The Department of Music Theory hosts guest scholar Roger Mathew Grant (Wesleyan University) as part of the Carrigan Lecture Series. Free and open to the public.

ABSTRACT: During the middle decades of the eighteenth century, Indigenous musicians in rural South America created a distinctive musical style music under conditions of Jesuit colonization. These musicians had been forcibly relocated to mission communities in the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru, which is now eastern Bolivia. There, they participated in vibrant scenes of choral and orchestral performance; they trained and retrained each other in apprenticeship systems of singing, conducting, composition, and instrument building. Today a substantial corpus of their music is preserved in Bolivian archives. The extant repertoire includes several large-scale operas and liturgical compositions attributed to teams of Indigenous composers. In this talk, I offer a systematic analysis of this repertoire and its distinctive style, which I call “colonial galant.” I argue, first, how the style of this repertoire is genuinely galant and very much a part of the eighteenth-century European intellectual and aesthetic movement that shares that name. I also define the colonial galant style as a distinct sub-set of the galant and demonstrate its particular features. I hope to show that close scrutiny of this colonial repertoire can help us reframe the historiography of eighteenth-century European music.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

ROGER MATHEW GRANT is a music theorist and cultural historian whose research focuses on eighteenth-century music, affect theory, and the history of music theory. He is the author of two award-winning books, Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical and Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era. His journal articles have appeared in venues such as Critical Inquiry, Representations, Music Theory Spectrum, and the Journal of the American Musicological Society. Currently, he is at work on a new book examining eighteenth-century Indigenous compositions from Jesuit missions in Bolivia. At Wesleyan University, Roger serves as Professor of Music, Dean of Arts and Humanities, and Deputy Provost. He was also recently named a Guggenheim Fellow.