This international conference (Galant Musics in Italy, the Iberian Peninsula and the New World) formed the scholarly nucleus of the recent Early Music Festival of Úbeda and Baeza. The festival, an annual event first celebrated in 1997, showcases performances by specialist ensembles from throughout Europe at venues in the Renaissance hill towns of Jaén Province, Andalusia. In 2019 the festival explored the theme of ‘Global Italy’, emphasizing connections between the Italian peninsula and Spain, regions linked politically for much of the early modern period through Spanish Habsburg and Bourbon governance in the Kingdom of Naples.
The festival specifically commemorated the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the death of a musician whose life embodies the very idea of ‘Global Italy’: Ignacio Jerusalem (1707–1769). Born in Lecce, Puglia, educated in Naples, and active in various parts of the Spanish world, including various Spanish port cities and the north African enclave of Ceuta, Jerusalem spent most of the final two decades of his life as the chapel master of Mexico City Cathedral, in New Spain (colonial Mexico), where he composed over 250 pieces. A focus on the figure of Jerusalem, who also played the cello and horn, offers an opportunity to trace the dissemination and transformation of galant aesthetics from Naples to a transatlantic destination with a cultural context and musical infrastructure distinct from Europe; his story and output thus provides a striking contrast from the historical pathways for musicians more familiar to musicology, such as those discussed by Reinhard Strohm in The Eighteenth-Century Diaspora of Music and Musicians (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001) and Daniel Heartz in Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720–1780 (New York: Norton, 2003).
In keeping with the cosmopolitan profile of galant music, the conference featured presentations by scholars active in Austria, Brazil, Colombia, Italy, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the United States; it was held at the Palacio de Jabalquinto, a structure which dates back to the fifteenth century and forms part of the Baeza campus of the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía. The first session approached the works of Jerusalem and his contemporaries from the perspectives of music theory, and opened with a keynote speech by Robert O. Gjerdingen (Northwestern University): ‘Ignacio Jerusalem as Bearer of the Galant Tradition to New Spain’. Applying the schema theory developed in his Music in the Galant Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) to passages from Jerusalem's solfeggi and his ode Al combate (1761), Gjerdingen revealed that the composer's bass patterns and voice leading idiomatically reflect the Neapolitan teaching tradition, leaving no doubt regarding the pertinence of the stylistic linkage of Jerusalem with more familiar Neapolitan composers. Following Gjerdingen, the session's panellists discussed specific schemata in Jerusalem's works. Jonathan Salamon (Yale University) proposed the recognition of a new schema, the ‘Leo’, which is prevalent in music by many composers of the period, from Leonardo Leo to Antonio Vivaldi to J. S. Bach, while John A. Rice (Akademie für Mozart-Forschung, Salzburg) analysed works from eighteenth-century Madrid – including Nicola Conforto's opera Nitteti and violin sonatas by José de Herrando – to probe the interaction between galant schemata and phrase structure. Finally, Zoe León Martín (Universidad de Valladolid) applied Gjerdingen's theoretical framework to trio sonatas by the composer brothers Joan Baptista Pla i Agustí (c1720–1773) and Josep Pla i Agustí (c1728–1762).
Concluding a year of considerable scholarly activity related to the legacy of Ignacio Jerusalem, a series of three keynote papers presented new research on the composer and his music. In a remarkable paper delivered in Italian, ‘Formazione e vita musicale a Napoli negli anni di Jerusalem’ (Musical Training and Musical Life in Naples during [Ignacio de] Jerusalem's Years There), Paologiovanni Maione (Conservatorio di Musica San Pietro a Majella, Naples) presented newly identified documents that situate Jerusalem at the Conservatorio di Sant'Onofrio in Naples in the period 1724–1726 and gave a broader context for the conservatory environment in which he studied and performed. Javier Marín-López (Universidad de Jaén), under whose direction both the festival and the conference have thrived, traced in his paper ‘Jerusalem grabado: hacia una construcción sonora del ’700 novohispano’ (Recording Jerusalem: Towards a Sonic Construction of 1700s New Spain) the recorded legacy of Jerusalem's music over the past forty years. Not only did Marín-López note the surprising number of Jerusalem's works that has been recorded (over fifty), but he also identified Mexican artists working in Mexico as the main locus of recording activity, despite the small production run of many of those albums. My own presentation (Drew Edward Davies, Northwestern University) established the number of mass ordinary settings by Jerusalem as five (there is additionally one requiem mass), examined the formal and philological idiosyncrasies of these cantata-style missae breves – ironically some of Jerusalem's lengthiest compositions – and stressed that several manuscripts preserved in California are the work of other composers.
