Speaker: Roger Mathew Grant
Title: "The Ritornello as Settlement Form: Chiquitano Instrumental Sonatas of the 18th Century"
Time and Place: Friday, October 21, 5:00 PM, Nabenhauer Recital Hall (Whalen 4308)
This event is free and open to the public.
During the late eighteenth century, Indigenous musicians in Chiquitania—modern day Bolivia—composed a corpus of trio sonatas in the context of Jesuit mission colonization. Today these sonatas are part of the Archivo Musical de Chiquitos (AMCh), and they have been performed and recorded by instrumental groups from across the Americas and Europe. Like other musical artifacts from this archive, they play an important role in contemporary Bolivian cultural campaigns celebrating the legendary flourishing of the eighteenth-century Jesuit missions.
What can these instrumental sonatas tell us about colonial settlement? What can they indicate to us about the spaces and places in which they were performed? In this paper I attempt to answer these questions in a detailed study of form in the corpus of Chiquitano instrumental sonatas from the AMCh. I aim to demonstrate how the ritornello—or refrain—creates a replication pattern that is conducive to the settler spatial logic of the missions. The sonatas in this corpus employ highly distinctive formal structures which rely principally on the return to the ritornello, structuring an inner and outer in a kind of repetition ritual. It is the form of this ritornello act that I endeavor to interpret as a sound of settlement.
In Chiquitania, Indigenous authors echoed the ritual orientation of their mission’s physical spatial logic in the form of their musical compositions. In these sonatas, the return of the ritornello creates a hierophany—or a manifestation of the sacred—within a set of concentric musical passages. The hierophany accomplished in the sound of these sonatas helps us to grasp their social role within the built environment of the mission. Because these works are some of the only surviving eighteenth-century artifacts of Indigenous authorship, they are vital to our understanding of the asymmetrical power structures within mission social life under Jesuit colonization.
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Roger Mathew Grant is Professor of Music and Dean of Arts and Humanities at Wesleyan University. His research focuses on eighteenth-century music and the history of music theory, and his journal articles have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, Music Theory Spectrum, and the Journal of Music Theory. His first book, Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era, won the 2016 Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Music Theory. His most recent book, Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical, was selected for “The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory” for 2020. He received his PhD in Music Theory from the University of Pennsylvania and his Bachelor’s in Music Theory from Ithaca College.