A
Arizona_Mike
Guest
I just took my daughter to the Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) in Phoenix. If you live here or visit and love music - any kind of music - it’s worth a trip - thousands of musical instruments from all over the world, and each display has a video of samples of the country’s music that plays over the free provided headphones when you walk into range.
In the Bolivian section, they had a small display on Bolivian “Mission” music, which I had never heard before. The Spanish and Italian Jesuits who established missions in Bolivia 400 years ago sheltered the displaced Guarani Indians who had fled from Paraguay, and taught them the Baroque music traditions they brought from Europe, which the Guarani enjoyed and combined with their own indigenous music. The Jesuits taught them to make cello, harps, and harpsichords, and each mission had an orchestra, a shop to construct musical instruments, and schools to teach music and painting. Both the Jesuits and the local people composed their own music in the Baroque style.
When the Jesuits were expelled by the Spanish in 1767, all that music was thought to be lost, but in the 1970s when Fr. Hans Roth, a Swiss Jesuit architect restoring a mission church in Bolivia, he found 5000 pages of original compositions in the ruins. The music has been reintroduced, is used in Masses, and in charity concerts help raise money for Bolivian charities.
Here are some YouTube performances of some of the music. It’s lovely and an amazing blend of the Old World and the New World (I’d imbed these but I don’t know how.)
youtube.com/watch?v=otGyaLpiWoo
youtube.com/watch?v=h55W899Zlyc
youtube.com/watch?v=CTtBaaJ_iT4
In the Bolivian section, they had a small display on Bolivian “Mission” music, which I had never heard before. The Spanish and Italian Jesuits who established missions in Bolivia 400 years ago sheltered the displaced Guarani Indians who had fled from Paraguay, and taught them the Baroque music traditions they brought from Europe, which the Guarani enjoyed and combined with their own indigenous music. The Jesuits taught them to make cello, harps, and harpsichords, and each mission had an orchestra, a shop to construct musical instruments, and schools to teach music and painting. Both the Jesuits and the local people composed their own music in the Baroque style.
When the Jesuits were expelled by the Spanish in 1767, all that music was thought to be lost, but in the 1970s when Fr. Hans Roth, a Swiss Jesuit architect restoring a mission church in Bolivia, he found 5000 pages of original compositions in the ruins. The music has been reintroduced, is used in Masses, and in charity concerts help raise money for Bolivian charities.
Here are some YouTube performances of some of the music. It’s lovely and an amazing blend of the Old World and the New World (I’d imbed these but I don’t know how.)
youtube.com/watch?v=otGyaLpiWoo
youtube.com/watch?v=h55W899Zlyc
youtube.com/watch?v=CTtBaaJ_iT4
