Jesuit Legacy in the Bolivian Jungle: A Love of Baroque Music

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Athanasius
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CONCEPCIN, Bolivia The aging musical score wasn't easy to read. It was a copy of a copy of a Latin Mass by the 18th-century composer Domenico Zipoli that had crossed the Atlantic and most of South America, only to be stuffed into a box for three centuries in a derelict jungle church where humidity had taken its toll.
And then there were the termites.

The insects had eaten large tracts of the Mass, including the 22nd and 23rd measures.

But while much of the work of Zipoli has vanished in his native Europe, it has managed to survive in eastern Bolivia along with his vast Baroque musical tradition, which hums through the tropical lowlands.

Here near the borders of Brazil and Paraguay, harpsichords and lutes can be found in the smallest villages. Luthiers have carved violins from local cedar for centuries.

And troves of ancient manuscripts, more recently rediscovered in church archives, have once again revived Zipoli and other composers of the period, whose music is played in elementary schools and on the radio.

"The Baroque is our tradition here," said Juan Vaca, an archivist in Concepcin, leafing through the crumbling pages of the Zipoli Mass with a pair of gloves and a small rod.

The score is a legacy of Jesuit missionaries who left a musical time capsule in Bolivia. By the 1700s, parts of what are now Paraguay, eastern Bolivia and southern Brazil were vast forests of seminomadic native peoples and the slave traders who hunted them. Surrounding the jungles were the Spanish and Portuguese Empires.
jkag89
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Interesting piece, thanks for posting.
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