From Serra to Sancho: Music and Pageantry in the California Missions (review)

Histories of American musics tend to overlook the legacy of the California missions, a series of Franciscan establishments that introduced Roman, Spanish, and New Spanish (Mexican) musical practices to resettled Native Americans along the Alta California coast during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. (I write "Alta California" because the contemporaneous missions of Baja California fall outside the scope of Russell's book.) Politically part of New Spain and then independent Mexico before incorporation into the United States in 1848, California preserves a significant body of religious music originally used by the Spanish priests and Native Americans who lived, toiled, and worshipped in the mission communities. Nonetheless, problematic historical narratives ranging from black legend portrayals of Spanish settlers as cruel theocrats to nostalgic fantasies of the missions as gardens of Eden continue to challenge proper understanding of the surviving repertoires on their own terms. Publishing the first major monograph on the subject since Owen da Silva's Mission Music of California (Los Angeles: W. F. Lewis, 1941), Craig H. Russell makes a substantial contribution to American, Mexican, and Spanish music history in From Serra to Sancho, a tale of a few tenacious friars and the music they led in the mission context.

From the outset, Russell clarifies that his intended readership includes scholars, performers, and amateur "sleuths," rather than solely the musicological establishment. He manages this diversity of readers nimbly by assuming an accessible and vibrant writing style that engages musicological discourse while reinscribing the public's understanding of mission history. Russell himself has been instrumental in the revival of mission music, and his collaboration with the vocal group Chanticleer has produced a series of performances and recordings. Thus, he envisions this book as a vehicle toward informed performance, and the many performing editions contained within the volume and its online appendices add a practical and welcome dimension rarely featured in musicological literature. It should be noted, however, that Russell has taken considerable liberty to compose instrumental accompaniments and realize continuo parts in many of his performance editions. Scholarly editions of the manuscripts would be considerably sparser. Nonetheless, while unconventional, such realizations do approximate performance practices of the time.

The greatest strengths of the book lie in Russell's clarification of terms such as canto de órgano, canto figurado, and gozos, which are essential to understanding mission musical practices. Russell explains these concepts using evidence from period pedagogical treatises, images of music manuscripts, and transcribed music examples. Facilitated by his nuanced command of Spanish and his ability to create literal though idiomatic English translations, Russell educates his reader not only in the less familiar Spanish traditions, but also in the liturgical practices of mission churches. His inclusion of primary documents, in both transcription and translation, lends the book and its accompanying Web site (www.oup.com.us/companion.websites/9780195343274/?view=usa [accessed 17 February 2010]) a transparency of great utility to scholars in this area.

As scholarship, From Serra to Sancho consciously follows traditional lines of musicological inquiry by pairing biography and formal analysis of musical works within a chronological frame. In so doing, Russell invokes Robert Stevenson's characterization of the life and works approach as "the Tigris and Euphrates" (p. 13) of musicology and sometimes adopts, perhaps unwittingly, the senior scholar's penchant for overstatement, for example in referring to two rhythmicized chant sequences as "prominent gems of California liturgy" (p. 197). That said, Russell, who openly criticizes the New Musicology in this book, does not strive to simply form a small canon of "great" mission pieces and personages, but rather he appreciates even the humblest mission composition as a vestige of cultural practice. His writing, despite its exuberance in playfully comparing disparate objects such as chant and Barry Manilow, offers more subtle perspectives on performance practice, greater command of eighteenth-century music pedagogy, and a more precise grasp...