For two consecutive years, Sebastián received a grant from the Grammy Foundation to restore and archive the collection of Folk music recordings made by Carlos Vega and other musicologists for the Instituto Nacional de Musicología in Buenos Aires from 1932 to 1944. These recordings, made on wax and acetate records, will be restored and made available at the Instituto's library and through an online database with musical examples.
Lasciatemi Morire: Love and death in the Biographies of Claudio Monteverdi is a critical reading of the biographies of Claudio Monteverdi and the way in which scholars have integrated the effect of grief on his musical production. It was presented in the annual meeting of the Northeast Chapter of the College Music Society at Bates College, in Maine, in April of 2001.
Amidst historical disagreement regarding Monteverdi’s relations with the two women mentioned in his biographies, resides the irrefutable proximity of grief to his composing. The fact that he wrote the Lamento de Arianna and Lagrime d’Amante al Sepolcro dell’Amata (published in the Sixth Book of Madrigals, Venice, 1614) in 1606-7, around the time of the deaths of both women, has been enough to start a series of portraits that present the composer as a romantic hero and a first incarnation of the Italian lyric spirit.
This paper takes a look at the descriptions of these facts in biographies and confronts them with their supporting documentary evidence, which consists of the corpus of Monteverdi’s letters, available to musicologists in different forms and languages since the last quarter of the XIX century.
There is plausible evidence to support some of the claims regarding the causal relationship between the tragic events and the composition of the two laments, less weighty, however, are the arguments that he was a «visionary proto-lyricist» and a «loving hero», an image that can be related to early XX-century Italian scholars, for whom creating a national musical identity was of great importance. It seems as if, in many cases, musicologists have regarded the lack of negative evidence that would falsify their own biographical wishes as an affirmation of their validity, instead of looking for data that would confirm their provisional assumptions. back to top
Religious music in the Missions of Chiquitos, Bolivia, in the XVIII century
This paper examines the repertoire of vocal church music found in the collection of the Episcopal Archive of Concepción de Chiquitos, Bolivia. The manuscript and most of music it contains were produced in the Missions the Jesuits established and maintained in the region from 1690 to 1767. Based on considerations about music in the life of the Missions and the analysis of some pieces, it traces the origins of the repertoire to the Austro-Italian Catholic music of the late XVII century and examine the stylistic transformation it went through as it was imported from Europe to the remote Bolivian Missions. Finally, it addresses the way in which this process was perceived by commentators and scholars. back to top