The conquistadors’ music
I spend a lot of time thinking about 500 years ago. In 1521, Tenochtitlan and the Triple Alliance fell to a few hundred Spanish people and tens of thousands of their Indigenous allies. I’m constantly calculating whether historical and cultural events elsewhere happened before or after that. Dante finished the Divine Comedy about 200 years before the conquest (and even a few years before the Mexica founded Tenochtitlan). That’s also about the time when Polynesians first arrived in New Zealand. Anne Boleyn was born about 15 or 20 years before the conquest, and she was executed 15 years after. The Mayflower landed in what’s now Massachusetts in 1620, 99 years after. Europeans reached New Zealand in 1642, 121 years after.
What I’m asking with these calculations is, did those people live in the same world I do? Did they know about the lands and people and empires beyond the sea? Did they die before anyone suspected? Did they experience the shock and wonder of learning of about them? Were they born into a world that knew? Was European colonialism a new thing for them? An unimaginable fantasy? A divine right? We tend to flatten all of history into one big “before,” but that’s a particularly egregious and misleading impulse when it comes to the early colonial period. This is the beginning of the world that we know, and it’s full of people making decisions without knowing what would happen and events that could have gone any number of ways. There’s a before and an after, yes. But there was also a during.
I’m fascinated by the during. It’s one of the things I liked so much about Wolf Hall (the TV show; I still haven’t tried again with the books but one day I will!), even though it’s not about what’s going on in Mexico or Peru or Spain or anywhere besides the English court, really. As I wrote about back in 2019, Thomas Cromwell is a modern character growing out of and still living in a pre-modern society. (Born 1485, 36 years before the conquest and seven before Columbus landed in the Caribbean; died 1540, 19 years after the conquest. The quintessential man of the during.) He knows what’s happening in Tenochtitlan, I’m positive, and he knows all the things it could mean. He knows the world is changing all around him, and he knows how to nudge those changes in the direction he wants them to go. In his milieu, he’s one of the very few who knows. That gives him incredible power and puts him in incredible danger.
Anyway, I’m always trying to get in the heads of the people who lived in the during. One very pleasant way to do this is with choral music from this period, roughly the 1400s and 1500s. (If you don’t know what this sounds like, look up anything performed by the Tallis Scholars.) It’s my favorite thing to listen to when I write, mostly because it’s pretty, ambient and conducive to focusing; I don’t always put it on so I can think more deeply about colonialism. (But really, when I am not thinking about colonialism, especially when I’m writing.) It also… all kind of sounds the same, so having some context for what you’re listening to really helps if you’re trying to actually pay attention to and think about it. So I was honestly thrilled to read an article in the New Yorker by Alex Ross about Josquin des Prez, the GOAT of Renaissance polyphony. Josquin died in 1521 (!), after becoming, as Ross argues, Europe’s first great composer in the way we understand those words today. His music was hugely popular in the during (even though a lot of it was written slightly before), and the Europeans who embarked for the Americas knew it and carried it with them, with haunting consequences that Ross touches on right at the end of the piece. I felt very seen, both by the interest in this time period’s wild cultural transformations, and by the fact that even Ross, the GOAT of classical music criticism, can’t reliably tell the polyphony composers apart.
And if you want something to actually listen to, the Belgian group the Huelgas Ensemble put out an album in 2019 called The Ear of Christopher Columbus. The idea is that it’s all music Columbus would have heard during his life (the European part of it anyway), from his childhood in Italy to his adulthood in and out of the Spanish court. Josquin isn’t on there, but he probably could be. (And did I mention most of this stuff sounds the same?) All the music is recognizably music to my 21st century Western ears, but it’s also “stark and strange,” as Ross puts it, because the preferred harmonies are slightly different than the ones we’re used to. The world wasn’t yet what it would become, but it was on its way.