Immaculate Sounds

Front matter

IMMACULATE SOUNDS The Musical Lives of Nuns in New Spain

IMMACULATE SOUNDS: THE MUSICAL LIVES OF NUNS IN NEW SPAIN

Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music

Part I. Acousmatic Discipline

1. Immaculate Conflicts: Resounding Mary's Immaculate Conception, or Who Was Sister Flor de Santa Clara?

2. Sonic Thresholds: The Grates ofthe Cloister and the Lips of Nuns, or Who Was Sister Rosa?

3. Disciplined Sounds: Dowry Waivers and Race, or Who Was Sister Mariana Josefa de Sefior San Ignacio?

Part II. Unity

4. Feasting Sounds: The Eucharistic Honeymoon, or Who Was Sister Paula?

5. Redeeming Sounds: Resounding the Passion of Christ and His Spiritual Brides, or Who Was Sister Marina de San Francisco?

Epilogue Acknowledgments Appendices

Select Bibliography Index

201 205 207 243 297 223

1.1

1.2

1.3

2.1

2.2 2.9 2.4

2.5 2.6 2.7

3.1

5.1

5.2

Figures

Locutorio with portrait of St. Beatriz de Silva, Inmaculada Concepción Convent, Toledo, Spain, ca. June 2011

Philip IV serenades the Immaculate Conception. Courtesy ofthe Getty Research Institute

Anonymous, Sor María Manuela Josefa de Zamacona y Pedroza, ca. 1796, Museo Nacional del Virreinato. Used with permission from INAH

Miguel Cabrera, La Virgen del Apocalipsis, ca. 1760. Used with permission from Museo Nacional de Arte, INBA, Mexico City

Romero, Misa "Bonae voluntatis" a 9, Kyrie (bass part), Encarnación Choirbooks, vol. 5, folio 33r

Dela Maza, side elevation, New Spanish convent church Coros, Concepción convent, Puebla, built ca. 1615

Coros with modified coro bajo to lengthen nave, Regina Coeli convent, Mexico City, built ca. 1732

Long facade, Regina Coeli convent, Mexico City Abanico above coro alto, Santísima Trinidad convent, Puebla, built ca. 1673

Anonymous frontispiece depicting Maria de Jesús, Diego de Lemus, Vida, virtudes, trabajos, favores y milagros, ca. 1683

Alcíbar, Votive Portrait of Sor M. María Anna Josefa de San Ignacio, 1793. With permission from the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

Christo confixus sum cruci, from Francisco Frías y Olvera, “Cristo Señor Nuestro retratado en la vida, virtudes, y muerte de la Venerable Madre Sor María Ignacia,” 1792

Nuestra Señora de los Dolores / de las Aguas, Jesús María Convent, Mexico City, 1794 xxiii

71 76 77

78 78 79

1,1

1:2

1.4

1.5

1.6 2.1 2.

Examples

Amo Christum, excerpt, Libro de Coro del Convento de Santa Inés de Montepulciano, folio 16r

Veni electa mea, Libro de Coro del Convento de Santa Inés de Montepulciano, folio 9v

Veni sponsa Christi, Libro de Coro del Convento de Santa Inés de Montepulciano, folio 6v

Veni sponsa Christi, Ceremonial para las religiosas geronimas de México, The Hispanic Society of America, B2911

Sancta et immaculata virginitas and Benedicta tu in mulieribus, Proprium de Tempore: Antiphonario General, 1691, Biblioteca Palafoxiana, folios 45v-46v

Vidales, Con qué gala en el campo (CSG.285), mm. 37-40 Romero, Misa "Bonae voluntatis," Gloria (mm. 10-32)

Anonymous, Venite adoremus regem regum, Encarnación convent choirbook 6, folios 131v-132r

Anonymous, Tonada sola a lo divino (CSG.109), mm. 5-24

Ximénez de Cisneros, Sacratísima Virgen (CSG.297), estribillo, mm. 4-18 Ximénez de Cisneros, Sacratísima Virgen (CSG.297), coplas, mm. 32-36 Vidales, Al aire que se llena de luces (CSG.283), mm. 20-30

Anonymous, Pide el alma el Sacramento a 4 (CSG.097), mm. 70-80

Riva, Cisne, no halagues a 3 (CSG.245), mm. 7-22

Cáseda, Pajarito que en el aire elevado (CSG.151), mm. 96-99 Anonymous, Corazón de dolor, 1718 (CSG.024), mm. 5-9