Three further papers based upon new archival research shed new light on sources of Jerusalem's music and its social context. Faith Lanam (University of California Santa Cruz) presented conclusions from her recent PhD dissertation concerning the Vezerro de lecciones, a large manuscript of solfeggi by Jerusalem, Leonardo Leo and Francesco Feo housed at the Colegio de las Vizcaínas in Mexico City, noting the relevance of this source to the education of Jerusalem's own daughters, especially María Micaela Jerusalem, who served as a leader at the Colegio herself. Dianne Goldman (independent scholar, Chicago) discussed Matins responsories by Jerusalem in the archive of the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City in connection with founding of that institutions, as well as the acquisition of repertory and responses to political changes at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Vielka Isabel Hernández Bello (Universidad Veracruzana, Xalapa) then examined the repertory of Mexico City Cathedral as listed in eighteenth-century inventories.
A series of papers discussed music by some of Jerusalem's non-Italian contemporaries in the Americas. Luisa Vilar-Payá (Universidad de las Américas, Puebla) took a ‘centrifugal’ approach (from the work outward) to the Dixit Dominus from the Vespers setting for the Feast of the Most Precious Blood of Christ by Martín Crucelaequi (1737–1784) to show how structural devices in the music translate into semantic meanings about this religious occasion. In discussing a mass setting by Tomás Ochando (c1725–1799), composed in New Spain, Gladys Zamora Pineda (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) drew attention to the symbiosis of Italianate and traditionally Spanish musical elements in the work. Paul G. Feller (Northwestern University) discussed how musical meaning was communicated in tandem with textual references to shepherds and the manger and through the evocation of dance, in Christmas villancicos from the late eighteenth century preserved at Santiago Cathedral, Chile. Moving to a slightly later chronological period, Zoila Elena Vega Salvaterra (Universidad Nacional de San Agustín, Arequipa) traced the vestiges of galant schemata through Peruvian music repertories of the first decades of the nineteenth century, such as the villancico El juego del hombre by Diego Llanos (1766–1855). Similarly, Ricardo Bernardes (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) analysed music by composer André da Silva Gomes (1752–1844), who emigrated to Brazil, set alongside the work of his peers who remained in Portugal; Diósnio Machado Neto (Universidade de São Paulo) then discussed music by José Mauricio Nunes Garcia (1767–1830) with reference to schemata and opera buffa.
Another important focus of the conference was the reception of the galant style in the Iberian Peninsula, within a wide variety of genres and contexts. Andrea Bombi (Universitat de València) offered a keynote lecture on this theme, ‘¿Galantes a distancia? Hipótesis sobre la italianización’ (Galant Styles at a Distance? A Hypothesis on Italianization), that probed how and to what extent eighteenth-century Spanish composers who did not travel to Italy for their musical education – specifically José Pradas (1689–1757) – may have employed schematic elements in their compositional process. In a session focused specifically on Portugal, Cristina Fernandes (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) gave a keynote address entitled ‘O Real Seminario da Patriarcal de Lisboa e o estilo galante na música sacra luso-brasileira: métodos pedagógicos e práticas de composição’ (The Royal Patriarchal Seminary of Lisbon and the Galant Style in Luso-Brazilian Sacred Music: Pedagogical Methods and Compositional Practices), in which she examined the role of solfeggi and other methods of teaching sacred music in Lisbon and the legacy of their transmission to Brazil. Luis Ramos (Hochschule der Künste Bern) gave a paper on a parallel topic: the education of boy singers for the Royal Chapel in Madrid.
