helme's inventory from 1779, this source includes pieces by ‘modern composers’, such as a ‘Sonata II’ attributed to Haydn (‘Del Sr. Ayden’, f. 1r), three sonatas by Muzio Clementi (‘compuestas por Clementi’, f. 8r) and an ‘overture’ entitled ‘La Chase’ [sic] by Haydn as well (f. 23r), also called ‘Symphony’ (‘Sinfonia’) in f. 30v, showing the ambiguity between the two terms at that time.
Even though it is not my purpose to study this manuscript in detail, an overview of its contents can shed additional light on the reception of instrumental music in Lima. The first piece (f. 2) corresponds to Haydn's sonata hXVI: 22. It was composed in 1773 along with other five sonatas (hXVI: 21, 23–26) dedicated to his patron, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, marking a departure ‘from his earlier practice of composing sonatas for students and other private uses’. These pieces were originally published in Vienna by Kurzböck in 1774 (hereafter KURZ), representing the first Viennese publication of music by Haydn. None the less, they became better known through Hummel's Berlin edition (hereafter HUMM) as Op. 13 Nos 1–6, published in 1778.Footnote 28 The title of ‘Sonata II’ in LIMA1, indeed, comes literally from this latter edition, which appears to be the primary source for the version preserved in Lima; further, both HUMM and LIMA1 use the modern clefs for keyboard music (G and F), unlike KURZ, which follows Haydn's autographFootnote 29 in using the C clef for the upper staff. A possible counterargument might be found in bar 23, where LIMA1 includes an F♯ also present in KURZ, but omitted in HUMM (see Figure 1); but this is not a conclusive argument against considering HUMM as the primary source, since such a mistake could easily have been detected and corrected by any competent copyist.Footnote 30 Nor is the fact that in bar 25 LIMA1 includes an ornament also present in KURZ, but absent in HUMM, since some of the ornaments included in LIMA1 are absent in both these editions (as in bar 43).
Figure 1 Haydn, Sonata in E major hXVI:22/i, bars 23–24, in LIMA1 (Archivo San Francisco de Lima, Musical Manuscript VI-PM 1, f. 1v). Used by permission
Some details, however, suggest that LIMA1 was not copied directly from HUMM, but from an intermediate manuscript version derived from it. For example, the erroneous placement of c♯1 in bar 22 (compare Figures 2 and 3) can be understood if the passage was copied from a manuscript version where their placement was also wrong, or at least not totally clear.
Figure 2 Haydn, Sonata in E major hXVI:22/i, bar 2, in HUMM (Berlin, 1778). © The British Library Board, G.271.f.(4.)
Figure 3 Haydn, Sonata in E major hXVI:22/i, bar 2, in LIMA1 (Archivo San Francisco de Lima, Musical Manuscript VI-PM 1, f. 1)
But the most interesting variants of LIMA1 are those that do not coincide either with KURZ or HUMM. Most of these correspond to transpositions made in order to avoid the highest or lowest notes of the piece. On the one hand, in the upper staff LIMA1 transposes to the lower octave fragments of bars 28–30, 35–36 and 38–39. In the last of these passages, KURZ and HUMM indicate the repetition of three chords an octave higher, reaching e3 then d♯3, but LIMA1 places the first version one octave lower then simply replaces the repetition with a rest (compare Figures 4 and 5). The third movement of this sonata shows this same tendency, since we find a fragment transposed to the lower octave in bar 44 and a section of six bars omitted between bars 70 and 71, both passages that originally reached d♯3 and e3. On the other hand, in the lower staff LIMA1 omits an F♯1 in bar 64 of the first movement that is included in both KURZ and HUMM, and in the third movement, bar 70, it removes a G1 also included in both editions. Consequently, and in spite of two exceptions that we can find,Footnote 31 the keyboard for which LIMA1's version was prepared reached only as far as d3 – a note found several times in the manuscriptFootnote 32 – in the upper register and possibly A1 in the lower register.Footnote 33
Figure 4 Haydn, Sonata in E major hXVI:22/i, bars 38–39, in LIMA1 (Archivo San Francisco de Lima, Musical Manuscript VI-PM 1, f. 2)
Figure 5 Haydn, Sonata in E major hXVI:22/i, bars 38–39, in HUMM
Clementi's sonatas (f. 8) correspond to his Op. 21, originally for piano (or harpsichord), flute and violoncello, published for the first time in London by Longman in 1788.Footnote 34 LIMA1 shows the independent circulation of the piano part as a sonata in itself, which is certainly not by chance, since, as indicated on the cover, these trios were conceived by the composer as pieces for ‘piano-forte or harpsichord, with accompaniments for a flute & violoncello’. In other words, woodwind and string instruments had complementary parts that could be easily omitted. The versions of the works found in LIMA1 show several other interesting aspects. First, they include some variants that are difficult to explain on practical grounds. For example, bar 23 of the second movement of the third sonata, which extends the duration of the phrase and increases the harmonic tension before the arrival on the dominant of the new key (G major), does not appear in Longman's edition (compare Figures 6 and 7). And second, LIMA1 keeps the original range of the piano part in these sonatas, repeatedly reaching e3 and even f3 in the upper register and G1, G♯1 and A1 in the lower.Footnote 35 Consequently, Haydn's and Clementi's sonatas were copied or derived from different sources or stemmata.Footnote 36
Figure 6 Clementi, Sonata in C major Op. 21 No. 3/ii, bars 22–24, Longman edition (London[, 1788]). © The British Library Board, G.161.a.(1.)
