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| Trumpeters at The Westminster Tournament (1511), via Wikimedia Commons. |
February is Black History Month, a time to honor the histories and legacies of the African diaspora in the United States and beyond. Here on Christopher Newport University’s Medieval and Early Modern Studies Blog, we’re going to kick off the month by celebrating some Black musicians from 17th-century Europe and the Americas.
All too often, the grand narratives of early music history overlook the significant contributions of people of color. Among other challenges, longstanding marginalization and archival gaps muddle access to histories of non-White performers. Nonetheless, today’s researchers are working to overcome such barriers in order to construct a more representative musical canon. Indeed, some of the latest scholarship in music history gives voice to professional Black and Afro-descendant musicians from Europe and the Americans. Let’s meet three of these individuals and consider their broader importance for early modern music culture.
John Blanke
On New Year’s Day, 1511, King Henry VIII of England and his first wife Catherine of Aragon welcomed their son, Henry. The event was a joyous one, especially after the couples’ stillbirth just a year earlier. To mark the birth of his son and heir, Henry organized a series of lavish celebrations. One of the festivities was a joust known as the Westminster Tournament. In addition to the military games that headlined this event, it also featured music, dance and theater. Today, we can learn about the Westminster Tournament thanks to a 60-foot-long painted roll from the College of Arms archives in London.
While the 1511 Westminster Tournament Roll depicts a number of important figures, one of the most notable is a dark-skinned trumpeter who appears on horseback alongside six other musicians. Evidently, the group played at the Westminster Tournament’s opening and closing processions. In 1961, historian Sydney Anglo identified the hornist as John Blanke, an Afro-descendant trumpeter who performed in the courts of Henry VII and his son Henry VIII. Anglo’s find opened the door for further research on Blanke, and subsequent accounts fleshed out a more complete portrait of the performer.
As a court musician, John Blanke appeared at some of the most important royal ceremonies of his day, including Henry VII’s funeral and Henry VIII’s ensuing coronation. The performer received ample wages for his services, along with room, board and even wedding gifts from Henry VIII himself. Despite what seemed like a comfortable life, however, the trumpeter had loftier goals. Around 1509, following the death of fellow hornist Dominic Justinian, Blanke successfully lobbied the court for a promotion and raise.
Although scholars often read Blanke’s salary and other privileges through a lens of exceptionality, Nadia van Pelt argues that Henry VIII compensated him in the same way as White court musicians. She remarks that “professionally speaking, he was not ‘marginalised’ ” (“No business” 7). While it is certainly tempting to see uniqueness in the apparent prominence of an Afro-descendant performer like Blanke, van Pelt’s careful archival work reminds us not to make assumptions about the disempowerment of people of color in early modern contexts.
Read about John Blanke’s history and legacy on The John Blanke Project.
Luis Barreto
Just over 100 years after John Blanke’s heyday, in 1615, a group of clerics gathered on the other side of the Atlantic, in Mexico City, capital of the Spanish viceroyalty then known as New Spain. The church leaders were engaged in a heated debate about Luis Barreto, an enslaved, Afro-descendant singer and longstanding member of the Mexico City Cathedral chapel (music ensemble). Alfredo Nava Sánchez’s painstaking archival work sheds light on the deliberations. With financial support from chapelmaster Juan Hernández, Barreto had petitioned the church council to buy his freedom. While it was not uncommon in Spain’s American territories for men and women in bondage to pay a sum equal to or greater than their purchase price in exchange for manumission, some council members saw a wrinkle in Barreto’s case. Indeed, several church leaders argued that the singer’s voice was simply too valuable to let him go, except at a very dear price (Nava Sánchez 113-18).
At the time, the enslaved musician had labored in the service of the cathedral for 20 years. Along with other chapel musicians, he was obligated to sing on the church’s many fest days as well as in public processions. In exchange for his duties, Barreto received room and board. The council rewarded particularly good performances with a stipend, just as it did for any other performer. For a few years, Barreto appears to have enjoyed the protection of Archbishop-Viceroy Fray García Guerra, whose love for music was well known. Indeed, Nava Sánchez remarks that “the mixed-race singer’s voice seems to have captivated the Dominican priest, and his participation in celebrations became increasingly notable” (113, my translation).