The ensuing papers made clear the diversity of understudied eighteenth-century repertories in Spain and Portugal that demonstrate distinct links with Italian music and also exhibit broader patterns of European circulation. Ana Lombardía (Universidad de Valladolid) recognized the presence and popularity of Italian or Italian-educated violinist-composers in Madrid around the middle of the century and discussed violin sonatas by two such figures, Christiano Reynaldi (1719–1767) and Franceso Montali (died 1782), whose works she has recently published in a critical edition, Sonatas para violin en Madrid hacia 1760: Raynaldi y Montali (Madrid: ICCMU, 2019). Héctor Eulogio Santos Conde (Conservatorio Superior de Música de A Coruña) discussed the repertories of late-century symphonies by composers such as Pasquale Anfossi (1727–1797) and Johann Christian Bach (1735–1782) which are present in some Spanish cathedral archives, while Francisco de Asís Manzanero Osuna (Consejera de Educación, Junta de Andalucía) examined an oratorio and cantata by Francisco Hernández Illana (c1700–1780). Both Carlos González Ludeña (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) and Antonio Soriano Santacruz (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) looked at music for Madrid's dynamic theatre scene in the eighteenth century: González Ludeña considered the role of Mateo Tollis de la Roca (1714–1781) – likely to be the same individual as the man who succeeded Jerusalem as chapel master in Mexico – as a theatre composer, while Soriano Santacruz traced elements of the galant style in multiple settings of the comedic libretto La fingida Arcadia across the century.
As already seen in the context of Peru, vestiges of the galant style remained present in musical culture well into the nineteenth century. Íñigo de Peque (Universidad de Valladolid) showed the persistence of galant idioms in some Spanish organ music in the nineteenth century, and Carlos Villar-Taboada (Universidad de Valladolid) considered the resonances of the galant in Joaquín Rodrigo's Concierto en modo galante, written in 1949. Both Sónia Maria Duarte (Universidade de Lisboa) and Egberto Bermúdez (Universidad Nacional de Colombia, who presented via video-link) employed iconographic sources to look at elements of dance and musical life in areas further removed from capital cities, respectively the Alentejo region of Portugal and El Socorro, Colombia.
Fabio Biondi, the leader of Europa Galante and a widely recorded specialist in historically informed violin performance, gave a closing presentation about idiomatic bows for violins to use in different types of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music. This was followed by the launch of the first three volumes of the ongoing series Ignacio Jerusalem: Obras selectas – Selected Works (Madrid: Dairea Ediciones, 2019), edited by Javier Marín-López and me. The first volume, Cronología biográfica y lista de obras / Biographical Timeline and List of Works, compiles the data currently known about Ignacio Jerusalem and his music, while the second and third provide editions of Jerusalem's works Al combate and the lamentation Aleph. Ego vir videns paupertatem respectively. The celebration of the composer concluded with concerts of works by Jerusalem and José Herrando in Úbeda (8 December 2019), Salamanca (10 December) and Madrid (14 January 2020) by Nereydas – a Madrid-based ensemble directed by Javier Ulises Illán that specializes in eighteenth-century repertory – with soprano Alicia Amo and countertenor Filippo Mineccia.
The international, multilingual and multidisciplinary qualities of Ignacio Jerusalem 250 opened up new pathways of interchange and communication vital to an ongoing historiography that will no longer be able to provincialize the Iberian world. Especially rewarding was the application of schema theory, using quantitative methodology, to the works of Jerusalem and Spanish peninsular repertories in ways that unsurprisingly point to Jerusalem as an exemplar of the Neapolitan galant style. Together with the concerts, the conference presented Jerusalem as an educated, expressive composer who worked in a global context about which future research will doubtless reveal much more. At the same time, the many interesting and relevant papers about diverse Iberian topics demonstrated the continuing opportunities for bringing Iberian repertories further into general discussions about baroque and galant music.
