AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

170 sunday morning AMS Philadelphia 2009
1653 and 1655 Puebla, as well as comparative examples from Spain and Bolivia, this paper
argues that negrillo villancicos work at the allegorical rather than literal level, derive from
contemporaneous European modes of representation, and can not serve as ethnographic documents.
(The present is a timely moment to discuss these issues, since negrillo villancicos have
recently entered two well-known score anthologies used to teach basic music history.)
Theoretically, this paper will draw upon perspectives voiced in Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency:
An Anthropological Theory and Ronald Radano’s Lying Up a Nation: race and Black Music in
order to situate mid-seventeenth-century negrillo villancicos amid peninsular Spanish and
Italian visual and literary sources, the cathedral performance context, and the aesthetics of
representing blackness allegorically in church media. It intends to show that the African personages
portrayed in works such as Gutiérrez de Padilla’s Ah siolo Flasiquiyo were exactly that;
stereotypes used as allegories that index simulacra of Africanness for narrative purposes. Although
the works would undoubtedly have acquired distinct meanings in viceregal contexts
where African people contributed to the multi-ethnic social reality, they can not be separated
from European traditions. For example, negrillo villancicos employ stock characters and stereotyped
African dialects previously presented in plays by Lope de Vega (e.g., La madre de
mejor/el santo negro, 1610), and they parallel the concepts portrayed in the European iconographic
topos of the Adoration of the Magi, in which painters such as Rubens depict the
youngest Magus as of Ethiopian origin. Ultimately, such negrillo villancicos for the Christmas
season serve to underscore the central messages of the Christmas story: that Christ was born
amid humble surroundings, yet the magnitude of that event inspired even distant “Others”
to celebrate.
TRANSCRIBING TOURISM: THE MUSICAL TRAVELOGUE
OF FRANCISCO SALVADOR DANIEL
Kristy Riggs
Columbia University
In 1848, France declared that Algeria was an “integral part of France,” and, therefore, no
longer just a colony. The French military finally defeated the insurrections of Abd al-Qadir,
yet Kabyle revolts under the direction of Bou Baghla still plagued the French settlement efforts
throughout the 1850s. An elected civilian government ruled briefly until 1852, when
Napoléon III returned Algeria to military control. The following year the French musician
and composer Francisco Salvador Daniel traveled to Algiers. From 1853 to 1857, Salvador
collected folk songs throughout North Africa. After his return to Paris, he published several
books and articles devoted to Arab and Kabyle music, and Napoléon III commissioned him
to deliver a series of lectures on the subject. Through these publications, Salvador earned a
reputation as an expert on North African music.
This paper explores Salvador’s Album de Chansons arabes, mauresques et kabyles (1863), a
collected volume presenting twelve songs transcribed by the composer during his travels.
The collection reflects two prevalent phenomena relating to mid-nineteenth-century French
colonialism: (1) travel journals published by European artists and explorers describing North
African tourist destinations as well as strategic sites for the French military and (2) the French
colonial policy of assimilation practiced during the early years of the occupation. Salvador’s
collection exhibits characteristics similar to those of nineteenth-century French travel journals.
The collection results in a kind of musical travelogue: that is, a composition or collection