In the past, I’ve highlighted various creative modes of catechesis and evangelization I’ve run across in the course of my random reading. I’ve shared information about the pictograph catechisms created by friars in the Americas, and the Catholic Ladders that originated in the American Northwest. Let’s continue in a Pentecost mode and talk about music.
This article is available via academia.edu – I think you have to sign up to read it (maybe not – just check and see) – but it’s freely available after that, and well worth a read.
Songs in Early Modern Catholic Missions: Between Europe, the Indies, and the “Indies of Europe”
The author is Daniel Filippi, a musicologist who wrote on his now-defunct webpage about his research on “The Soundscape of Early Modern Catholicism” in Europe and the missions:
This line of research focuses on one of the most remarkable, and least studied, aspects of early modern Catholic soundscape: the teaching of the catechism through songs. The main source I examine is Michel Coyssard’s Traicté du profit (1608). This Jesuit was a key figure in the adoption of vernacular poetry and singing as tools for the teaching of Christian doctrine in France. His treatise is one of the most substantial methodological reflections on the subject: it shows Coyssard’s remarkable awareness of past and present practices in this field, and includes both practical guidelines and theoretical reflections. I use it as a gateway to this complex phenomenon.
From Asia to America, European missionaries were quick to realize that music was a powerful tool for establishing a connection with the natives, and pave the way for their conversion to Christianity. Here I investigate how music was used to support the missionary endeavor. Even though liturgy was an ambit of primary importance, my focus here, as in rest of the project, is on the extra-liturgical use of music, particularly in connection with the teaching of Christian doctrine and the fostering of spiritual life.
And yes, if you’ve seen The Mission, you get a glimpse of this.
So this article is an exploration of how Jesuits used music in missionary activity, with the additional point of questioning the traditional scholarly chronology which suggests the use of music was primarily a Counter-Reformation phenomenon. He also looks a bit at the uses of music in evangelization and renewal in rural Europe. It’s a very interesting article, and I’d suggest – if you’re interested in any aspect of this – music, liturgical music, catechesis, evangelization – you take a look. A few excerpts:
Pedro de Gante (Pieter van der Moere) arrived in Mexico in 1523. Initially, he had difficulties with the natives, but when he fully realized that music played a crucial role in their spiritual life the consequences were obvious. A couple of months before Christmas of 1528, he composed some “solemn verses” regarding the law of God and the history of Redemption (“compuse metros muy solemnes sobre la Ley de Dios y de la fe, y cómo Dios se hizo hombre por salvar al linaje humano, y cómo nació de la Vírgen María”) and organized a Christmas play. The natives of the entire area (“from twenty miles around Mexico”) were invited to participate and to contribute with songs and dances. This event marked a turning point in the evangelization process, as the Franciscan reported in a letter of 1532 to Emperor Charles V. Afterwards, Gante taught music to the natives, and the results were remarkable: Soon, in the words of Ros-Fábregas, native musicians “could hold books of polyphony in their hands and skillfully perform the same repertory as a major European music chapel.”
Once the basic missionary infrastructure had been established, the missionaries taught the natives European music in major centers and then sent them “to the front” in minor centers as teachers, organists, and church musicians. According to Lemmon, one of the reasons to teach music at the Jesuit college of San Gregorio in Mexico City was to train and provide church musicians “for villages through-out the Archdiocese of Mexico.” The same approach was adopted in Fontibón for the surrounding missionary areas in the New Kingdom of Granada. A similar situation on a different continent is described by Irving for the Philippines.
In an eighteenth-century account of the founder of the music school in Fon-tibón, José de Hurtado, S.J. (1578–1660), we find another interesting element, after the usual topos about the natives’ fondness of music is mentioned (“co no-ciendo quan aficionados son aquellos Indios à la musica”). In Europe, music might seem an “inappropriate activity” for a priest (“impertinente ocupacion”), the Jesuit chronicler observes, a “frivolity or a vain pastime” (“ociosidad, ò di- vertimiento fantastico”). In the missions, however, it was “one of the means by which the Indians were tamed, and of which God availed himself for their conver-sion” (“uno de los medios con que se suavizaban los Indios, y de que se valía Dios para su conversion”). Thus, in the missions it did not suffice to be a “maestro de escuela ò de gramatica” which was common for the Jesuits:
en Indias, los missioneros deben ser maestros de obras, de musica, de organo, y otras habilidades.
in the Indies, the missionaries must be master builders, teachers of music, of organ, and of other skills.
The mnemotechnic value of organizing doctrinally or spiritually relevant text in metrical form and adding music, repeatedly noted by catechists and Catholic authors in Europe, became even more critical in the context of the missions. Why? Being constantly on the move, the missionaries often could not occupy a permanent physical space in the life of the newly founded local communities. Thus, they occupied their time through memory . The depositum fidei had to be preserved in a stable form even without direct supervision. The newly converted natives, who were soon left to their own devices or to a local catechist as their only spiritual guide, frequently observed the holy days by means of simple devotional and paraliturgical practices in which formular recitation and song had a central role.
Song worked as a support for religious and spiritual practice when liturgical celebrations or other rites which required the presence of ordained priests were not possible. Much the same, for that matter, happened in certain missionized areas in Europe: In Brittany during the 1640s, for instance, a layman, who was appointed to lead the prayer in Sein when no priest was available, asked the Jesuit missionary Julien Maunoir to have copies of his songs made in Breton so that the congregation could sing them during their gatherings. In the colonies, however, this mechanism might have had more complex implications: In New Spain, for instance, native cantores usually belonged to the local nobility and inherited the social and religious roles fulfilled by equivalent figures in pre-hispanic society as well as a social status similar to theirs.
