Baroque music beyond Europe: missions, syncretism, and fusion

The world as a stage

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while Bach was writing cantatas in Leipzig and Handel was filling theatres in London, something extraordinary was happening in places those composers never visited and perhaps barely imagined: in the jungles of Paraguay, in the mountains of the Andes, along the coasts of West Africa, on the islands of the Caribbean, in the cities of Portuguese India, and across the Pacific archipelagos, European Baroque music was encountering musics that had evolved over millennia with no contact with the Western world.

The outcome of those encounters was neither pure imposition nor the intact preservation of any of the traditions involved. It was something more interesting and more complex: a series of unique syntheses, each with its own logic, that produced musics which were not European, nor indigenous, nor African, but all three at once and none of them entirely.

That process — which we now call musical syncretism — is one of the most fascinating and least told chapters in the history of music. And its relevance extends far beyond the Baroque: the fusions that began in the Jesuit missions of the seventeenth century lie at the root of much of the music the world listens to today.

The Jesuit missions: a musical utopia in the jungle

Of all the experiments in musical encounter between Europe and the rest of the world during the Baroque period, the best documented and perhaps the most remarkable took place in the heart of South America: the Jesuit reductions of Paraguay, the present-day north of Argentina, and parts of Brazil and Bolivia. Between 1609 and 1767 — when the Society of Jesus was expelled from Spanish dominions — the Jesuits established in that region a network of more than thirty towns organized around Guaraní communities. The project was, by the standards of its time, a utopia: self-sufficient communities where indigenous people lived according to a model of Christian life that the Jesuits considered purer than that of Europe itself, sheltered from slavery and the excesses of the colonial system.

Music occupied an absolutely central place in that project. The Jesuits — many of them musicians trained in the finest European traditions — quickly discovered that the Guaraní had an extraordinary musical sensitivity and a capacity for learning that astonished them. Father Antonio Sepp, a Bavarian musician and composer who arrived at the missions in 1691, wrote admiringly of how his Guaraní students learned to play the violin, harp, guitar, and wind instruments in a time that would have surprised any European teacher.

What was built in the missions was, in musical terms, something unprecedented: a tradition of European vocal and instrumental polyphony — masses, motets, villancicos, processional music — performed by Guaraní musicians who had made it their own in ways that went well beyond mere imitation. The musical archives of the missions, partly rediscovered in the twentieth century, reveal compositions that blend European Baroque forms with melodic and rhythmic elements of non-European origin. We cannot say with certainty whether those inflections are Guaraní or whether they were conscious adaptations made by the Jesuits themselves, but the result is a music that unmistakably sounds like both.

The destruction of the missions following the Jesuit expulsion in 1767 was also a cultural and musical destruction. Many of the instruments built in the workshops of the reductions — some of them of extraordinary craftsmanship — were lost or scattered. The manuscripts that survived did so almost by accident. But the tradition did not disappear entirely: it persisted in community memory, in religious festivals, in the ways of singing that can still be traced in the popular music of Paraguay and northern Argentina.

The Baroque in the Andes: chirimías, drums, and saints

The Jesuit missions of Paraguay were the most systematic experiment, but they were not the only encounter between the European Baroque and the musics of the Americas. Throughout Spanish colonial America, church music was the principal vehicle of that encounter, and the results were as varied as the territories in which they occurred.

In the Andes, the fusion took particular forms. The chirimía — a double-reed wind instrument, a relative of the medieval European shawm, which the Spanish had brought from the Arab-Andalusian tradition — was adopted by Andean indigenous communities with an intensity that exceeded all expectation. Today, four centuries later, the chirimía still sounds at the patron saint festivals of towns in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, played by indigenous and mestizo musicians in contexts that blend the Catholic and the pre-Columbian in ways no colonial theologian would have entirely approved.

The cathedrals of cities such as Cuzco, Lima, Bogotá, and Mexico City developed musical traditions of extraordinary richness. The post of maestro de capilla — the musical director of a cathedral — was one of the most coveted positions in the colonial American world, and the composers who held it, both Spaniards from the Old World and creoles born in America, produced a music that absorbed local elements in ways that were sometimes conscious and sometimes involuntary.

Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco, born in Spain but maestro de capilla in Lima, composed in 1701 the first opera to be premiered on the American continent: La púrpura de la rosa, with a text by Calderón de la Barca. Juan de Araujo, another maestro de capilla who worked in Lima and Sucre, composed villancicos in Spanish, Latin, Portuguese, and also in African languages, for a congregation that included enslaved people of African origin who had brought their own musical traditions with them.

