Overwhelming history at the sound of a theorbo

It's Semana Santa, and Quito has a wonderful way of celebrating this week before Easter. At several sacred and less sacred locations in the city centre, top notch artists are performing several performances as part of the XI Festival de Música Sacra. Here's to living in the historical centre! I just have to walk a few blocks down the road to enjoy these musical delights. And the best part is, it's all for free!

The other night, I attended a performance of the Colombian 'early music ensemble' Musica Ficta, in the magical Iglesia de la Compañía, just a block down the road from the presidential palace. This baroque ensemble is renowned for playing Hispano-American baroque music, with scores dug up from archives in Bogotá, Quito, Cusco and other cultural centres of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. By default, these historical notes beg for equally historical instruments such as the baroque guitar, the vihuela, the shawm, the dulcian and the theorbo.

As the church got filled with the warmth of guitar strings, graceful puffs and flaring chantings, Carlos Serrano shared with his audience how thrilled they all were to be playing their baroque music in that church, the perfect setting given their historical coincidence. That comment of his made me think back at some of the texts from The Peru Reader that I had read on the Viceroyalty of Peru (stretching from the Carribean beaches of Colombia to Potosi's ore-filled Cerro Rico in present-day Bolivia), the geo-political framework of the very same period in which that music was written and the Jesuit church built.

Musica Ficta performing in the Iglesia de la Compañía

All of sudden, history came alive. Realising I was listening to 16th century music in a baroque church in Latin America, it daunted to me how alien all of this experience was to these lands. Back in the day, locals didn't compose such music; they weren't catholic; and their concept of a fun night out most certainly wasn't attending a baroque music ensemble. Those who did attend such nights out (or, more likely, afternoons), were the nouveaux riches, the local elite seeking social acceptance among the Spanish colonialists, who had imposed their rites and customs on these promised lands.

Nothing else symbolised in a better way this cultural imposition and ignorance of the local richess as the inside decoration of the church, completely guilded with gold leaf, freshly extracted from the land on which it was built, with the blood of people it had expulsed and demonised. The sounds and voices that just a minute back had sounded so warm and joyful, became distantly cool and, in a way, made me feel out of place. The performance got a whole new dimension, moving me immensly, giving me the sensation that history was overwhelming me. And that, at the sound of a theorbo...