Iberian Sources on Musics in the Early Modern Moluccas (Maluku), by David R. M. Irving
March 28, 2025, 14:00 Central European Time. Online via MS Teams.
The Moluccas (Maluku) were known as the unique sources of certain spices in the early modern period, and they became the focal point of colonial desire for Portugal, Spain, England, and the Netherlands. The colonial presence of Portugal and Spain lasted collectively from 1512 until the 1670s. This was a complex time of many conflicts, alliances, and competition between Indigenous polities and colonising forces; Christian missionaries also played significant roles as cultural and political intermediaries. As was the case for other regions under the colonial domination or cultural influence of the two Iberian nations, music and dance were part of local intercultural engagement. There exists in Portuguese and Spanish historiography diverse data on music and dance on the Moluccas, and on other kinds of performing arts (such as drama). In this presentation I offer a general overview of Iberian descriptions of sonic events from the Moluccan milieu, contextualising them within their political, social, and cultural frameworks. I focus on three main fields: first, musical and ethnographic data in the c.1544 treatise of António Galvão (c.1490–1557) on the Moluccas; second, the accounts and letters of Jesuits, including Francis Xavier (1506–1552); and third, a prominent book written by Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola (1562–1631) and published in Spain in 1609, Conquista de las Islas Malucas. All these texts, produced from a colonial and imperial perspective, and with clear motives of evangelisation, demonstrate clearly the cultural bias of their authors. Yet they also contain useful data for the historical study of the Moluccas’ musical past.
David R. M. IRVING is an ICREA Research Professor affiliated to the Institució Milà i Fontanals de Recerca en Humanitats (IMF), CSIC, Barcelona, a Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and an Honorary Senior Fellow at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on the role of music in early modern intercultural contact, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. Irving is the author of the monographs Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila (Oxford University Press, 2010) and The Making of European Music in the Long Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2024), besides numerous journal articles and book chapters. He co-edited, with Tara Alberts, the volume Intercultural Exchange in Southeast Asia: History and Society in the Early Modern World (I. B. Tauris, 2013), and was co-general editor, with Alexander Rehding, of A Cultural History of Western Music (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). He is also co-editor, with W. Dean Sutcliffe, of the journal Eighteenth-Century Music (Cambridge University Press).
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