Professor Stein's abstract:

“The pervasive influence of popular dance-songs in early modern Hispanic literature and colonial cultures has long been recognized by literary and musical scholars. Hundreds of plays, stories, and text booklets for vernacular sacred villancicos call for them. Musicologists have focused primarily on analyzing form and genre, finding and listing musical sources, categorizing poetic texts, and generally describing their broad cultural context. 

In this paper, I focus on dance-songs that were incorporated into sacred music performed across the Hispanic dominions, despite their repeated condemnation and prohibition. Their tunes, rhythms, and harmonic patterns (made especially clear to us in solo instrumental settings) were distinct and recognizable to all kinds of listeners. They communicated meaning through their very musical materials, not merely in their sung texts.  

My recent research has uncovered what might be the key to understanding the paradoxical value of these dance-songs to seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century ecclesiastical authorities. Many describe, execute, facilitate or narrate the violation of feminine spaces, womanly precincts, female privacy, and even the female body. My presentation moves from a sacred play by Miguel de Cervantes about a conversion in the Americas to provocative excerpts from sacred villancicos composed in Spain, colonial New Spain (Mexico), and colonial Latin America. The paper will be illustrated with both audio examples and visual evidence presented via slides.”

The talk is part of the Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop on "Religion in the Atlantic World."