What, exactly, was so special about Luis Barreto’s voice? Without a doubt, the singer’s appeal was due in part to the fact that he was a soprano, capable of singing the uppermost line in polyphonic (multi-voiced) music. Since the Catholic church did not permit women to perform in sacred settings during Barreto’s time, high-voiced singers were in short supply. While boy sopranos could fulfill the role for a few years, the impending change in their voices made it impractical to train young boys as sopranos. Instead, Spanish and Spanish American churches sought to contract adult men who sang in their upper register, either by means of a special vocal technique called falsetto or as a result of surgical castration. These singers were known as castrati or capones, in Spanish.
In the end, Barreto did indeed purchase his freedom. The majority of the church council voted in favor of the singer’s petition, on the condition that he remain in the cathedral’s service for several more years (Nava Sánchez 118). While subsequent archival references to Barreto are scarce, Nava Sánchez has pieced together some details. Barreto lived another 25 years as a free man, and he continued to perform in the Mexico City Cathedral chapel as well as in Puebla (119).
Currently, our collective scholarly portrait of Luis Barreto is partial, at best. Scholars who seek to document the contributions of Barreto and figures like him face must confront archival limitations and the historical marginalization of Afro-Mexicans. Despite these challenges, Nava Sánchez has reconstructed Barreto’s musical career expertly, using materials from the Mexico City Cathedral Archive. Likewise, the singer is one of many characters in my forthcoming book Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexico: Vocality and Beyond, where I contextualize Nava Sánchez’s findings with a broader overview of African and Afro-Mexican sound culture.
At the end of his 2007 article on Barreto, Nava Sánchez underscores the performer’s exceptionality in the New Spanish canon. In light of Barreto’s prominence in an elite musical genre once thought to exclude performers like him, Nava Sánchez beckons a re-interpretation of colonial Mexican society that problematizes the rigid racialization often attributed to it. He observes that “currently, Luis Barreto is an exceptional figure in colonial historiography. But for how long will this be true” (120, my translation)? Today, more than 15 years later, Nava Sánchez’s poignant query still rings true. For how long will we think of musical production in the great cathedrals of colonial Latin America as a “White” cultural product?
Giovannino Buonaccorsi
In the Florentine courts of the mid-17th century, we find Giovannino Buonaccorsi, another enslaved Afro-descendant whose career as an elite musician flourished in the public eye (fl. 1651-1674). As a singer in the service of Cardinal Prince Giovan Carlo de’Medici, Buonaccorsi frequently performed in the celebrated Medicean court and on the operatic stage of Florence’s Pergola Theater, where his master was patron. Musicologist Emily Wilbourne observes that Buonaccorsi was almost always cast in racialized, comedic roles, many of which were written explicitly for his voice (193-97). Evidently, the singer was a Florentine favorite, and his reputation soon extended beyond local audiences. Indeed, Wilbourne follows Buonaccorsi to Venice, where he appeared in 1664 for at least one season (254).
Like Barreto, Buonaccorsi was a soprano whose high register fulfilled an essential role in early modern stage and chamber genres. Wilbourne convincingly hypothesizes that he was a castrato, a singer who had undergone an emasculation procedure before puberty with the goal of preserving his boyish voice. If indeed Buonaccorsi was a castrato, the musician’s bodily difference would have increased his opportunities to perform to some of the most widely elite music of his time. Wilbourne remarks: “Buonaccorsi-as-castrato makes Western music itself integral to his being in the world” (248).
As is so often the case for 16th- and 17th-century Black artists and performers, the archive offers limited access to Buonaccorsi. To be certain, references to this figure are fragmented and difficult to piece together. Despite such challenges, Wilbourne has documented his life and career meticulously in Voice, Slavery, & Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence. She draws upon paintings, opera scores, theater records and a comedic poem that she maintains Buonaccorsi himself penned in order to flesh out the performer’s biography and situate him more fully within the music culture of early modern Italy.
Learn more about Giovanni Buonaccorsi from Wilbourne’s overview of one painted and one musical source for studying the singer. For an analysis of the poem he wrote, see Wilbourne’s article in the open access anthology Acoustemologies in Contact: Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity.
