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The Inevitable Bandstand
The State Band of Oaxaca and the Politics of Sound
By Charles V. Heath UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8419-7
CHAPTER 1
Closing the Colonial Past
To close the colonial past ... to substitute the Catholic religion with atheistic paganism ... [and] the centralist viceroy with republican federalism. Antonio Caso, México (Apuntamientos de Cultura Patria)
Settling Oaxaca
In 1456 the Aztecs began their incursions into the territory that comprises the modern-day state of Oaxaca but never completely subjugated the region. They established an encampment in an acacia forest and felled the trees to construct the village of Huaxyacac (from the Nahuatl for "the nose of the acacia tree"), from which the name Oaxaca is derived. The Zapotecs and Mixtecs, tribes native to the region, allied to impede the Aztec advances; ultimately, a marriage between Zapotec and Aztec royalty brought forth the kingdom of Tehuantepec. To preserve a tenuous peace, however, the Zapotecs accepted a tributary role in the Aztec empire.
In 1521, along with some four hundred Aztecs, Spanish troops under Gonzalo de Sandoval and Francisco de Orozco founded Villa Segura de Frontera, the first colonial settlement in Oaxaca. Before long about five hundred Spanish families arrived, some directly from Spain. Extraction of resources and tribute began immediately, and the prime plots of land were divided among the conquistadors.
In 1527 a royal decree changed the village's name to Nueva Antequera. When the village was divided in 1526, Juan Peláez de Berrio, the first mayor of La Villa, placed the central plaza of Oaxaca (Plaza de Armas) at a point equidistant from the two rivers that cross the Central Valley, the Atoyac and the Jalatlaco. A subsequent royal decree on 25 March 1532 changed the name of the village to Oaxaca.
The village of Oaxaca grew fitfully as the result of a series of events that included disputes among the Spanish landholders and natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods. The Spanish yoke weighed heavily on Oaxaca's indigenous people. Repression was severe: they were forced to labor in mines, fell victim to disease, and were uprooted and resettled as the Spanish population grew. During the colonial period, Dominican missionaries may have softened the brutality and deprivation for the indigenous peoples, whom they found predisposed to "civilized" life and whose vigor and vitality impressed them. Church construction, one of the hallmarks of Spanish settlement, began in earnest.
The Late Colonial Period
In 1786 the Spanish Bourbon regime converted Oaxaca to an intendancy. The intendancy of Oaxaca assumed the approximate territory and shape of the present-day state. Oaxaca was a "multiple reality," integrated differently from any other part of New Spain. In the Mixteca Alta, for example, distribution channels connected indigenous communities with the market system and the colonial mercantilist structure. In the densely populated Central Valley, indigenous populations remained relatively consolidated and controlled the majority of agricultural production and trade between indigenous and nonindigenous communities, preventing the solid formation of latifundios (landed estates) that took place, for example, in the north of New Spain. Finally, in the less populated regions of Oaxaca, cattlemen and commercial agriculturalists competed with the indigenous communities for land. In those subregions, indigenous communities often suffered disintegration, fragmentation, and impoverishment.
Bourbon Military Reform
The Bourbons inherited a fragile and fractured colonial defense system from the Hapsburgs. New Spain was relatively peaceful, although disputes and factional rivalries between colonial landholders, as well as occasional indigenous and Afro-Mexican uprisings, did require intervention. Spanish troops in the Americas endured poor pay, which was often late, and some probably had to resort to a second occupation to support themselves and their families. Some trafficked in goods from Spain, both legally and illegally, while others dedicated themselves to outright banditry, robbery, extortion, and rustling. As members of the Spanish Army of the Americas (see fig. 4), military musicians likely found itinerant forms of employment performing at fiestas or within the church.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, soldiers had been a rare sight in Oaxaca. However, foreign threats resulted in the establishment in September 1784 of the Provincial Battalion of Oaxaca, a white infantry regiment consisting of 423 "well-disciplined men." Companies in other regions of Oaxaca proliferated. For example, in the Mixteca region, the Southern Division was created to protect the Pacific coast. In Oaxaca Spaniards became officers while Indians were excluded from service, so that the weight of service necessarily fell on mestizos. To risk one's life for the caprice of a European king made the idea of military service unappealing; to be called up likely meant hardships and possibly a cruel and thankless death.
During the late colonial period, the Oaxaca militia was most visible at its musters and exercises in the small plaza known as the Llano de Guadalupe (Plain of Guadalupe), while firing honors at funerals, and while participating in coronation celebrations for the Spanish Crown. The militia musicians performed martial, spiritual, and celebratory functions. With the February 1794 coronation of Carlos IV, in an event presaging countless others to follow, the city of Oaxaca "was illuminated, fireworks were set off, coins and trinkets were flung at the townspeople, and the fiestas ended with three days of dances at the town hall." (In order to ensure flawless military comportment within society, the Bourbons even taught their officers to dance.)
