The Music History/Theory Workshop is delighted to welcome Jutta Toelle, Visiting Scholar at the University of Chicago and Assistant Professor of Music at the Humboldt-Universität Berlin, who will be sharing a draft from her current book project.

Jutta Toelle
So schön singen die nackten Barbaren:
European narratives on “mission through music” in the Guaraní reductions

Wednesday, April 24 from 4:30 to 6:00 PM
Logan Center for the Arts, Terrace Seminar Room 801

Jutta writes:

I am presenting a draft for my chapter on the Guaraní reductions, which will be part of my current book project about the process of ‚mission through music’. In the course of this research, I want to find out how missionaries of the Catholic orders, above all Franciscans and Jesuits, used music in order to missionize the indigenous peoples in Latin America. I want to know how this process was transformed over time and have decided to also put emphasis on its perceptions and consequences in Europe. The time frame will be 1523 until roughly 1767, from the time the first official (Franciscan) missionaries entered Aztec territory until the year the Jesuits were expelled from the Spanish and Portuguese colonial territories. The contested concept of (European) music as a civilizing force and the entanglement of music in these dichotomies of barbarity and civilization form the core of my research. Questions of oral vs. written traditions and of the valorization of different types of music in the history of the Early Modern encounter are also important. Eventually, I want to show that the Catholic orders established a „layer“ of exoticism which is still powerful in many musical relationships between Europe and Latin America.

 Maria Welch will serve as respondent. All are welcome to attend!

To download the document, click here.

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