Towards a more inclusive history of early music
For all this, Blanke, Barreto and Buonaccorsi are far from the only Black musicians or performers in the early modern world. In fact, it would be a mistake to cast them as rare or extraordinary figures, just as Onyeka Nubia, author of Blackamoores: Africans in Tudor England has cautioned on the website for The John Blanke Project.
In the world of court music, John Blanke joins ranks with numerous other Afro-descendant musicians who played drums, shawms and horns at European palaces and royal ceremonies during the same time period. Van Pelt lists several of these performers in what she calls “a tradition of heraldic instrumentalists of colour seen across the European courts” (Intercultural Explorations 28).
Elsewhere in the early modern world, it seems that musicians of color were equally prominent. Indeed, in Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexico: Vocality and Beyond, I draw attention to several Afro-descendant singers and instrumentalists who appear in cathedral archives from colonial Mexico and also highlight Black music-making in political and religious festivals in some of the viceroyalty’s most prominent public spaces. Although accounts of Mexico’s music history have long relied on a binary framework that privileges the Indigenous and European roots, I argue that performers of African origin or heritage impacted the region’s sound traditions in equally significant ways.
Likewise, while Wilbourne acknowledges the uniqueness of Buonaccorsi’s presence in the 17th-century Florentine archive, she is careful not to celebrate the soprano as a one-of-a-kind performer. To this end, she remarks: “In many ways, Buonaccorsi is a singular figure, yet my time in the archives makes perfectly clear that Buonaccorsi was but one of numerous court retainers who were racially or ethnically marked and who labored as entertainers” (Voice 38). Here, Wilbourne does not only compare Buonaccorsi with other musicians of African descent in Italy. She also considers his similarities and differences from other performers of non-European or non-Christian origin.
Today’s post offers a brief glimpse of three Afro-descendant performers who challenge the assumption that elite genres in early music were only accessible to White musicians. While the number of archival resources available for studying John Blanke, Luis Barreto and Giovannino Buonaccorsi is indeed unusual, their presence in 16th- and 17th-century courts, churches and theaters was not necessarily out of the ordinary. Scholars are just beginning to scratch the surface of the vast contributions that Africans and Afro-descendants made to music and sound cultures throughout the early modern world. As research in this area advances, new models will emerge for understanding early music as a complex product of diverse cultures in contact.
Learn more at CNU
If you’ve enjoyed reading about these figures, we hope that you’ll join us on March 18 at 5:30 pm in Torggler Lecture Hall as Professor Noémie Ndiaye (University of Chicago) delivers a Dean Parks Lecture on Afro-Romani connections in early modern theater.
by Sarah Finley
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References
Finley, Sarah. Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexico: Vocality and Beyond. Vanderbilt University Press, 2024. Forthcoming.
Nava Sánchez, Alfredo. “El cantor mulato Luis Barreto. La vida singular de una voz en la catedral de México en el amanecer del siglo XVII.” In Lo sonoro en el ritual catedralicio: Iberoamérica, siglos XVI-XIX, edited by Patricia Díaz Cayeros, Universidad Autónoma de México and Universidad de Guadalajara, 2007, pp. 105-20.
Nubia, Onyeka. “The Author of Blackamoores: Africans in Tudor England.” The John Blanke Project, 29 May 2016, https://www.johnblanke.com/onyeka.html. Accessed 29 Jan. 2024.
van Pelt, Nadia T. Intercultural Explorations and the Court of Henry VIII. Oxford University Press, 2024.
---. “John Blanke’s Wages: No Business Like Show Business.” In Medieval English Theater, vol. 44, Boydell and Brewer, 2023, pp. 3-35.
Wilbourne, Emily. “Giovanni Buonaccorsi (fl. 1651-1674): An Enslaved Black Singer at the Medici Court. In Teaching Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide, edited by Matthieu Chapman and Anna Wainwright, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Press, 2023, pp. 276-88.
---. “Little Black Giovanni’s Dream: Black Authorship and the ‘Turks, and Dwarves, the Bad Christians’ of the Medici Court.” In Acoustemologies in Contact: Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity, edited by Emily Wilbourne and Suzanne G. Cusick, Open Book Publishers, 2021, pp. 135-65.
---. Voice, Slavery, & Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence. Oxford University Press, 2023.