Anonymous, Corazón de dolor, 1718 (CSG.024), mm. 58-63

Ardanaz, Ay, afligida madre, ca. 1658-1706 (CSG.125), mm. 37-45

63 67 72

Tables

L1 Extant sources of New Spanish convent music 1.1 Timeline of foundational events for the Order of the Immaculate Conception

1.2 New Spanish convent establishments, drawn from Asunción Lavrin's Brides of Christ, 359-361

2.1 Sample conventliturgical schedules

43 84

I1

I2

1.1

1.4

2.1

2.2

4.1

4.2 4.3 4.4 5.1

5.2

Profession chant, Ceremonial para las religiosas geronimas de México, San Jerónimo convent, Mexico City, ca. seventeenth century. Hispanic Society of America, New York, Call number B2911

Chant, Libro de Coro del Convento de Santa Inés de Montepulciano, Puebla, ca. 1709. Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, Mexico City, Colección Antigua Vol. 968

Rodriguez de Mata, Excerpt of Asperges me, mm. 16-24, Encarnacion Convent Choirbook 2, folios 115v-118r

Art gardens in convent manuscripts

Francisco Guerrero, Missa Saeculorum Amen, a4, Agnus Dei (tiple part), decorated A initial, Encarnación Choirbooks, vol. 1, fol. 74v

Juan de Lienas, Salve Regina, a4, snake in tree (before tiple part), Encarnación Choirbooks, vol. 1, fol. 78v

Juan de Lienas, Salve Regina, a4, bird (before alto part), Encarnación Choirbooks, vol. 1, fol. 79r

Juan de Lienas, Salve Regina, a4, snakes in vines (before second tiple part), Encarnación Choirbooks, vol. 1, fol. 79v

Nicolás de Texada Guzmán, Immaculate Conception, Jesás María Convent Profession book, ca. 1584

Anonymous, Immaculate Conception, Jesús María Convent Profession book, ca. 1774

Music references in Archbishop Payo Enriquez’s Visits to Mexico City Convents, 1672-1675. Based on Leticia Pérez Puente, Gabriela Oropeza Tena, and Marcela Saldaña Solis, eds., Autos de las visitas del arzobispo fray Payo Enríquez a los conventos de monjas de la ciudad de México, 1672-1675 (Mexico City: CESU-UNAM, 2005)

Franciscan coro gestures, excerpt from Manuel Aromir y Bustamante, Reglas generales para dentro y fuera del coro, ca. 1825

Dominican coro gestures, “De las inclinaciones,” excerpt from Francisco Guerra, Regla y constituciones para las religiosas recoletas dominicas, 1789

Decorated Initials of María Teresa de San Francisco, Name on Alto of part of Second Choir, Vidales, Al aire que se llena de luces (CSG.283)

Riva, Cisne, no halagues

Cáseda, Pajarito que en el aire elevado

Riva, Que enigma tan bello

Instancia presentada por la abadesa y religiosas del Convento de la Purísima Concepción de Nuestra Sefiora la Virgen María, AGN/Instituciones Coloniales/Indiferente Virreinal/Caja 0565/Expediente 023

Diego de Oviedo, hymns, Manual de ejercicios para los

desagravios de Cristo, 1705

211 213

227 231 232 233 234 235

Note on Sources

All translations and transcriptions are the author's unless specified otherwise. Standardized Spanish orthography has been used for clarity and ease of reading. Bible quotations are taken from the Knox Bible with occasional modifications by the author. Vulgate numeration was used for the Psalms, consistent with their listing in the early modern New Spanish sources. When I refer to the Encarnación choirbooks, I am referring to the manuscript sources at the Newberry Library called Mexican choir books. I do this to foreground their conventual provenance, which is obscured by the generic title of the books in the Newberry’s catalog.

Preface, or an Autohistoria- Teoría

Ave María Purísima

Late November at Clares place in the desert, as the sun dips below the San Jacinto peaks, Casey, Clare and I are knee-deep in poetry. Just before dinner, Cesar from the neighborhood arrives. Hes writing a book, a history of "the musical lives of nuns in New Spain,’ and has invited them to join us. Echoes of convent music come wafting in with them, and as we all settle in, we form a new pod, of sorts.