Figure 7 Clementi, Sonata in C major Op. 21 No. 3/ii, bars 22–25, in LIMA1 (Archivo San Francisco de Lima, Musical Manuscript VI-PM 1, f. 20v)
The ‘Overtura La Chase’ (f. 23) is a keyboard arrangement of Haydn's Symphony No. 73. As is well known, its title is authentic but refers mainly to the fourth movement, originally composed as an overture to La fedeltà premiata, a ‘dramma pastorale giocoso’ performed for the first time in 1781.Footnote 37 Robert Stevenson accounts for a manuscript copy of that symphony by José Cayetano Carreño that was possibly used in Caracas before 1800, reflecting its wide circulation in America at that time.Footnote 38 Since an arrangement by ‘Mr. Percy’ for the keyboard (organ, harpsichord or fortepiano) had been published in London in 1790,Footnote 39 one might assume that the version found in LIMA1 had been copied from this edition. However, there are too many variants: for example, in bars 40–41 LIMA1 enriches the harmony by adding notes to the right hand, and some bars later (55–57) it thickens the texture by adding parallel thirds and sixths that increase the technical difficulty.
Two further pieces of information allow us to assert that LIMA1 was not copied directly from Percy's edition. First, in bar 24 of the Andante LIMA1 includes a double suspension and repetition signs absent from this edition, but included in Haydn's original version for the orchestra.Footnote 40 Second, after bar 14 of this movement the copyist of LIMA1 had again notated bars 8–10, but struck them out when he noticed his error (Figure 8). Now, in Percy's arrangement (page 24) the first half of bar 8 was placed at the very end of the first staff system, while the second half was displaced into the following line (see Figure 9). A logical explanation for this mistake is that in the source from which this movement was copied in LIMA1, bar 8 was in the same staff system as bar 14, so that the copyist, instead of going to the next line, returned to the same one, repeating its initial bars.Footnote 41 Once again, the LIMA1 version departs from the published version of the musical text.
Figure 8 Haydn, Symphony in D major hI: 73, ‘La chasse’/ii, copying mistake in LIMA1 (Archivo San Francisco de Lima, Musical Manuscript VI-PM 1, f. 25v)
Figure 9 Haydn, Symphony in D major hI: 73, ‘La chasse’/ii, placement of bars 8 and 14 in Percy's arrangement, ‘Sig.r Haydns Grand Orchestre Sinfonie La Chasse as Performed at the Nobility's Concerts; Adapted for the Organ, Harpsichord, or Piano Forte’ (London, 1790) (Musiksammlung der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, SH.Haydn.112, page 24). Used by permission
But the more interesting aspect of that manuscript for my concerns may be the presence, along with Haydn's and Clementi's works, of an organ piece (Obra para Org.º) attributed to one ‘Sor. Cipote’ (f. 5v). Since this author is totally unknown, one could think that the copyist mistook such a name for ‘Cipole’ – in other words, Domenico Zipoli, the well-known Jesuit composer who worked in Italy and South America, and died in Córdoba (currently in Argentina) in 1726.Footnote 42 Indeed, the piece attributed to Cipote corresponds to a ‘Canzona’ in G minor included in the first part of Zipoli's Sonate d’Involatura per organo e cimbalo (Rome, 1716). If one considers that Clementi's sonatas were published in 1788, this manuscript therefore includes music created seven decades apart, which explains, among other things, the sharp stylistic contrast between these works.
