Latin American Baroque: Performance as a post-colonial act?

Abstract

Vernacular villancicos featuring African characters, such as A siolo fl asiquiyo by the Mexican composer Juan Gutirrez de Padilla (1590-1664), have become staples highlights, even of the Latin American Baroque repertory. Yet there has been little consideration of the historical meanings of these colonialist representations of African slaves or of the ethical and practical issues surrounding their performance today, often in contexts where both performers and audiences are almost exclusively white. This has led to widespread misapprehensions of such pieces as a kind of early Afro-Latin world music. This article sets out to explore some of the ways in which a greater mindfulness of the realities of colonialism might impact on performing and listening to colonial Baroque music, and to refl ect on the broader signifi cance that this might have for the notion of Historically Informed Performance. What sort of historical information should be brought to bear on performance, and what options are open to performers if this information is profoundly disturbing to modern sensibilities? By drawing on post-colonial approaches to music and literature and on debates surrounding the performance of problematic 19th-century operas, performers and listeners may embrace the musical equivalent of Edward Said's contrapuntal reading and thereby come to understand and appreciate works such as A siolo fl asiquiyo in all their complexity, rather than erasing their unpalatable historical context and functions. In the multi-cultural, post-colonial modern world, the unproblematized re-presentation of centuries-old racial stereotypes and caricatures is no longer ethically or artistically defensible, however appealing the garb in which they appear. © The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.