Dinner is al fresco, masks at the ready, life lived in the moment, “in this time of COVID”—it’s not like it was in Truchas or San Miguel— poets sitting around tables, breathing in, breathing out, suffused in each other's molecules, breathing the mountain or city air, attuned to each other's physical cues, breathing in and out.

Chicken with mushrooms, tiny potatoes, baked eggplant with cheese, the four of us eat every bite. The nuns don't eat a thing. Nothing virtual about chocolate lava cake, vanilla ice cream only melts in real time. I slip into a sugar-based reverie where all I see is that funny screen between the priest and me, the screen in the confessional.

Ave María Purísima, Father says to me in Spanish. Sin pecado concebida, I reply. I push back the curtain at the entrance to the confessional. I look out at the church through a huge, life-sized version of that same screen.

It separates the nuns of the Royal Convent of the Most Holy Pure Conception in San Miguel from me. The entire order is there, white habits, blue capes, eyes averted. Ave María Purísima, they greet me in unison, our bodies in close proximity. I can feel their pure exhalation through the semisheer scrim against my bristled cheek.

Poem by C. W. Emerson

XXii PREFACE

Cloistered convents seem to inspire artists of various sorts. They always have. My friends, poets C. W. (Chris) Emerson and Clare Chu, were in the middle of a poetry marathon one night in November 2020 when Clare hosted a dinner. They had to write one poem every day for a week. It was the first time I had met Chris. Clare lives two doors down and across the street from me. I had only known her for some four months after crossing paths almost daily on dog walks in the pre-vaccine COVID days. During the dinner she hosted, Clare insisted that I tell Chris about my experience visiting the Conceptionist nuns Mother House in Toledo, Spain, and about the book I was writing, this one. Chris immediately latched on to my story and began jotting down notes on a piece of paper Clare brought to him, developing a poem about the situation at hand for his marathon assignment. What resulted is a mystical weaving together of past and present—now long passed— through the story I told over dinner and his and Clares recollection of their participation in the San Miguel Poetry Week while lodging at the "Posada de las Monjas" (Lodge of the Nuns), half a block down the street from San Miguel de Allendes eighteenth-century Conceptionist convent church, La Purísima Concepción. They had visited the church multiple times, and throughout the dinner they commented on its beauty and unusual architectural features, the topic of Chapter 2. It is rare to encounter people who have visited these types of old, otherworldly spaces, let alone to be neighbors with one. Thus, I could not think of a better epigraph to open this book than Chriss poem, the product of various fortuitous events. Then again, as Clare often reminds me, "there are no coincidences!"

The convent in Toledo that I visited and told Chris and Clare about was the birthplace ofthe Order of the Immaculate Conception (the Conceptionists), established in the late fifteenth century. I arrived to it on a sweltering Sunday afternoon in June 2011, seeking to gain access into the nuns’ library, which I presumed held primary sources about the order's history. For being cloistered nuns, the Mother House inhabitants were well connected to the outside world. They had internet access, a website, and personal email accounts to confirm my stay in their convent guest quarters.

At the time designated to me by the nuns, I went to the convent's “locutorio” (parlor), where the nuns communicated with guests through an iron grate that kept them physically barricaded from any visitors to the cloister without obstructing the ability to talk to and see one another. I waited some ten minutes in a chair next to the grate, just below a portrait ofthe order's founder, St. Beatriz de Silva (see Figure P.1). Soon, two women came into the cloistered

PREFACE Xxiii

Figure P.1 Locutorio with portrait of St. Beatriz de Silva, Inmaculada Concepción Convent, Toledo, Spain, ca. June 2011 space behind the grate; they were covered from head to toe in white, wearing black veils on their heads and blue cloaks on their shoulders—walking, talking likenesses of St. Beatriz. Nearly in sync, the nuns both said out loud, "Ave María purísima" (Hail purest Mary). Without skipping a beat, I replied, "sin pecado concebida" (conceived without sin). Sister María Nuria then said, "You know our salutation!" I said that I was not aware that these words were used as their salutation, but that I was more than familiar with the phrase from having grown up in a churchgoing Catholic family.

The “Ave María purísima” dialog initiates the confession ritual for Spanish-speaking Catholics. When receiving the sacrament of Penance (confession) one arrives before a priest in a space within a church called a confessional. The priest says upon ones arrival “Ave María purisima,” to which the confessant responds "sin pecado concebida" and proceeds to confess any sins committed such that God would be convinced by the intercession of the Virgin Mary, hailed at the opening of the ritual, to forgive the confessants sins vocalized to the mediating priest. The opening of the confession ritual is different in English, in which the confessant begins by arriving to the

XXiV PREFACE confessional and saying, “Bless me father, I have sinned,” without the added mediation of the Virgin Mary within Spanish confession. I performed my first confession at the age of seven with the Spanish phrase.

