OPEN TODAY: 10 A.M.–5 P.M.

Music in the Early Spanish Americas, Performance Spaces, and Archives

Event
A book opened to a page with musical notation.

Fri., March 21, 2025, 8:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m.Sat., March 22, 2025, 9:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m.

Two-day conference | General: $35, Students and Huntington Fellows: Free | Optional lunch: $20 each day Conference registration includes general admission to The Huntington. Lunch reservations will close on March 17 at noon.

Education and Visitor Center, Haaga Hall

Tickets
This conference examines the musical sounds that once reverberated across the Spanish Americas to enhance devotion, signal identity, or express agency. Experts will discuss the intersectional issues of music performance, sound and voice studies, art history, gender and race relations, and institutional hierarchies.
Conferences

Ma huel cenquiza, ma nechicaui
(May they come together, may they assemble)

These opening lines of a Nahuatl garden canticle from the Psalmodia Christiana (Mexico City, 1583) set the stage for a conference focusing on the musical sounds, performance spaces, and sonic traces of the early modern Hispanic world. The Huntington Library is the ideal venue for an interdisciplinary conference that aims to examine the musical sounds that once reverberated across the Spanish Americas. Today, these musical and sonic legacies are preserved at the Huntington Library. To highlight these little-studied collections and encourage their value in pushing musical-humanistic research forward, this conference will bring together interdisciplinary scholars to discuss their current, cutting-edge research on the performances, performance spaces, and archives of this music.

Key Details

  • Conference registration is for both days and includes general admission to The Huntington.
  • Lunch reservations close on March 17 at noon. A limited number of lunch tickets will be available for purchase at the conference.

Day of Program

  • Please bring your registration confirmation with you.

Conference Schedule

Friday, March 21

8:30 a.m. | Registration and Coffee

9 a.m. | Welcome

  • Susan Juster (The Huntington), Savannah Esquivel (University of California, Riverside), and Cesar Favila (UCLA)

9:15 a.m. | Session 1: Archival Voices and Instruments on the Move

  • Moderator: Cesar Favila (UCLA)
  • Javier Marín-López (Universidad de Jaén)
    “From Mexico City to Santa Fe: The Camino Real de Tierra Adentro as Sonic Performance, 1598–1821”
  • Paul Niell (Florida State)
    “Dancing to drum and ‘shake shake’ and ‘congo upon the ramparts’: Rhythm and the Urban Landscape in Nineteenth-Century San Juan, Puerto Rico”

10:45 a.m. | Break

11 a.m. | Session 2: Mission and Voice

  • Moderator: Savannah Esquivel (UC Riverside)
  • Bernard Gordillo (UCLA)
    “A Rare Luiseño Voice: Native Oral Tradition, Franciscan Music Instruction, and California Missions, 1769–1846”
  • Cesar Favila (UCLA)
    “Voicing Christ in New Spanish Missions”

12:30 p.m. | Lunch

1:45 p.m. | Session 3: Sacred and Secular Urban Soundscapes

  • Moderator: Sarah Finley (Christopher Newport University)
  • Alex Hidalgo (Texas Christian University)
    “Singing as Social Protest: Public and Private Spaces of Forbidden Balladry in Seventeenth-Century Mexico City”
  • Lidia Gómez García (Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla)
    “Músicos y cantores en el obispado de Puebla, siglos XVI–XVIII”
  • María Luisa Marina Vilar Payá (Universidad de las Américas Puebla)
    “Palafox and Trans-Atlantic Political Theater”

Saturday, March 22

9:30 a.m. | Registration and Coffee

10 a.m. | Session 4: Performed in This Space, Acoustical Archives

  • Moderator: Paul Niell (Florida State)
  • Christina Kim (Stanford University)
    “Singing for the Dead: Imagining Liturgical Sound in New Spain with Stanford 734”
  • Stella Nair (UCLA)
    “Inca Architecture and the Acoustics of Empire”
  • Susan Webster (College of William and Mary)
    “Pipe Organs and Musical Sculptures in Colonial Quito”

Noon | Lunch

1 p.m. | Session 5: Resonances of Viceregal Humanity

  • Moderator: Bernard Gordillo (UCLA)
  • Matthew Gilbert (Stanford University)
    “Sounding Human: Casus Belli and Conflicting Cosmologies of Song in Mexico City”
  • Sarah Finley (Christopher Newport University)
    “Sounding Indigenous Music from Colonial Mexico City: An Oceanic Approach to Biombo con desposorio indígena, mitote y palo volador” 
  • Ireri Chávez Bárcenas (Bowdoin College)
    “Nahua Notions of the Sacred in Seventeenth-Century Christmas Villancicos”

3 p.m. | Closing Remarks: Savannah Esquivel and Cesar Favila

For questions about this event, please email researchconference@huntington.org or call 626-405-3432.

A book opened to a page with musical notation.

Missale romanum ordinarium (Mexico City: Antonio de Espinosa, 1561). RB 32667. | The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

Three images, from left to right, an illustration of a religious figure holding a cross, a statue of Christ on the cross in a church, and a detail view of music notes on a page.
Verso

Experiencing Music in the Early Spanish Americas

Funding provided by USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute and Anonymous.