"¡A ver la comeria nueva / que la negla representa!": Villancicos de negros en la Bogotá virreinal

Abstract:

Sung inside and beyond the confines of cathedrals during the principal religious celebrations, the musical-poetic genre of the villancico took on a special vibrancy in the viceregal city of Santafé (today, Bogotá, Colombia) from the later sixteenth century onward. The singers themselves not only played (sung) the roles of angels and shepherds, but also of others, often adapted from stock comic characters, such as the "Negro" or "Negra" (Black man or woman), found in the widely popular short comic dramas of the Spanish-speaking world. This article studies the manuscript evidence of how the villancicos composed, sung, and performed in the Bogotá Cathedral attest to the contribution of the "black voices" that were heard in this viceregal metropolis, to be embodied in these pieces. I provide transcriptions and analysis of the poems, and even theatrical scripts, found in the musical scores of a corpus of "villancicos de nacimiento" preserved in the Archive of Bogotá's Cathedral. In turn, these musical-poetic works open a window through which to better understand devotional and festive practices in a stratified colonial society and, in so doing, can give us also a picture of performance practices developed by largely unheralded and mostly anonymous Black performers of the territory of New Granada (which coincides with present-day Panamá, Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador), which was administered through the Viceroyalty of Peru until 1717.