We should moreover observe that the mnemonic support granted by music was also of a quantitative nature. Through song one could memorize more content and in a shorter span of time . Both were clearly valuable assets. Of course, this also held true on European soil. The missionary Dom Michel Le Nobletz commented in a letter about the astonishing apostolic successes achieved in Brittany by the previously mentioned Maunoir, who was able to teach the inhabitants of the Is-land of Ushant (Ouessant) five hundred lines of cantiques spirituels with different tunes in a fortnight.
Moreover, in places where missionaries had to work in a multi-linguistic context, songs could provide further advantages. French missionaries in New France taught songs based on the same melody to the different linguistic groups, so that everybody, French and natives belonging to different tribes, could sing and pray together, even though in different languages, and have a sonic token of their affiliation to the Church:
“In order to further encourage them, our Frenchmen sing a stanza in our language, then the Seminarians sing another stanza in Huron, and then they sing all together a third stanza, each in their own language with a beautiful consonance ; they like it so much that they make this song re-sound everywhere […] I have heard Frenchmen, Montaignais and Hu-rons sing together the articles of our faith, and even though they used three [different] languages, they harmonized so nicely that it was a great pleasure to hear them. ”
This testimony from a Jesuit source, referring to the singing of a paraphrased Credo in 1637, could not be clearer. Thanks to the shared melody, the different lin-guistic groups could alternate or sing simultaneously, thus powerfully expressing their “unity in variety.”
Finally, a big chunk on a fascinating figure – a layman:
Gregorio de Pesquera is a rather elusive figure. A native of Burgos, Spain, he travelled through America during the second half of the 1530s, but not as a missionary: rather, as a conquistador. Only later he converted, and even though he remained a layman he was active as a missionary and educator “en España y en Indias juntamente.”
In the early 1540s he started the Colegios de Niños de la Doctrina in Spain (the first was in Valladolid) which have been defined as “a network of centers created to offer shelter and education to destitute children” all over the Iberian Peninsula and which became a kind of “pre-Tridentine movement for popular education.”
In 1544–1545 Pesquera travelled to Mexico with Bartolomé de las Casas on the famous expedition when Las Casas was going to take possession of his diocese after being appointed bishop of Ciudad Real de Chiapa. In 1546 in Mexico City, Pesquera founded and then directed a colegio , one of the first centers for orphans, mestizos , and other indigent children in the Americas (it later took the name of College of San Juan de Letrán). There he was also in contact with Pedro de Gante, who, as we have seen above, was one of the pioneers in the teaching of cat-echism and in the use of music as a medium for communicating with the natives.
In the following decades, Pesquera repeatedly travelled between Spain and Mexico. In Mexico during the late 1540s, he printed a (now lost) catechism for the children of his college, some copies of which he then apparently brought to Spain. In 1554, this time in Valladolid, he published another catechism, entitled Doctrina christiana, y Espejo de bien biuir . It is a compendium of miscellaneous pedagogical tools, evidently designed for the needs of his niños and includes a version of Juan de Ávila’s seminal catechism (Ávila was a pioneering figure in the field of catechesis, and his influence was decisive for many early members of the Society of Jesus who exported his methods to Italy and elsewhere). According to historian of education Félix Santolaria Sierra, Pesquera’s Colegios were rooted in Ávila’s teachings and educational vision.
In conformity with the rules of the Colegios their members were instructed to proclaim and sing the Christian doctrine in the streets and squares, in hospitals and prisons, in nearby villages, and so on. This helps explain why, in addition to including the “standard” sung catechism, Pesquera devoted the entire third part of the book to songs: “muchos cantares y coplas devotas para que los niños y otras personas canten y se alegren con devoción” (“many songs and devout coplas , for the children and other people to sing and devoutly rejoice”) – an un-commonly large set of poems and songs described in a recent study as consisting mainly of villancicos, romances, and coplas, plus additional “bonus” materials, including “Biblical and educational materials, devotional exercises, a treatise on good manners, and an ample casuistic discussion of confession as well as of the Final Judgment.” Thus, similarly to what happened in the foreign missions, Pesquera’s children were assigned the role of mediators of the doctrine, and singing was a key element in this public and socially relevant enterprise. In the same year of the publication of the Doctrina Pesquera wrote to Ignatius Loyola in Rome, to ask for his help in consolidating his Mexican enterprise: He was searching for teachers for his college there, but Ignatius could not accede to his wishes.
In sum, Pesquera, a former conquistador, was in touch with some of the most relevant figures of the mid sixteenth-century scene of Catholic missions, on both sides of the Atlantic, from Pedro de Gante to Juan de Ávila, from Bartolomé de Las Casas to Ignatius Loyola. He was active both in Spain and in New Spain us-ng the same methods, which included the sung catechism and devotional songs as tools for instructing and entertaining the children and for enhancing the public role of Christian doctrine
This is fascinating, isn’t it? Note, too, the emphasis – on communicating content and doctrine and prayers as a core of evangelization and mission. Using music to communicate the truths of the Faith? You might even say it’s a creative form of accompaniment.