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• The Sweet Penance of Music: Musical Life in Colonial Santiago de Chile by Alejandro Vera
• Hannah Snavely

Alejandro Vera's The Sweet Penance of Music offers a holistic overview of colonial Santiago de Chile's music across the religious, private, and public spheres. This comprehensive, sweeping work addresses the musical continuities and changes that occurred in the cathedral of Santiago, convents and monasteries, public festivals, and the domestic sphere during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Centering the stories of both key performers and composers as well as lesser-documented musicians, Vera concentrates on a broad range of genres, with repertoire extending from plainsong, polyphony, and villancicos to keyboard sonatas, dances, and theatre works. As such, the book vividly depicts the musical practices of a city often overlooked in musicology and is a crucial contribution to English-language musicological scholarship of the Americas.

The Sweet Penance of Music is a testament to the substantial yields of careful, extensive archival research, as well as the humbling fact that historical synthesis is never complete. Conducting research primarily in Santiago, but also in historically linked cities such as Lima and Seville, Vera consults an impressive range of primary sources, including musical scores, ship entries, wills, inventories, ecclesiastical council agreements, and account books. He describes the process of archival work and is explicit about what data he can confirm and what is cautious speculation; he nuances his conclusions and clarifies errors through cross-referencing data across various documents. He consistently converses with twentieth-century Chilean scholars, particularly Eugenio Pereira Salas and Samuel Claro Valdés, to support their claims or refute previous assertions using his own archival findings, and he builds on growing trends in Chilean urban musicological scholarship and broader monographs about music in the New World. Historical explorations are bolstered with musical score analysis, though perhaps not as many as a reader would desire, primarily due to the lack of space in an already sizeable work. Despite this, the musical analyses, present in each chapter and accompanied by transcriptions, effectively enable the reader to comprehend how compositional techniques reflected theological and cultural values and connected to genres across musical traditions and periods.

In the Introduction, Vera uses eighteenth-century harpist Josefa Soto's expression 'sweet penance' as a conceptual springboard off of which to theorise duality, or [End Page 177] 'the union of "two different characteristics" in a single "person or thing"' (p. 2), as an ever-present trait within Santiaguino colonial structures and music. According to Soto, playing music was both a difficult, tolerated job and a selected vocation; it was a pleasurable punishment. Expanding on her assertion, Vera postulates the dualities of Santiaguino life through two compelling arguments prominent throughout the book. First, he demonstrates that sacred and popular musics were not clearly divided, but rather were performed in both domains and actively influenced one another. Second, while acknowledging the hierarchies of the colonial system, the author reveals how Santiago was not simply a peripheral city, but also simultaneously a centre for musical practice and circulation. The reader discovers that similar ostensible contradictions abound: dualities emerge in the complications of balancing tradition and modernity, the incongruent social status of belittled minstrels who performed highly esteemed music, and the paradoxical opinion that music can manifest both virtuous and reprehensible ideals, to mention a few.

Chapter 1 focuses on the cathedral of Santiago as an extended institution interconnected to multiple spheres of urban life, overviewing the cathedral's organisation, structure, and often fraught financing during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as several staffing and budgetary reforms throughout the eighteenth century. Within this chapter, Vera evinces how the cathedral remained highly connected to Lima, Mexico City, and Spain, despite the city's relative geographic isolation. In terms of repertoire, liturgical plainsong, specifically the subgenre 'in tone' song, was ubiquitous in cathedral life, performed during the Mass, Offices, and Feast Days, while polyphonic music became more present in the eighteenth century. Vera concludes...

