PROGRAM NOTES by Phillip Huscher

Baltasar Martínez y Compañón, collector Miguel Harth-Bedoya, transcriber

Colección de música virreinal (Collection of Vice-Royal Music)

These pieces, collected in Peru around 1783, are scored for flute and piccolo, , , , bombo, maracas, sonajas de semillas, tambor, harp, violins, cellos, and basses. Performance time is approximately nine minutes.

These three short pieces, buried in the pages of the famous Trujillo del Perú codex, have been transcribed for orchestral performances by Miguel Harth-Bedoya. He explains the significance of this rare manuscript:

Between 1782 and 1785, Baltasar Martínez Compañón y Bajanda, bishop of Trujillo, made a number of official visits within his diocese, resulting in a record of nine volumes of watercolors illustrating the natural landscape, daily life, and architecture of his bishopric. In this codex, known as the Trujillo del Perú, we also find some twenty musical works that were collected in the streets of the villages he visited. There are many reasons for treating this collection of music as indispensable to any attempt at understanding the history of Latin American music. Being part of an oral tradition, these pieces would never have come down to us in their original form if it had not been for this collection.

The twenty pieces of music in the Trujillo codex—interspersed among the more than 1,400 illustrations— represent the popular music of the streets and festivals that was traditionally passed down from generation to generation. Maestro Harth-Bedoya has chosen three and transcribed them for small . The only pieces in the manuscript without lyrics, they are among the earliest known examples of purely instrumental music in Peru.

The first, Baile de danzantes (Dance with dancers)—noted in the codex as “con pifano e tamboril” (with pipe and drum), instruments popular in Spanish dance, revealing a strong European origin—would have been performed by four to eight dancers with sword in hand or handkerchiefs, as in a contredanse. The second, Baile del Chimo (Dance of Chimo), comes from the Lambayeque region of Peru; the codex’s two illustrations for this dance show men with axes and handkerchiefs dancing to the accompaniment of harp and lute or harp and violin. The third, Lanchas para bailar (Boats to dance), has a stronger South American flavor and was adapted in Creole as well as Peruvian lands.

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

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These notes appear in galley files and may contain typographical or other errors. Programs subject to change without notice.