Geoffrey Baker: Dominant harmony, Music and society in colonial Cusco, PUCP, 2020

Abstract

Among the studies that account for musical activity in the imperial city of Cusco, seat of the ancient Tahuantinsuyu, which became the nuclear center of cultural, artistic, religious and other kinds of life in the viceregal world in southern Peru, the one that stands out a few years ago was published by Geoffrey Baker, a British musician and researcher, with the title Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cusco (2008), whose content we accessed in a presentation at the musicology congress held within the framework of the Baroque and Renaissance Music Festival “Misiones de Chiquitos” held in Santa Cruz de la Sierra in 2008. A dozen years later, the PUCP Publishing Fund put into circulation the Spanish version of this work with the title Dominant Harmony, Music and Society in Colonial Cusco, which broadens the horizons of knowledge about a city with a rich historical past, in which there are strong material traces of the activity of composers, choirmasters, singers, minstrels, instrument players and musical centres of varied profiles: its cathedral, its parishes, convents, missionary towns or doctrines, its university and, why not, its streets, squares and public spaces.