Musicology Lecture: Roger Mathew Grant, "The Ritornello as Settlement Form: Instrumental Sonatas from 18th-c. Chiquitania"

Please join us at 4:00 pm on January 25 in the CAC Conference Room for the next entry in our ongoing musicology series, Roger Mathew Grant's "The Ritornello as Settlement Form: Instrumental Sonatas from Eighteenth-Century Chiquitania."

During the middle decades of the eighteenth century, in a remote region of central South America, Indigenous musicians composed a group of instrumental sonatas under conditions of Jesuit colonization.  Today these sonatas are part of the Archivo Musical de Chiquitos (AMCh) in Bolivia.  Although these works have been performed and recorded by early music ensembles from across the Americas and Europe, they are virtually absent from historical and analytical scholarship. 

What can these instrumental sonatas tell us about colonial settlement?  What can their sound and rhetoric indicate to us about the spaces and places in which they were performed?  In this paper I attempt to answer these questions in a detailed study of form in the corpus of instrumental sonatas from the AMCh.  I demonstrate how the ritornello—or refrain—creates a replication pattern that is conducive to the settler spatial logic of the missions.  The sonatas in this corpus employ highly distinctive formal structures which rely principally on the return to the ritornello, structuring an inner and outer in a kind of repetition ritual.  It is the form of this ritornello act that I endeavor to interpret as a sound of settlement. 

Close analytical scrutiny of these sonatas can help us to understand their social role within the built environment of the missions.  In Chiquitania, Indigenous authors echoed the ritual orientation of their mission settlement with the vocabulary of group ceremony in their musical compositions.  In these sonatas, the return of the ritornello creates a hierophany—or a manifestation of the sacred—within a set of concentric musical passages.  Linking the music theoretical work of James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy with the social theory of Mercia Eliade, I argue that the distinctive ritornello patterns of these sonatas worked to create a hierophany in sound.  Because these works are some of the only surviving eighteenth-century artifacts in Indigenous hands, they are vital to our understanding of the asymmetrical power structures within the social life of the Chiquitano missions.

This lecture is free and open to the public.

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.  In addition to teaching at Wesleyan, he has also been Visiting Professor in the music departments at both Harvard and Yale. His most recent book, Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical, was published with Fordham University Press (2020).  He is currently serving as the Dean of Arts and Humanities at Wesleyan University. For more information on Roger, visit his website.