Across the early modern Atlantic world, sounds, tunes, and rhythms travelled with ideas, people, and merchandise to and from the shores and ports of Mexico and Latin America. In America a constant process of variation, recomposition, and reinvention preserved some forms of the past, within the rich stew of the canarios, guabinas, pajarillos, corridos, fandangos, morenas, peteneras and villancicos of the New World.

Many surviving collections of music contain diferencias for harp and guitar, and accompaniments shaped around the melody of a ballad or the cadences of a son, illustrating how melodies were glossed, revitalized, and improvised “in the local manner,” to bring forth new genres and original variations. The local sones of New Spain, which were the forerunners of the Mexican son, therefore may preserve many features of colonial musical practice. The origins of much traditional music (in particular, the sones from Veracruz, Huasteca and Guerrero) become clearer when the sones are compared to the characteristic folias, jácaras, jotas, and fandangos of the early modern repertory.

Eloy Cruz, scholar and performer, is Professor of Guitar at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma in Mexico City and author of the book La Casa de los Once Muertos. Historia y Repertorio de la Guitarra. He is a founding member of the Tembembe Ensamble Continuo and the ensemble for Hispanic baroque music, La Fontegara. His current interests include the early history of the guitar, the origins of son in the seventeenth-century Hispanic world, and the development of this musical genre in Mexico.

Following his March 14th performance at Lincoln Center in New York with the Tembembe Ensamble Continuo and Jordi Savall, Eloy Cruz comes to the University of Michigan as a Martin Luther King/Rosa Parks/César Chávez Visiting Professor sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Department of Musicology.