Marriage contracts and death certificates in Oaxaca's ecclesiastical archives reveal the names of militia musicians. These men, assigned to various provincial militia battalions, constituted the earliest Oaxacan military musicians in the colonial historical record. They included the following individuals:
Lorenzo Morales, español, músico del Batallón (ca. 1765)
Simón Rosalino, músico del Batallón (ca. 1765)
José Barragán Machuca, soldado músico del Batallón (1777)
Tomás Manuel Castillo, miliciano músico de la sexta compaña del Batallón Provincial (1781)
Domingo Barrera, morisco, pífano miliciano (1781)
José María Flores, español, pífano segundo de las milicias (1784)
Vicente Aguirre, mulatto, pífano del Batallón de Veracruz (1785)
These musicians' racial castes, as well as their inclusion in the ecclesiastical archive, evoke the liminal nature of colonial life (and musical practice): did these musicians pass back and forth between military and sacred performances? Unfortunately nothing else is known of these men, whose biographies are crucial to providing a better understanding of military musical production in New Spain shortly before Mexican independence.
On the eve of the insurgent rebellion that became the Mexican War of Independence (1810–1821) the population of Oaxaca numbered approximately 419,000 inhabitants,16 comprising groups quite diverse in their ethnicity, language, and socioeconomic status. The vast majority of Oaxacans dedicated themselves to pursuits such as agriculture and domestic artisanal production.
Religious, Political, and Musical Transition
The Bourbons sought to diminish the power and presence of the Catholic Church. Reformers saw the endless feast days, lifecycle events, and religious celebrations, especially among the indigenous, as an obstacle to economic development. Sacred musical production forged a link between colonizer and colonized, however, and the heart of musical production in New Spain was the church.
Religious music entered a period of decline during the mid-eighteenth century, gradually ceding its preeminence to "profane" music. The Catholic Church initially permitted "loud" instruments like drums, bass, and cornet within the church, but reforms attempted to remove such instruments from the church's liturgy and interior. Popular music eventually usurped sacred music as the most important musical product of the late colonial period. The eighteenth century saw the introduction in New Spain of musical genres from Europe that included chamber music, Italian lyrical music, and even performances of symphonies composed by Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The advent of new performance venues such as theaters, opera houses, and parks accompanied the introduction of these novel musical forms in New Spain. The late colonial period thus brought to its inhabitants both new sounds and new ways of listening.
With the role of military musical corps instituted within the military hierarchy, the increased military presence in New Spain brought a corresponding increase in the number of musicians. They performed at imperial celebrations, saint's-day processions, and even bullfights. No concrete evidence emerges from the historiography of New Spain's musical traditions to distinguish specifically the roles of church musicians from those of military musicians. On the contrary, the musicians are often seen alternating between both institutions, passing back and forth between them. A new type of musical group, however — a formally structured civil wind band — would emerge from independent Mexico's military. While such bands were created in response to new political realities, they still owed much to their colonial-era roots.
Army and Nation Ascendant
The military now rivaled the church as the political leader of the colony and brought its ideological derivatives — patriotism, loyalty, unity, heroism, and a dawning sense of the nation — leaving its boot print on all of society: "Where the Hapsburgs used priests, the Bourbons employed soldiers." As will be shown below, during the nineteenth century, especially in large cities, the sounds of religious celebrations competed with state-sponsored patriotic festivals. Military band performance came to share a space that had formerly belonged exclusively to Christian festivities.
After independence, the Mexican military was responsible not only for the chaos that characterized the first few decades of the new Mexican republic, but also for perpetuating traditions of military musical performance after independence. The bellicose character of the decade-long struggle for independence had ramifications for musical production: while music still held identifiable vestiges of its pre-Hispanic and colonial roots, the triumphant state now installed itself in the soundscape and created new musical forms for its political repertoire.
Rubén M. Campos writes, "The bandas de música are the sonorous joy of our people," then follows with the question, "But when did popular life emerge?" In his analysis of Mexican band traditions, Campos does not rigidly define the bands that arose during the colonial period. Instead, he writes of "city bands," "village bands," and "rural bands," attesting to their ubiquity. According to Campos, the violent political changes and upheaval that took place in early nineteenth-century Mexico led to the disintegration of all "civil bands" of the colonial tradition. Mexican military bands, designed to serve the new political purposes of the nascent nation and its regions, replaced their colonial predecessors.