“Ave Maria purísima, sin pecado concebida" is a short salutatory prayer to the Virgin Mary that acknowledges Mary’s Immaculate Conception. Most Spanish-speaking Catholics say this prayer passively without knowing what it implies. Reciting it as a product of my sacramental learning,' I gave very little thought to the theology behind “Ave Maria purísima" prior to engaging in the research for this book. But it is an apropos phrase for confession, a ritual through which practicing Catholics believe their sins are forgiven. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception instructs that Mary’s soul was created by God without original sin—conceived immaculately—from the moment of the Creation, when it was believed that time began. As we will see in the pages that follow, the idea of Mary’s immaculacy from sin was bolstered in the early modern period, more so than it is today, especially within the Hispanic Church. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary was thought to be essential in the Catholic narrative of humanity’s salvation.

After making light conversation about my Catholic upbringing and my work as a church organist with Sister Maria Nuria and the Reverend Mother Julia, who you will recall were locked behind the grates of the Mother House locutorio, I explained to them my interest in exploring the music of nuns who branched out from their order throughout New Spain (as colonial Mexico was called before its independence in 1821). The sisters were delighted with my curiosity about the histories and legacies of cloistered convents outside of Spain. I was then granted access to the convent archive and hosted in their guest quarters located outside the cloister for a week.

The nuns fed me two hearty meals a day in the locutorio during my stay through a small opening on the side wall, where a torno (round cabinet) would circle within the wall to deliver food from inside the cloister into the locutorio. I simply had to pull on a rope next to the torno to ring a bell that the nuns could hear inside, and within minutes a voice from behind the wall would say “buenos dias/buenas tardes” (good morning/afternoon). It was an acousmatic voice, one whose source always remained unknown, but whose faint echoes I could hear from behind the torno within the wall that separated the interior world of the cloister from me. The torno would then spin around carrying a plate of delicious Spanish fare. My favorite was the paella made with the tiniest and tastiest clams I had ever eaten.

PREFACE XXV

Lunch always came with chilled red wine, which at first seemed peculiar to me, because growing up in Northern California, not too far from the Napa Valley, I was taught that red wine should be consumed at room temperature. But it was summertime and quite hot in Toledo, and so the chilled red was perfect.

The week I was generously hosted by the nuns ofthe Conceptionist Mother House also coincided with the festivities of Corpus Christi, which filled the streets with tourists for the lavish ceremonies in the city's famous Gothic cathedral. The festivities involved a procession of the cathedral’s consecrated communion host (the Blessed Sacrament) through the streets, accompanied by the archbishop, hundreds of priests and clerics, city officials, university faculty, and laywomen dressed in black, crowned with large Spanish peinetas (combs) on the back of their heads and draped with long, black-laced mantillas (veils). On the Sunday after the town's main procession, the nuns also held their own procession inside their cloister, and they invited me to participate, as they needed assistance holding the canopy that is carried over the Blessed Sacrament during the procession. I was happy to help them out.

The nuns' hospitality was compensated with a promise that I would send them copies of all my published work and the pictures I took, both of their own cloister and sources and of others following my visit. They vouched for me to nuns at other convents, facilitating my entrance into more cloisters as I continued my research in Mexico in a quest for convent music sources.

Through my research travels, I also became an intermediary between nuns in Spain and Mexico, connecting religious communities that will likely never meet in person, through the exchange of digital images of convent lives an ocean apart. All the while, I learned about the musico-religious traditions that tied my own labor as a church organist and my experience in the Mother House during Corpus Christi with convent musicians of the past. As complex and problematic as the Catholic Church has been and continues to be, especially with regard to some of its social and moral teachings, it continues to offer people with varying commitments to its doctrines paths for making a living, making art, and making music, just as it did for the New Spanish cloistered nuns whose lives I reimagine in the subsequent chapters. Along the way, I hope to elucidate some of the Churchs early modern complexities— especially surrounding gender, race, sexuality, and mysticism, and their relationship to music and nuns' voices—that might astound contemporary audiences, whether or not they are religious.