The African diaspora and the birth of new rhythms

The most transformative encounter of all — and the one with the deepest consequences for the music of the world — did not take place in the missions or the cathedrals, but on the plantations and in the ports of the Caribbean and Brazil, where millions of people brought from West and Central Africa as enslaved persons carried with them musical traditions of extraordinary richness and diversity.

The transatlantic slave trade was one of the greatest crimes in human history. Its musical consequences — which no one sought or foresaw — were equally extraordinary in another sense. The African musics that survived in the Caribbean and Brazil did not do so unchanged: they survived by adapting to new contexts, blending with the European music the colonizers had brought, adopting instruments and forms that did not exist in Africa, and resisting from within that very process of adaptation.

The result was a body of musical traditions that laid the foundations for almost everything popular music in the twentieth century would go on to do. The music of Afro-Brazilian communities — the candomblé, the maracatu, the forms that would eventually flow into samba — blended polyrhythmic patterns of African origin with European harmonies and Portuguese texts. The music of the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone Caribbean followed similar processes, each with its own outcome.

In the Spanish Caribbean, the encounter between European music, African traditions, and the vestiges of indigenous musics produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the first seeds of what would centuries later become Cuban son, Puerto Rican plena, and Dominican merengue. Rhythms that are universal today, being born at that moment in communities with no awareness that they were creating something the entire world would one day dance to.

India, China, and the Pacific: the limits of the encounter

The encounter between European Baroque music and the musics of Asia was, in general, less transformative than the American or African ones, for reasons connected to the structure of the civilizations in contact.

In Portuguese India — Goa above all — the Jesuits established musical traditions similar to those in the Americas, with results that can still be traced in the Catholic religious music of communities such as the Catholics of Kerala or the cristãos of Goa. Church music in those contexts adopted scales and ornamentations from classical Indian music that distinguish it clearly from any contemporary European music. The result was a hybrid tradition that today forms part of the musical heritage of those communities and that is rarely included in books on the history of Western music.

In China and Japan, restrictions on trade and the Christian mission limited the scope of the musical encounter. The Jesuits who worked in China — among them Matteo Ricci, who gave the emperor a harpsichord and offered lessons in Western music — found a civilization with a musical tradition so ancient and consolidated that European influence was, in general terms, superficial. The same was true of classical Indian music, which continued its own development throughout the Baroque period without being significantly transformed by European contact.

What the encounter reveals

Looking at Baroque music from the periphery of the colonial world — from Guaraní Paraguay, from the African shores of the Caribbean, from the Andes — means seeing something that the official history of music has been slow to acknowledge: that the Baroque was not only what happened in Leipzig, Venice, or Versailles. It was also what happened when that music arrived in places where other musics were waiting for it, and the conversation that followed.

That conversation was, in many cases, profoundly unequal. Indigenous and African communities did not freely choose to incorporate European music: they did so in contexts of conquest, slavery, and cultural destruction. Musical syncretism was also, in many cases, a form of resistance: a way of preserving something of one's own traditions within the frameworks that domination imposed.

But the musical result, regardless of the context in which it was produced, is one of the richest inheritances history has left us. Every time we listen to salsa, samba, cumbia, or any of the Latin American musics the world dances to today, we are hearing the echo of that encounter which began four centuries ago in the jungles, the plantations, and the cathedrals of the colonial world. What would the music of the world be today if that encounter had not taken place? The answer is unimaginable, because it would mean a world without jazz, without blues, without rock, without almost anything we understand as popular music of the twentieth century. The Baroque we study in Europe is only part of the story. The other part is everywhere. With this post we close the Baroque era. In the next era we will enter the universe of European Classicism: order, clarity, the symphony as the new cathedral of sound — a radically different world, and yet one built on everything these pages have explored.

The music of the missions was not European dressed up as indigenous, nor indigenous dressed up as European. It was a third thing: the music of a new world.

Listening suggestions

• Mass in F major from the Jesuit missions of Paraguay — Ensemble Elyma conducted by Gabriel Garrido: to hear what survived in the archives of the reductions
• Domenico Zipoli at the missions — works by the Italian composer adapted for the Jesuit reductions: a music deeply transformed by the American context
• La púrpura de la rosa — Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco: the first opera composed and premiered in the Americas
• Villancicos negros — Juan de Araujo: to hear the encounter between the European Baroque and African communities in colonial Peru
• Candomblé music — any recording of traditional candomblé rituals from Bahia: to hear where, centuries later, the traditions that began mixing in this period eventually arrived