In American Originals: A New World, A New Canon, Agave Baroque and Reginald L. Mobley present a survey of music composed in the Americas from colonial times up to the twentieth century. Showcasing music that is mostly by composers of color, this album confronts head-on our colonial and postcolonial musical histories while challenging the musical narrative we have been taught, that of the ontological supremacy of the European canon.
In the accompanying notes, Mobley observes that with a few exceptions (Bernstein, Copland, and Gershwin) the canon of classical music is “overwhelmingly Western European, […] overwhelmingly male, and overwhelmingly white.” This “fallacious and harmful belief in White-male musical superiority” has been criticized and countered by many scholars,Footnote 1 among them Philip Ewell.Footnote 2 The canon—“a list of composers or works assigned value and greatness by consensus” as per Grove's definitionFootnote 3—has been at the center of debate in academia in past years, especially within the context of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) efforts regarding music curriculum. The first question that comes to mind after reading this definition is: Who was part of this so called consensus?
Philip Ewell's entry for RILM's blog, “Erasing Colorasure in American Music Theory, and Confronting Demons from our Past,” affirms that “music of the White-male Western canon—itself a mythological human construct meant, in very large part, to enshrine White-male dominance in the academic study of music in the U.S.—is not superior (nor inferior) to other musics of the world,” and applauds musicians whose research “show[s] the richness of the many musics of our planet for all to see.”Footnote 4 With this album, Mobley and Agave Baroque propose a new canon made up of composers from the Americas, thus recognizing and elevating some of the diverse voices which, in the words of Mobley, were left aside by the “whitewashing of music history.”
This album showcases music produced in different geographical locations, composed in different historical contexts, and for various purposes: From colonial cathedral music meant to perpetuate European culture in the American diaspora; passing by music composed for the Jesuit missions, intended as a tool for cultural and religious imposition; to music composed in the midst of the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries’ civil rights activism in the United States. Mobley's voice works as a unifying thread throughout this tour, guiding us with charm and ease and not letting us miss any detail of the musical landscape.
The album opens with “Resignation” by Florence Beatrice Price (1887–1953), the first African American woman composer to have a symphonic work performed by an American orchestra. The singing and soaring violin of Aaron Westman welcomes us into Price's sound world and to this album while Mobley's velvety, at times visceral, and emotional voice shows us all the details of Price's text settings and colors. Price provides a balance of female representation in this album with six gorgeous art songs in the spiritual style and two instrumental song arrangements for string quartet. Her text setting to music is very sensitive, ingenious, witty, and overall remarkable, especially in “Out of the South Blew a Wind,” where we may find ourselves rocking to her text painting.
Other African American composers represented in this album are Justin Holland (1819–1887) and Scott Joplin (1867–1917). Holland's arrangement for guitar of the folk song “Sweet Memories of Thee,” in the form of a theme and variations, showcases his prowess as a composer and performer, rendered in this album by Kevin Cooper with fantasy and eloquence. “King of Ragtime” Scott Joplin's “Bethena, A Concert Waltz,” on the other hand, was composed as an homage to his deceased beloved wife, here masterfully interpreted by the members of Agave Baroque.
Composers Manuel de Zumaya (1678–1755), Esteban Salas y Castro (1725–1803), and José Mauricio Nuñes Garcia (1767–1830) represent the musical world of colonial cathedrals in Mexico, Cuba and Brazil, where music catered for Europeans and their descendants was initially composed exclusively by Europeans or criollos. Footnote 5 As the century progressed, colonial cathedrals opened their exclusionary spaces to mestizosFootnote 6 and mulattosFootnote 7 like Nuñes Garcia, who was a descendant of slaves. Among them, these composers represent three distinct compositional styles, Baroque, gallant, and Classical, and their music attests to the rich and prolific musical production in colonial America. The two instrumental pieces by anonymous composers, “Cancion para dos instrumentos” and “Trio Sonata in F,” had a different purpose: Either they were composed in Europe and brought to the American missions or they were composed by European musicians settled in the missions to be used in the evangelization of Indigenous peoples in these territories.
Mobley and the members of Agave Baroque showcase their command of historically informed performance practices of various styles throughout this album, observing the different affects and deploying creative approaches to ornamentation in the Baroque and Classical pieces of Salas, Zumaya, and Nuñes Garcia and executing tasteful glissandi, portamenti, rubato, and tempo fluctuations in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century pieces of Holland, Joplin, and Price. The masterful work of sound engineer Aaron Westman and sound designer and producer Geoffrey Silver allows for a clarity of the voice and transparency of diction as if Mobley was singing next to us. The accompanying notes include the translations for the pieces set to Latin and Spanish and the texts for all but one of Price's songs (“Songs to the Dark Virgin,” set to a poem by Langston Hughes) and serve their purpose in guiding the listener through the contents of the album with an overview of the composers and their work.
This album stands out as a compendium of musical practices across historical periods and geographical locations within America and can be used in the classroom as an example, not only of left-out composers of color and the racial inequity in current musical curriculums, but as a starting point to talk about colonial and postcolonial histories in classical music in the Americas.
Karin A. Cuellar Rendon is a Bolivian historical violinist and scholar based in Montreal. She is currently pursuing a PhD in musicology at McGill University supported by the Fond de Recherche du Quebec with a research focus on performance practices in South America in the first half of the nineteenth century, using as a case study the music of Peruvian composer Pedro Ximenez Abrill Tirado (1784–1856).
