Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco (review)

This book is a major contribution to the understanding of colonial society in Cuzco and elsewhere in Spanish America. While focusing on the propagation of European music in Cuzco, Geoffrey Baker gives us privileged access to the complexities and evolution of the interactions between a sector of the native population and the colonizers as they became part a new society. Making superb use of the available documentation and secondary literature, the author presents us with an outstanding book that is destined to become a classic for the study of colonial Peru and a significant addition to the literature on music and society.

Following the path of previous authors who had highlighted religious music, dance, and festivals as crucial arenas of negotiation and accommodation in colonial Latin America, Baker goes beyond them, using novel research strategies and perspectives. He questions the cathedral-centered approach to the history of music in colonial Latin America, which perpetuates a prevalent geographical and hierarchical view, namely, that of a vibrant and powerful urban center and less important urban or rural peripheries. Instead, he thoroughly demonstrates the prolific production and performance of music and other public expressive forms that involved music (e.g. dances, processions, masses), which permeated urban and rural institutions such as the San Antonio Abad seminary, the monasteries, the convents, the beaterios, and the urban and rural parishes. He also moves away from a musicology centered on the written musical scores to give much more importance to the dynamics that allowed and encouraged the performance of European music in colonial Cuzco. Baker found a rich source for the understanding of such dynamics in notary records. These and other kinds of sources that the author employed have limitations as far as providing a full picture of what the world of performance was like even in the context of the Spanish/Catholic-sponsored events. Nevertheless, Baker acknowledges these limitations and makes the most of his material.

In the last paragraph, Baker summarizes the main argument: “To a large extent, it was indigenous elites who enabled the propagation of European music in the hemisphere. . . . [M]usic required constant recreation through performance and could not therefore be maintained as a tool for domination by a small European elite” (p. 248). The author demonstrates how under, and often despite, the policies and ideological currents that permeated colonial Cuzco, the indigenous elites used music creation and performance as a way to advance their social, economic, and political status. This was a mechanism, as the author points out, not unknown during the Inca Empire. The Incas also had a well-developed and complex system of public ceremonies with abundant music and dance traditions. Building on these historical trends, and along the lines of those who have previously argued similarly, Baker suggests “the aspects of colonial society and culture which flourished in the Spanish colonies were generally those which displayed continuities with the pre-colonial” (p. 11).

While the book is well argued, Baker’s underplaying of the aspects of resistance and conflict during the process of dissemination of European music, ritual, and religion in general may not sit well with those who would like to see a focus on these aspects. The author is clear from the start that his work is not a “‘decolonized musicology’: [that] it is not the story of the subaltern masses, nor a tale of the survival of indigenous musical traditions in the face of Spanish domination” (p. 6). Nevertheless, the documentation he presents in some occasions provides a glimpse into the world of confrontation and conflict and into efforts by the native population to preserve crucial aspects of their precolonial traditions. These are aspects always difficult to document but this kind of analysis is left for others.

Imposing Harmony contains a very nice balance of first-hand information from colonial documents, captivating narrative, academic discussion, and illustrative presentation of individual careers of different types of musicians. It is highly...