Besides its obvious political and ideological foundation, the Franciscan enterprise of establishing twenty-one missions in California between 1769 and 1834, stretching from San Diego to Sonoma, created a remarkable cultural laboratory in which local populations and newly arrived European priests, soldiers and colonists engaged in interpreting each other and their beliefs in a process that to some extent has never stopped. On the European side, a considerable number of artistic works have survived, including more than two hundred polyphonic pieces. Since the middle of the twentieth century, they have generated much interest among musicologists. To discuss the present state and future prospects of musical research on the California missions, the Center for Iberian and Latin American Music at the University of California, Riverside dedicated its 2009 annual conference entirely to that subject. It was coordinated by Walter Clark (University of California, Riverside), who started the Encuentros in 2005 as an annual series of one-day conferences, each on a single topic related to the music of Spain, Portugal and their former colonies. Previous conferences have dealt with Spanish music in the time of Goya, the Mexican son (a generic term for several traditional forms of vocal and instrumental music), music and politics in the Andes and Hispanic music of the Philippines. The small size of the event and the space given for discussion allow for an atmosphere of exchange of ideas rarely seen in larger conferences.

A number of the participants at the Encuentro 2009, ‘Music and Musicians of the California Missions’, have been active in the field for some decades, pioneers in unveiling the music of that often misunderstood era in North American history. Others are newer to the field. Together, they have recently drawn upon new types of sources (using not only music manuscripts but also inventories, records of purchase and censuses, among others) and ventured towards more cultural approaches. In his thoughts on the future of research in Californian mission music, one of the pioneers, William Summers (Dartmouth College), elaborated on possibilities that primary music sources could surface in the future. And in California this can happen in the most unexpected places. Summers recalled his own experience in finding four elusive pages of mission music: while watching a famous show on TV years ago, he saw excerpts of an Office of the Dead hanging on a wall as set decoration. He never managed to get to the 150-plus-page codex from which those four pages were copied, for the original four pages belonged to an anonymous collector who did not want to be identified. Summers also considered how eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century mission inventories, which keep surfacing in archives north and south of the Mexican-American border, not only reveal the scope of the losses but help to clarify the nature of early performance practice.

James Sandos (University of Redlands) exemplified the move beyond music manuscripts with his research on early Franciscan censuses in California, part of an ongoing project with the Huntington Library. He emphasized that population records, censuses and inventories can lead to important insights into the professionalization and social status of musicians. Being a singer was a path to achieving high status in the mission, for singers were an elite group. Choristers were preferred padriños (godfathers); they assisted at baptisms and matrimonies and they performed the duties of a sacristan, all in all exerting a strong social influence in the community. However, one intriguing puzzle in nineteenth-century Franciscan censuses remains unsolved: the clear under-reporting of musicians in the Mission San Antonio de Padua. The music there was considered the finest of any mission, and inventories show that a sizeable orchestra was active. Sandos and the participants debated the issue in the discussion that followed. It could be that the Franciscans at San Antonio decided to omit most references to the activities of their neophytes. Or maybe women were used as singers, a practice that was common in earlier times among the Jesuits in Baja California, but not in the Franciscan Missions.

John Koegel (California State University, Fullerton), who also does research on mission inventories, devoted his presentation to the soundscapes of missions, military garrisons and villages in late eighteenth-century Alta California and northern New Spain, considering in particular the function of music and the circulation of musicians between these different settings. He showed that military musicians were active not only in military contexts but also in social gatherings and fandangos in the pueblos. As for the presence of instrumental music in sacred contexts, Koegel pointed to small instrumental interludes in extant vocal sources and to records of purchase of musical instruments. The contribution of Steven Hacket (University of California, Riverside) complemented that of Koegel. Hacket discussed early nineteenth-century inventories of musical instruments brought from the Colegio de San Fernando in Mexico City to the Mission San Fernando in Alta California. Focusing on the cultural context, Hacket argued that liturgical art was an essential part of teaching the doctrina and that significant financial resources were devoted to iconography and imagery. Indeed, they surpassed all expenditures for music. Franciscan missionaries specified in detail the type of iconography they wanted, matching it to the needs of their respective missions. He also described how the imported iconography was interpreted locally in paintings by Indian artists clearly influenced by local traditions and practices. In the fruitful discussion that followed, the participants explored some of the musical implications of Hacket's study, asking about what insights might or might not be gained from the parallel between appropriations in the visual arts and in music, and, more basically, about the sources themselves.

