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GeoFFrey Baker anD tess kniGhton, eDs. Music and Urban Society in Colonial Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 392 pp. ISBN 978-0-521-76686-9.
As some scholars admit (even if informally), part of the fascination that musicology has with colonial Latin America is the wealth of untapped music sources waiting to be uncovered. Indeed, recent studies and transcriptions consider surviving scores as testimonies of vibrant music cultures in need of study beyond the lens of "Latin exoticism." It is this fascination with music texts that has made "sound" the basis of inquiry about colonial music culture in an immersive urban environment. Under this view, however, the city acquires a privileged position as a performative site formed by networks of musical activity in different places (e.g., institutions, processional routes, recreational spots, celebrations at private homes), which prompts scholars to consider music not as notated text but as social practice. This is the premise that Geoffrey Baker and Tess Knighton- editors of Music and Urban Society in Colonial Latin America -use to define the colonial urban map as a "resounding city . . . a harmonious ideal that existed before the physical form of the city" (5). For Baker and Knighton, the "resounding city" is a kin concept to Angel Rama's notion of the lettered city as a space that arises from two superimposed grids-a physical plane and a symbolic plane that interprets the former as a meaningful and idealized structure of order. For Rama, such a symbolic plane departed from a conception of writing as an instrument of power that men of letters (letrados) used as a means to organize the city's social environment and to establish a cultural hegemony in the New World. Just as Rama considered writing, Baker and Knighton regard music an instrument crucial to the discursive construction of the Latin American city.
In this light, the editors set to map the "resounding city" by locating places of music practice outside ecclesiastical institutions, which continue to be important sites of musical study today. As Baker notes, the emphasis on cathedrals has promoted an idea of a colonial music culture that mostly reproduced...