The Alabados of New Mexico

The Music of the Alabados

27 i Several years ago, Jennifer Foerster, a perceptive student exposed to the alabados for the first time, described her reaction to them. As someone foreign to this communal field of meaning, I initially listened with a critical ear to the music itself, but I did not achieve the experience it was intended to evoke. When I was able to go beyond this, I found an understanding of the music as a tool specifically created, sustained, and employed for the purpose of engaging individuals into communal emotions and religious orientations , as well as having the function of reflecting, expressing, and validating such emotions and spiritual orientations that are the foundation of the culture. This understanding involves the awareness that the culture of Hispano New Mexico is still distinctively tied to the time and place of its development. . . . This type of music has a pedagogical function: the teaching of the doctrines, prayers, and ethics of the religious community . The alabados’ music is relatively simple , and so listeners used to hearing and singing it can readily retain and repeat it; and this suggests that teaching the alabados was an important part of the missionaries’ work in the colony. . . . As a naive listener not engaged in the shared religious meaning or emotions of the hymns, I found that I could not at first separate the stylistic interpretations of the music from the meaning of the hymns as expressions of mourning and atonement. The music has inherent connotative and denotative functions; it is meant to be expressive of the prescribed religious sentiment . The text teaches a story that decrees a religious morality and validates a way of life where devotion and suffering are important positive values. Furthermore, the teaching lies not only in the lyrics of the hymns but also in the evocative power of the music itself: the mournful melodies, the earnest voices singing together, and the chant-like slow tempo. . . . The alabado music is not sung for aesthetic purposes so much as for spiritual purposes . This perhaps accounts for the music’s archaic style, not developing into the complex , harmonically rich sounds of Classical Europe that had less a sacred function and more an intent to create contemplative beauty, inspiration, mood, and emotion. But there are more practical circumstantial reasons for the style of the alabado. As with the santero art of Hispano New Mexico, alabados are products of time and place. Not only are they oriented toward specific times of the liturgical calendar, they are historically influenced by the realities of New Mexican regional life and especially its sacred structures and other places; New Mexico was a remote colonial outpost at the The Music of the Alabados 28 THE ALABADOS edge of Christendom which lacked cultural influence and material support from the metropolitan centers of Mexico and Madrid. Thus the fact that alabado music seems “stuck in time” by retaining a Medieval musical style even into the present day is a circumstance of place. The art and music of Hispano New Mexico is influenced by geography in that the isolation of the religion kept the arts Medieval while the European Renaissance went off on its own way (Foerster 2001, 1–2, 3, 4, and 9). These brief paragraphs may help the reader grasp the sacredness and beauty of the alabados of New Mexico. The earliest helpful description of European music is the fifth-century BC Greek listing of modes, which were neither measured, nor in a major or minor key, nor harmonic, polyphonic, or homophonic ; rather they were sung a single tone at a time. Greek ethicians judged these musical modes by their emotional effects and disapproved of some of them. Eastern Christianity made use of the more acceptable modes.According to legend rather than history, Saint Ambrose (d. 397) approved the four authentic modes: Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixolydian. Also according to legend, Pope Saint Gregory the Great (d. 604) synthesized Hebrew, Greek, and Latin hymnody (Fisher 1952, 6) by approving the four plagal modes: Hypodorian, Hypophrygian, Hypolydian, and Hypomixolydian.12 The French lyric called virelai probably developed into the Italian laudi at the time of Francis of Assisi (d. 1226). The laudi then influenced the Spanish cantigas at the time of Alfonso el Sabio (d. 1284). The combination of those religious hymns and Spain’s secular narrative romances developed into the Spanish religious romances. In addition, the cante hondo and the saeta of southern Spain traveled from the Old World to New...