Octave Mannoni's Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (London: Methuen, 1956), a seminal work in postcolonial studies, inspired Daniel E. Krieger (California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo) to write an insightful paper on inferiority and dependence in the process of ‘civilizing’ California. Krieger drew parallels between Father Narciso Durán's efforts to transform California into a paradise and the French attempt (described by Mannoni) to colonize Madagascar. In California, music was connected with both civilization and savagery. It was both a blessing and a curse, much as language was in Shakespeare's Tempest. The efforts of Durán/Prospero in taming the Native/Caliban had a lasting impact. Even several decades after the mission system was shut down, a certain sense of paradise remained: orchestras continued to be active for many years, a tradition of locally made European instruments persisted and the rhythms of daily life were still somewhat conditioned by devotional songs of the hours. The taming of Caliban also resulted in the successful reshaping of social relations and hierarchies, for choristers were still regarded as important members of society and even took leadership roles in political revolts in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the debate that followed, James Sandos pointed out that this interpretation coincided with his own findings on Franciscan censuses.

Kristin Dutcher Mann (University of Arkansas, Little Rock) turned to the blending of natives' and colonists' musical practices in late eighteenth-century Texas and New Mexico. She commented on reports of shamans sharing the religious space of a pueblo with Catholic priests, and of colonists who went dancing with ‘pagans’ when priests were not watching. As she argued, the northern frontier of New Spain was a region where religious guidelines were extremely difficult to enforce. Dutcher Mann also pointed out the survival of dance dramas that depicted struggles between natives and colonists. The paper prompted a debate that explored comparisons with northern New Spain and Alta California as well as the nature and extent of the blending of European and native elements in the mitotes, fandangos and matachines.

In spite of such recent interest in the cultural context of music, some papers have shown that there are still possibilities for original research on the musical score itself, either by approaching old sources with new tools and methods, or by drawing parallels with living traditions. Margaret Cayward (University of California, Davis) combined musicological source study with cultural contextualization by examining early sources (mid- to late nineteenth century) of the Pastorelas in Alta California, a Christmas play that was very popular during the mission period and still is in many parts of Hispanic America. She convincingly argued that, after the dismantling of the missions, some families maintained the Pastorelas tradition for decades as a way of preserving their Hispanic and Californian identities.

While most misunderstandings regarding notation and transcription of Franciscan mission music have dissipated in the past decades, Craig Russell (California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo) stressed the importance of identifying the actual sources of chant melodies copied and arranged in Alta California. As he pointed out, there are sociological and political implications to the choice of a specific source for a chant melody. It matters whether a chant derives from Rome, Toledo, Martinez's Prontuario or the Franciscan tradition. But most of Russell's research focused on performance practice issues, on how that music was actually sung and played, and he emphasized that the uniqueness of Franciscan mission music poses its own problems and asks for new approaches. One of these approaches would be to study the process of learning music in the missions. According to Russell, Marcos y Navas's book on canto llano, canto figurado and canto de organo, of which there are five copies in Santa Barbara, states some of the musical guidelines that were adopted in California mission music, for example with respect to rhythmic and polyphonic settings of chant melodies. Russell went on to show how some musical sources imply the performance of canto figurado with instruments: a sketchy notation allowed the interpreter to expand, realize or complete the polyphony. For the enjoyment of the audience, members of the Cal Poly Early Music Ensemble illustrated Russell's thoughts by singing some musical excerpts. The Encuentro 2009 came to a close with an evening concert in which the Ensemble, directed by Thomas Davies, offered the participants a rare chance to hear the music that was mentioned and discussed throughout the conference. The proceedings of the conference are scheduled to appear in the next edition of Diagonal, the online journal of the Center for Hispanic and Latin American Music at the University of California, Riverside.