The second musical source to be dealt with here is a manuscript for guitar preserved in Lima and entitled ‘Libro de zifra’,Footnote 43 edited by Javier Echecopar in 1992.Footnote 44 It assembles several pieces in ‘modern’ style, such as a group of sonatas that includes one attributed to the Catalonian musician Luis Misón (1727–1776).Footnote 45 Two other pieces can be also considered of modern origin, since they appear in Juan Antonio de Vargas y Guzmán's ‘Explicación de la guitarra’, copied in Cádiz around 1773: the ‘Marcha de Nápoles’ (Naples march) (f. 1v) and the ‘Minuet de Conde de las Torres’ (f. 3v).Footnote 46 The first concordance is especially relevant, since it allows to clear up many of the inaccurate or confusing passages that make the version found in the ‘Libro de zifra’ virtually unplayable.Footnote 47 As for the ‘Minuet’, it was considered by Echecopar to be a piece of local origin, since according to him, the Conde de las Torres resided in Lima by that time. However, its inclusion in Vargas y Guzmán's book makes it very unlikely that this piece was composed there.
Both the aforementioned sonatas and these two concordances fit well in a manuscript copied around 1800, since Vargas y Guzmán was a ‘modern’ author who composed in a galant style, yet we also find a group of minuets that seem to have been composed much earlier. Furthermore, even though the use of an additional line over the tablature staff indicates that the music was intended for a six-course guitar, this is only used on a few exceptional occasions. In the first minuet (f. 1r), for instance, the additional line is used only twice, at the end of each section, in order to play the sixth open course, and in another minuet (f. 3r) the sixth course is used only once, in spite of the copyist having indicated that the piece would be of a ‘new’ origin by entitling it ‘Otro nuevo’ – in other words, ‘another new [minuet]’. But going beyond these stylistic arguments, the presence of ‘old’ music is confirmed by a minuet copied near the end of the manuscript, corresponding to a ‘Menuet de trompas’ included in the ‘Códice Saldívar No. 4’.Footnote 48 This need not imply that such a minuet is by Murcia, given that he usually borrowed minuets and other non-Spanish genres from other composers and sources;Footnote 49 but whatever the case, the inclusion of that piece in a practical source, copied around 1800, confirms that older pieces from the past for guitar and other instruments continued to be played in Lima at the end of the colonial period.
CONCLUSIONS
Although many aspects deserve further research, the information and ideas presented in the previous pages allow us to draw several interesting conclusions, as well as offering new hypotheses that can be the object of future research.
One of these, anticipated at the beginning of this article, is that America was an intended destination for instrumental music composed and published in Spain and central Europe. While this is evident in the case of Juan de Navas, other data, such as the strong connections between Murcia's sources and Mexico and the identity of the music included in shipments to Mexico City and Lima at the end of the eighteenth century, suggest that this was true for other composers too, such as Murcia himself and, much later, J. C. Bach, Boccherini and Haydn. As a result, their music arrived in the New World soon after it had been composed and/or published.
At the same time, both the manuscript I have labelled as LIMA1 and the ‘Libro de zifra’ for guitar show that this music was not received by local composers in a passive way, but underwent a process of transformation and updating that involved different sources. Haydn's ‘Sonata II’ and the three sonatas by Clementi, for example, derived from different sources or stemmata, since the first was adapted to an instrument with a more limited register, while Clementi's pieces kept the original register of Hummel's edition. Additionally, some of the variants found in LIMA1 do not seem to be susceptible of explanation on practical grounds, but rather in the light of aesthetic preferences that may reflect the reception context for these pieces.
Another interesting aspect relates to the origin of the music that was imported. While at the beginning of the eighteenth century it seems to have been predominantly Spanish, around 1800 it was mainly from central Europe. This more direct access to the music printed in London, Amsterdam, Paris and Vienna may be related to the opening of intercontinental trade during this time, as noted above. But even more important is the fact that this represented an alteration of the established order, according to which Spain was the main referent for colonial people of the New World. Now the criollos of Lima, Mexico City and other centres were looking to the main cities of central Europe for cultural models, rather than to Madrid or Seville. Consequently, I would argue – as a hypothesis that may nourish future research – that knowledge and performance of overtures, trios and other genres of this kind represented for the criollos a way not only to match, but to surpass the conquistadors. In other words, the consumption of this kind of music might be interpreted as a sign of an increasing sense of criollo identity separate from Spain, something that would lead to the processes of independence and to the creation of the modern national states.
