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Tony's Classes

A Socratic dialogue with music as the focus. Respect all questions and ideas.

Bolivian Colonial Music

I'm interested in establishing this blog for the purposes of anybody interested in research into Bolivian Music. My own interests are related to Colonial music but don't let that stop you if your interest is something slightly different.

My life is centred around reconstructing Bolivian manuscripts that I have in digitised form from archives in Bolivia (I live in Australia and travel to Bolivia regularly).

Currently I'm completing the reconstruction of another Villancico (a festival piece for voices and accompaniment in Spanish - nowadays it applies only to a form of Spanish Christmas Carol).

Often the handwriting is the hardest bit to decipher and that's the case with the latest one. You just have to spend a bit of time with the score trying out different ideas as there are no hyphens and often the words have been truncated. They rarely effectively align making the process quite an interesting form of 'jigsaw puzzle'.

I can't claim to be an expert in Baroque Spanish - I came to this research through Latin liturgical music. So, if you're interested in collaborating - tell me!
Here's an example of the sort of thing I'm looking at.
Música52_02.jpg

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