Music Department 2024-2025 Colloquium Series

Thursdays | 4:30–6:00pm | Adzenyah Rehearsal Hall 003 (unless otherwise noted)

SPRING 2025

The Colonial Galant Style: Eighteenth-Century Music from Chiquitania, Bolivia

Roger Mathew Grant (Wesleyan University)
Thursday, February 6, 2025 at 4:30pm
Adzenyah Rehearsal Hall 003

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 European art music.

Roger Mathew Grant is a theorist and historian of music and culture with particular interests in affect theory, the history of music theory, and eighteenth-century music. His journal articles have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, Music Theory Spectrum, Eighteenth-Century Music, and the Journal of Music Theory. His first book, Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era, won the 2016 Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Music Theory. His second book, book, Peculiar Attunements, was selected for the “Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory” for 2020. He is currently serving as the Dean of Arts and Humanities at Wesleyan University.

MORE TO COME!!