In The Sweet Penance of Music: Musical Life in Colonial Santiago de Chile Alejandro Vera takes the reader on a comprehensive tour of Santiago de Chile's musical fabric during the century or so leading up to the independence of Chile in 1818. Radiating from the centralized space of Santiago Cathedral through the city's convents and domestic spaces to the more decentralized phenomena of public festivities and the career paths of individual musicians, Vera's study reveals the multifaceted circumstances under which professionals and amateurs made music in the colonial city. It does so through an inclusive lens substantiated by copious documentary evidence drawn from archives in Chile, Peru and Spain. One of Vera's most potent conclusions is that Santiago remained intrinsically connected to international music networks in this period, despite its geographical distance from other major cities, a perspective that updates previous scholarship.

The outcome of more than a decade of research, Vera's study might be seen to comprise five books in one by means of its quintet of substantial chapters that exhibit contrasting types of documentary material. The initial chapter on Santiago Cathedral, for example, looks at transformations in the economic resources underpinning music production during the eighteenth century as well as the different types of surviving cathedral repertories. Meanwhile, the chapter dedicated to musicians (chapter 5) considers social factors such as race and musical employment. By contrast, the third chapter, which deals with the private sphere, engages organology and the circulation of music books, among other topics.

What unifies the book as a whole is the concept of dualism, which is symbolized in the title by the oxymoron ‘sweet penance’, a phrase drawn from a 1776 letter written by a nun in relation to the practice of music. Vera uncovers myriad dualisms in the culture of colonial Santiago, including but not limited to those resulting from the dynamics of centre and periphery, secular and regular clergy, social inclusion or exclusion, or liturgical music and street music. He conceives of these dualisms as ‘complex interactions’ that defined the lived experience of the time (4).

As such, Vera's study contributes to the field of urban musicology in the tradition of Reinhard Strohm, whose Music in Late Medieval Bruges (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985) is not cited but is epistemologically present, but it also departs significantly from that field. While Vera shares the task of urban musicology by developing a multi-sited approach that incorporates convents, private residences, public spaces and commercial enterprises, in addition to the cathedral itself, it is clear throughout the book that the city of Santiago is the stage rather than the subject. The book is – refreshingly – about music, musicians and music culture, as evidenced by Vera's intelligent analysis of musical scores and performance practices and detailed discussions of musical instruments ranging from the guitar (an instrument Vera himself plays) to the vihuela and the organ. It is primarily in the chapter about public spaces (chapter 4) that Vera approximates the urban-musicology model by discussing public spectacle, tracing processions through the city's streets and interpreting regulations about bells as an instrument of social control. Luckily, enough musical sources survive for the author to be able to discuss specific compositions, mostly from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, rather than make reference to sound alone. Indeed, one hopes the book will inspire more performances and recordings of the Chilean repertory, as the extant discography Vera cites totals only five albums, all of which were recorded in Santiago. Like Craig Russell's From Serra to Sancho: Music and Pageantry in the California Missions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), Vera's book engages with a variety of repertories, including local practices of liturgical monophony, works by composers active locally (for example, José de Campderrós (1742–1811), the Barcelona-born chapel master of Santiago Cathedral around the turn of the nineteenth century) and pieces written in Europe and acquired for local use (such as music by Antonio Ripa (1718–1795), the long-time chapel master of Seville Cathedral). An interesting repertory Vera discusses is opera. Although opera is not often explored in this context, there is a reference to the presence in eighteenth-century Santiago of arias from Metastasio's Didone abbandonata written by the Neapolitan composer David Perez (1711–1778), whose music was known internationally and printed in London by John Walsh.

Some of the sections that comprise the chapters of The Sweet Penance of Music present brief microhistories that abound in detail. One instance is the section entitled ‘A Christmas Villancico – of Popular Character?’, which forms part of the fourth chapter concerning festivals and public spaces. A defining aspect of Santiago Cathedral's music repertory is the continued cultivation of the villancico into the early nineteenth century, decades after it had fallen out of favour at, for example, the Royal Chapel in Madrid or Mexico City Cathedral. Similar works can be found in Cuba and scattered throughout the Spanish world, including on the Iberian peninsula itself. Music scholarship today has paid little attention to the late villancico, yet this layer of the genre can suggest how musicians blended practicality, tradition and aspects of modernity into deceptively simple compositions. Regarding the anonymous villancico ‘Hermoso imán mío’, a piece most likely composed in Lima, Vera shows how the work retains traditional formal elements characteristic of much older villancicos, but also that the apparent simplicity of its text and music demonstrates a malleable, later eighteenth-century approach to creating multi-purpose music. This is evidenced by the contrafact texts that fit a generalized musical language. Through reasoned analysis, Vera concludes that the villancico was ‘enjoyed not for its supposedly popular character, but in large part for integrating two of the musical styles that were in vogue in the region: the traditional Spanish villancico and the Classical style. This allows us to understand the apparent simplicity’ (245). It is significant that Vera understands and presents this villancico neither as an anachronism displaced from the seventeenth century nor as a harbinger of decline, but rather as a contemporary creation that served the needs of South American church musicians in their own milieu at the time of Beethoven.

Another point at which Vera provides a fascinating and relevant window onto how music was conceived in colonial-period churches involves an analysis of the varied usage of the term ‘punto’ in cathedral documentation and imported theoretical treatises, specifically in reference to singers taking part in burial services (303). For example, a singer would be required to perform music ‘por punto’, which basically refers to measured music, probably polyphony, in contrast to unmeasured plainsong. Using period dictionaries and other sources, Vera shows how a ‘punto’ was conceived of as something like a ‘rhythmic figure’ in the context of counterpoint. I personally found this case study rewarding given the frequency with which the term ‘punto’ appears in Petrine villancico texts from New Spain, for example in Manuel de Sumaya's ‘Músicos puntos’ and José Bernardo Abella Grijalva's ‘Canta el gallo’, works that use the term to refer to contrapuntal figuration as a symbol of the harmony of the spheres and expressed through the dualism of Peter's sorrow and joy (see my ‘St. Peter and the Triumph of the Church in Music from New Spain’, Sanctorum 6 (2009), 67–89). The relevance of Vera's analysis to these compositions suggests that the concept of duality as applied to the Santiago repertory can serve more broadly as a framework for discussing colonial-period music from Latin America.

Vera's original Spanish-language version of the book earned the 2018 Premio de Musicología Casa de las Américas award in Havana. Julianne Graper deserves special recognition for her English translation, which reads naturally and idiomatically throughout. The design and production of the book from Oxford University Press, however, are somewhat less elegant, and the excessively small font size, narrow margins, headings in all caps, inconsistencies in formatting among the musical examples and some inexplicable details, such as the absence of the final bar of Example 1.15 (‘Cruel tempestad deshecha’ by Antonio Ripa on page 100), detract from the quality of the scholarship.

In his Introduction, Vera makes an explicit epistemological case for a musicology founded upon dialogue among documentary sources and musical scores, which might appear traditional. At the same time, the book avoids constructs such as nationalism, schemes of periodization and developmental narratives, thus rendering it somewhat less conservative than the author might otherwise suggest, at least in the context of scholarship on music in the Spanish world. In sum, The Sweet Penance of Music counts among the most thoroughly researched, reasonably argued and informative books written about eighteenth-century music in the Americas. It provides ample material for future comparative and interlinked studies and builds appreciation for the global scale – yet one allowing for unique local possibilities – on which music thrived during the eighteenth century.