Sor Juana's Villancicos: Context, gender, and genre

Western Folklore, Fall 2001 by Underberg, Natalie

These "earthier" elements in villancicos, like common characters and mimicked local dialects, served to delight and entertain the audience, and thus, to alarm the ecclesiastical authorities (including the Church in Rome). Yet the local bishops specifically sought out composers, among them Sor Juana (Perez Martinez 1975), to produce this form for religious services, believing that the villancico could serve the dual purpose of entertainment and moral edification (similar to the Mexican pastorela see Maria y Campos 1985 for a discussion of this issue). Sor Juana thus walked a rather thin tightrope in order to be successful in having her compositions performed in public cathedrals in New Spain. Fortunately, from a folkloristic perspective, she had, among other things, the conventions of the genre to shield her at least to some degree from Church censure.

The texts of the villancico were often in the vernacular language, and as such were the only part of the Catholic Office with a markedly "folkish" or "popular" character. This form, then, clearly stood in sharp contrast with the rest of the Office as well as with the Latin-language psalms sung by professional musicians in the great Spanish cathedrals. The Latin psalms, in fact, were intended to fulfill precisely the opposite function in the church service: to increase the solemnity of the religious service on specific feast days (Lothar Siemens Hernandez 1968 cited in Stevenson 1974:25). In this way we can see that the prevailing attitude of the public (if not of all the church authorities) toward the villancicos provided the optimum vehicle for the expression of Sor Juana's views on being a woman in seventeenth-century New Spain. This leads to a discussion of the issue of the performance context of the villancico in Sor Juana's day and the way in which this contributed to her ability to present her pro-woman vision subversively.

PERFORMANCE CONTEXT OF THE VILLANCICO

I have suggested above that through the built-in "trivialization" of the medium she employed, Sor Juana may have been better able to present her worldview with relative freedom. In addition, however, due to the fact that such compositions were accompanied by music and sung by multiple voices, it is also possible that the strategy of "distraction" was at work as well. Marta Sanchez (1988) notes that in the seventeenth century, the villancico changed considerably. Influenced by "the vocal and instrumental baroque style, and the fashionable music of the Spanish theater, the traditional estribillo-coplas format is expanded and transformed. The vocal texture of this villancico includes one or more soloists and frequently a four-to-twelve-voice chorus. The instrumental accompaniment includes: continuo, continuo with strings, and continuo with strings and winds" (Sanchez 1988:47). She adds: "The villancico sung in Spanish churches and monasteries during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries differs noticeably from the villancicos cultivated during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Unlike the earlier form, which was primarily a single movement vocal composition with or without instrumental accompaniment, the later villancico appears as a composite form with continuo and instrumental accompaniment" (Sanchez 1988:49). Miguel Querol Gavalda (quoted in Stevenson 1974) observes that, when played by a small orchestra, some of these villancicos "could today figure agreeably in chamber music concerts" (Querol Gavalda 1963 cited in Stevenson 1974:4). That is to say, the churchgoers of the day were happily engaged in listening to and observing this beautiful, entertaining, and probably somewhat loud performance; they may or may not have been truly listening with an ear toward discerning latent feminism in Sor Juana's choice of words. We know from a study of her life that she did not have any such latitude in the essay format in which she wrote her critique of Vieyra's (or Vieira's)'s sermon, nor in her ensuing Answer to the harsh gender-specific criticism it caused.2