Finally, both documentary and musical sources cited here show that new repertoires did not replace the old, as we frequently assume, but instead coexisted with them, giving rise to a diverse and complex musical practice under which the music of Ferandiere, J. C. Bach and Haydn was performed in conjunction with that of Sanz, Murcia, Zipoli and Corelli. And, while I have mainly focused on Lima and Mexico City, other studies have shown that something similar happened in Madrid and London with the music of Corelli, Handel and others.Footnote 50 Consequently, if scholars such as Leo Treitler or, more recently, Jim SamsonFootnote 51 have warned us against the linear view of history as a kind of progress, the cases of Mexico City and Lima from the late eighteenth century confirm that their broader, non-linear view is the more plausible. If we were to trace a strict evolutionary line from Vivaldi to Haydn, to Beethoven, to Wagner – to mention a few emblematic composers — or from Sanz to Murcia, to Ferandiere in the field of guitar music, this would severely distort the information actually found in the musical and historical sources cited here. Therefore, this brief review of the sources for guitar and other instruments that reached America during the eighteenth century should invite us to rethink not only the social and cultural relations between the Old and the New World, but also the way we have traditionally conceived the history of music.
APPENDICES
1. Manuscript sources
Archivo General de Indias, Contratación 674. Inquisition records, with extensive lists of books shipped from Spain to the New World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Archivo General de Indias, Contratación, 5473, N. 1, R. 54, available at Portal de Archivos Españoles <http://pares.mcu.es> (24 March 2015), permission for travel to New Spain for the merchant Juan Francisco Vidal.
Archivo General de Indias, Contratación 5524, N. 1, R. 84, available at Portal de Archivos Españoles <http://pares.mcu.es> (16 September 2014), permission for travelling to Peru for Pedro Muñoz de Arjona, ‘Corregidor de la provincia de Saña’.
Archivo General de la Nación de México, Indiferente virreinal, Civil, caja 674, record No. 5. Letter from 22 June 1754 to Adrián Ximénez, mentioning ‘Garaycochea’ (in all likelihood Pedro) as the owner of the ship ‘La galga’.
Archivo General de la Nación de México, Inquisición, vol. 1416, fols 92–102v. List of books shipped from Spain to Mexico City in 1803 by the merchant Francisco Rico, including Fernando Ferandiere's Arte de tocar la guitarra (Madrid, 1799) and plainchant treatises by Jerónimo Romero (Madrid, 1761) and Francisco Marcos y Navas (Madrid, 1777).
Archivo General de la Nación del Perú, Real Aduana, C 16.632–287, no foliation, list of the books shipped from Spain to Lima in 1779 by the merchant Antonio Helme, including more than five hundred pieces of music (see Appendix 2) and some instruments.
Archivo General de la Nación del Perú, Real Aduana, C 16.633–291, no foliation, list of the books shipped from Spain to Lambayeque (Peru) in 1779, for the use of Pedro Muñoz de Arjona, including Gaspar Sanz's Instrucción de música (Zaragoza, 1674–1697) and some books of plainchant.
Archivo General de la Nación del Perú, Real Aduana, C 16.746–823, no foliation, list of music and other goods shipped from Spain to Lima in 1787, by Juan Vives y Echevarría, including symphonies and chamber music.
Archivo Histórico de Protocolos de Madrid, Protocolo 15179, fols 451–454v. This includes Juan de Navas's will of 3 September 1719 and his ‘codicilo’ of 6 September of that year.
Archivo Histórico del Arzobispado de México, Parroquia del Sagrario, Microfilm 256, census (padrón) of 1729; and Microfilm 257, census of 1730, 1731 and 1736. It includes extensive lists of the inhabitants of ‘El Sagrario’, the main district of Mexico City at that time.
LIMA1 = Archivo San Francisco de Lima, Partituras musicales, VI-PM 1, manuscript with keyboard music copied around 1800 for the use of ‘Josef Maria de Flores y Basquez’.
Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología e Historia del Perú, 780 Mis M 371, ‘Libro de zifra’. Manuscript for the guitar copied around 1800, apparently in Lima.
2. Music shipped to Lima by Antonio Helme in 1779
Source: Archivo General de la Nación del Perú, Real Aduana, C 16.632–287