审核人：

• 音乐的甜蜜忏悔：智利圣地亚哥殖民地的音乐生活，亚历杭德罗·维拉（Alejandro Vera）
• 汉娜 Snavely

亚历杭德罗·维拉的《音乐的甜蜜忏悔》提供了智利圣地亚哥殖民时期音乐在宗教、私人和公共领域的整体概览。这部全面而全面的作品讲述了 16 至 18 世纪圣地亚哥大教堂、修道院和修道院、公共节日以及家庭领域中音乐的连续性和变化。维拉以主要表演者和作曲家以及记录较少的音乐家的故事为中心，专注于广泛的流派，曲目范围从普通歌曲、复调和维拉西科斯到键盘奏鸣曲、舞蹈和戏剧作品。因此，这本书生动地描绘了一个在音乐学中经常被忽视的城市的音乐实践，是对美洲英语音乐学学术的重要贡献。

音乐的甜蜜忏悔这证明了仔细、广泛的档案研究取得了可观的成果，也证明了历史综合永远不会完整这一令人羞愧的事实。Vera 主要在圣地亚哥进行研究，但也在利马和塞维利亚等历史悠久的城市进行研究，她咨询了一系列令人印象深刻的主要来源，包括乐谱、船舶条目、遗嘱、库存、教会理事会协议和账簿。他描述了档案工作的过程，并明确了他可以确认的数​​据和谨慎的推测；他通过交叉引用各种文件中的数据来细化他的结论并澄清错误。他一直与 20 世纪的智利学者交谈，尤其是 Eugenio Pereira Salas 和 Samuel Claro Valdés，使用他自己的档案发现来支持他们的主张或反驳先前的断言，并且他建立在智利城市音乐学学术和更广泛的关于新世界音乐的专着的增长趋势之上。历史探索得到了乐谱分析的支持，尽管可能没有读者想要的那么多，主要是因为在已经相当大的作品中缺乏空间。尽管如此，每章中的音乐分析并附有转录，有效地使读者能够理解作曲技巧如何反映神学和文化价值，并与跨音乐传统和时期的流派相关联。历史探索得到了乐谱分析的支持，尽管可能没有读者想要的那么多，主要是因为在已经相当大的作品中缺乏空间。尽管如此，每章中的音乐分析并附有转录，有效地使读者能够理解作曲技巧如何反映神学和文化价值，并与跨音乐传统和时期的流派相关联。历史探索得到了乐谱分析的支持，尽管可能没有读者想要的那么多，主要是因为在已经相当大的作品中缺乏空间。尽管如此，每章中的音乐分析并附有转录，有效地使读者能够理解作曲技巧如何反映神学和文化价值，并与跨音乐传统和时期的流派相关联。

在引言中，Vera 使用 18 世纪竖琴家 Josefa Soto 的表达“甜蜜的忏悔”作为概念性的跳板，以此来理论化二元性，或[End Page 177]“将“两种不同的特征”结合在一个“人或事物”中”（第 2 页），这是 Santiaguino 殖民结构和音乐中始终存在的特征。根据索托的说法，演奏音乐既是一项艰巨的、可以容忍的工作，也是一项有选择的职业。这是一种令人愉快的惩罚。维拉进一步阐述了她的主张，通过贯穿全书的两个引人注目的论点，假设了圣蒂亚吉诺生活的二元性。第一，他论证了圣乐和通俗音乐并没有明确划分，而是在两个领域都进行了表演，并积极地相互影响。其次，在承认殖民体系的等级制度的同时，作者揭示了圣地亚哥不仅是一个外围城市，而且同时也是音乐实践和流通的中心。

第 1 章重点介绍圣地亚哥大教堂作为与城市生活的多个领域相互关联的扩展机构，概述了 16 和 17 世纪大教堂的组织、结构和经常紧张的融资，以及整个 18 世纪的几项人员配备和预算改革. 在本章中，维拉展示了大教堂如何与利马、墨西哥城和西班牙保持高度联系，尽管这座城市的地理相对孤立。就曲目而言，礼仪素歌，特别是“音调”子流派的歌曲，在大教堂生活中无处不在，在弥撒、办公室和节日期间表演，而复调音乐在 18 世纪变得更加普遍。维拉总结...