This volume is the end-product of a Smithsonian-sponsored project that brought together a broad range of scholars to examine the musical impact of the events of 1492. Music is the unifying thread among these essays, though here it is considered in its broadest sense as it relates to any aspect of human endeavor, whether concert, dance, theater, or religious and social ritual.
The cultural encounter that began in 1492 was one of the seminal events of the Renaissance; and just as a sense of perspective sets Renaissance painting apart from its medieval predecessors, perspective is essential to understanding the encuentro. The intermingling of Italian, Iberian, and indigenous cultures and the struggle for survival and dominance among them appear vastly different from the perspective of each culture, yet the collective impact of the events of that year is still being felt half a millennium later.
Editor Carol Robertson has organized the text into five sections. The first deals with indigenous music before the encuentro; the second examines the three musical traditions of fifteenth-century Spain—Christian, Jewish, and Islamic. Section 3 contemplates the musical explorations of the Renaissance, inspired by the exploratory spirit of the age. The fourth section surveys myth and legend as affected or inspired by the encuentro, and the final section studies the encuentro’s effects on contemporary American cultures. Each section consists of three to six essays. Robertson has added an introduction along with overviews of each section. Each of the essays includes a thorough bibliography, and most begin with a review of important literature. The collection thus will be of particular interest to readers interested in further research in any of the areas it covers.
The essays are uniformly well written. They are scholarly but (mostly) free of unintelligible jargon, and Robertson’s overviews are valuable in establishing a philosophical continuity among the contributors. The topics range widely, covering aspects of historical musicology, ethnomusicology, music and dance performance traditions, anthropology, folklore, and mythology. The assessment of such a collection is beyond the scope of any single scholar, but as for my own discipline (historical musicology), I found the contributions to be quite lucid. Dorothy Keyser’s essay, “The Character of Exploration: Adrian Willaert’s ‘Quid non ebrietas,’” was especially interesting and well researched.
It would be easy to overlook this collection in the flood of publications celebrating the Quincentenary, but any reader interested in the musical impact of the confluence of cultures in this pivotal era will find these essays thought-provoking and enlightening.
