The Power of Song: Music and Dance in the Mission Communities of Northern New Spain, 1590-1810 by Kristin Dutcher Mann (review)

Over more than two centuries, Franciscan and Jesuit clergymen enabled European incursion into territory that today comprises northern Mexico and the southwestern United States by establishing and administering a series of frontier mission communities. Clusters of missions throughout this vast region served to stabilize Spanish sovereignty by organizing diverse indigenous groups, many of them seminomadic, into sedentary polities, indoctrinating them with Christian cultural practices, and retraining them in European agricultural technologies. Building on experience in central New Spain in the decades after the Conquest and evangelical techniques developed in medieval Europe, the regular clergy found that music making aided the initial conversion process and helped maintain the colonial order thereafter.

In The Power of Song: Music and Dance in the Mission Communities of Northern New Spain, 1590-1810, Kristin Dutcher Mann explores how musical practices articulated power relations in these widely scattered mission communities. This represents an enormous undertaking. Not only are the missions themselves spread throughout a gigantic territory and mostly in ruins, but also the documentary evidence in Mexican, American, and Spanish archives is fragmentary, inconsistent, and rarely forthcoming with details about musical activities. While the California missions have received considerable musicological attention on account of their preservation of notated music manuscripts, little scholarship has focused on the cultural practices of missions on the Mexican side of the border, thereby making Mann's book, which does not use modern political borders as geographical distinctions, all the more welcome.

In her logically organized and meticulously cited book, Mann sees music as a social practice that defines a group's collective identity, functions as an agent of social control, and operates as a language to communicate doctrine or abstract ideas. Defining music as "performed, structured sound" (3), she considers activities as diverse as plainchant, the pealing of bells, martial trumpet fanfares, liturgical polyphony, devotional songs, and dance to articulate such power relations. Although her work engages no music scores and only a few devotional lyrics, she convincingly argues that the soundscape of any specific mission was determined by the musical knowledge of the particular missionaries at that place, the precontact practices of local indigenous groups, and "the sociopolitical context of larger overlapping communities with which the mission was involved" (254). In my opinion, it might have also been illuminating to make a distinction between presentational and participatory forms of music making throughout the book.

Mann divides The Power of Song into three sections: "Musical Traditions," "Mission Music," and "Song, Time, and Space." The first of these pairs the chapter "Reconstructing Indigenous Music and Dance" with "Liturgical and Religious Music in Europe, 1500-1800." Neither of these chapters deals with any actual music; rather, they look at how musical practices articulated power, identity, and ritual. The section on indigenous musics draws upon a mixture of colonial period chronicles, contemporary ethnomusicology, and organology to show the importance, if not the aesthetics, of music in indigenous politics and culture. To her credit, Mann remains cautious about this multiplicity of voices, especially the practice of "upstreaming" (22), or using modern anthropological observation to work back to the past. Whereas Mann is able to reveal certain categories of music making among indigenous groups, such as battle music, healing songs, and ritual song-dance, the frustrating lack of detail in Spanish chronicles—for example, a priest recording that "they also sang songs that referred to victory" (32)—makes it difficult to imagine the soundscape.

In her second chapter, Mann riskily ventures into the territory of Renaissance and Baroque musicology, attempting to provide an overview of three hundred years of well-studied music within a space of twenty-three pages. Most of this discussion centers on the role of music in the decrees of the Council of Trent, the ways in which music articulated Catholic spirituality...