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Sara Finley
IMMACULATE SOUNDS is a praiseworthy exploration of sacred music-making among cloistered women from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century central Mexico. Previous research on the topic struggles to draw out nuns' voices from a fragmented music archive whose most complete source is the cathedral repository, a collection that tends to privilege the contributions of upper-caste men. In order to overcome this obstacle, Favila reads extant choirbooks, ceremonials, and other scores from diverse women's convents—helpfully outlined in a table on page 5—alongside notarial records, sermons, autobiographies, visual art, and more. His innovative methodology takes a broad temporal approach to primary materials for studying colonial-era convent music to develop a more comprehensive account of cloistered women's musical practices. This framework is ideal for grappling with "porous convent archives," and it also enables the author to approach chronology in a way that attends to cloistered women's singular experience of ritual time (8).
Throughout the study, Favila expertly weaves diverse sources together to offer a more comprehensive view of New Spanish convents' thriving music culture than any prior study has achieved. A rich, bilingual appendix makes many of these resources available for further study. Through meticulous research, he brings the shadowy imprint of convent musicians to life, giving voice to women whose only reference in the New Spanish music archive might otherwise be their names, hastily scrawled across choirbook pages to designate physical or musical ownership. In some cases, informed speculation fills in gaps that scholars may never be able to address. In other instances, material from elsewhere in the archive informs music references to offer fuller biographical detail.
Immaculate Sounds is divided into two parts that highlight overarching themes. Part 1 spans chapters 1 to 3, focusing on the myriad forces that disciplined music-making and its reception among New Spanish cloistered women. Chapter 1 argues that convent sound culture reinforced the doctrine of Immaculate Conception—the Virgin Mary's preservation from sin—in a variety of ways. Precisely, the opening chapter considers how liturgical music, [End Page 179] texts, and performance practices constructed cloistered women's singing as a symbolic reinforcement of this essential belief as well as of their devotion and virginity. Here, Favila develops some of the book's guiding links among music, religious women, and Mary as the archetype of the virtuous woman. Chapter 2 looks behind the iron grille that shrouded nun musicians' identities and offers a glimpse of daily musical life in the coro, a secluded place in the convent where cloistered women celebrated the liturgy. Here, Favila explores the twin themes of power and discipline, particularly as they relate to the space where much convent music-making took place. While the chapter attends to the sounds and structure of the Divine Office, arguably the most important musical activity in the coro, it also delves into sonic reiterations of convent hierarchies, physical gestures of devotion, and nuns' audio-mystical experiences of the coro setting. The last of these topics is especially thought-provoking, for it charts new pathways in early modern sensory studies. Chapter 3 asks how the notarial record that conditioned convent music-making disciplined sound among cloistered women. Specifically, it considers how questions of musical need intersected with discourses of calidad (decency), virginity, race, and other aspects of identity in the dowry-waivers that enabled some women to offer their performance skills in lieu of the financial contribution that families usually made. This focus underscores the importance of convent music-making for spiritual and monetary economies, a point to which Favila returns throughout the book.
Part 2 of Immaculate Sounds focuses on how sonic components of convent ritual reinforced spiritual communion and thus heightened participants' experience of God. First, chapter 4 considers music's role in the Eucharistic imaginary of cloistered women. Here, Favila likens the consumption of Christ's body during communion to sound entering a listening ear. The comparison is rooted in early modern constructions of hearing as the physical experience...