The new nation required a strong military to overcome its problems and remain viable. Mexico's leaders immediately created legislation aimed at organizing the army so that it could protect the nation's sovereignty. As it had in the colonial period, the military played an important role in political, social, and military life throughout nineteenth-century Mexico. The Mexican armed forces followed the models of the Spanish army and the provincial militias.
The enormous Mexican army consumed the majority of the nation's annual budget; each new president or governor saw in the military budget a voracious corporation whose fiscal demands subjugated the public's needs. The leaders considered reducing the military's size, but the precarious nature of Mexico's newly found independence and political system mandated a strong army to counter threats and provide stability. A similar problem (which persists to the present day) confronted the state in regard to funding military bands. As we will see later in this study, when military music was cut from the budget, the state almost invariably reinstated it once reminded of the importance of bands in the public realm.
Civilian traditions celebrating Mexican independence developed almost immediately, with military bands providing the musical accompaniment. The first recorded celebration of Mexican Independence Day (16 September) took place in the village of Huichapan (in the present-day state of Hidalgo) in 1812, only two years after Father Hidalgo's Grito de Dolores, the mythic pronouncement for revolt. One year later in Oaxaca, on 16 September 1813, the newspaper Correo del Sur published an article entitled "One American's Rapture of Patriotic Enthusiasm on the Happy Anniversary of 16 September 1810." The Mexican people celebrated their victories not only with civic celebrations that included military bands, parades, and speeches by the nation's heroes and saviors, but also with Catholic masses in honor of the fallen.
After independence a mix of professional forces and regional militias was responsible for Mexican defense. In 1823 the national government formed the Milicia Activa (Active Militia), whose objective was to function as a "disciplined intermediary between military and domestic life" and to help the professional military "in emergency." The formation of the Active Militia indirectly conferred the role of cultural mediators upon its musicians. In the same year the Milicia Cívica (Civic Militia) was formed to defend the pueblo (people or village) and to provide occasional escorts where no permanent army was available. In Oaxaca in 1828, Article 43 of the "Regulations for the Civic Militia" decreed that in the infantry "the Plana Mayor [military unit] will consist of a colonel, a lieutenant colonel, a first assistant, a second assistant, a sub-assistant, a drum major, a chief cornet, eight sappers, and twelve individuals to drum for the military band."
Mexican militias served in provincial capitals, in city plazas, and at outposts that the government deemed strategically significant in the interior and on the coasts. A decree of 5 May 1823 created the national artillery militia, establishing companies of between thirty and forty artillerymen, pickets of between twenty and twenty-five men, and a drummer and fifer in each company. Further ordinances and decrees established the positions and salaries of military musicians depending on the branch in which they served — infantry, cavalry, or artillery — and standardized the toques militares (musical orders or signals) the musicians in the different divisions practiced.
Military musicians performed at public events that featured a multiplicity of characteristics. For example, while visiting Mexico City in April 1840, Madame Frances Erskine Calderón de la Barca described a Good Friday procession that included a military band whose music was forced to compete with informal street musicians. The long citation merits inclusion for its description of the diverse elements within the separate but converging civil and religious celebrations:
The music began with a crash that wakened me out of an agreeable slumber into which I had gradually fallen; and such discordance of instruments and voices, such confusion worse confounded, such inharmonious harmony, never before deafened mortal ears. The very spheres seemed out of tune, and rolling and crashing over each other. I could have cried Miserere! with the loudest; and in the midst of all the undrilled band was a music-master, with violin-stick uplifted, rushing desperately from one to the other, in vain endeavouring to keep time, and frightened at the clamor he himself had been instrumental in raising, like Phaeton instructed with his unmanageable coursers. The noise was so great as to be really alarming; and the heat was severe in proportion. The calm face of the Virgin seemed to look reproachfully down. We were thankful when, at the conclusion of this stormy appeal for mercy, we were able to make our way into the fresh air and soft moonlight, through the confusion and squeezing at the doors, where it was rumoured that a soldier had killed a baby with his bayonet. A bad place for little babies — decidedly. Outside, in the square, it was cool and agreeable. A military band was playing airs from Norma, and the womankind were sitting on the stones of the railing, or wandering about and finishing their day's work by a quiet flirtation au clair de la lune.
Was the "inharmonious harmony" Calderón described merely a combination of sounds unfamiliar to her Western ears? Were they the live sounds of the process of cultural hybridization at work? The answer may be yes to both questions, for when Calderón heard the military band playing "airs from Norma," she recognized something familiar and therefore comforting; she finds order amidst a disorder so pervasive that even a baby may have suffered violence. The "airs from Norma" comfort the woman so greatly that the scene transforms to the pastoral; even the weather seems to change!
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Inevitable Bandstand by Charles V. Heath. Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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