Who says that nobody publishes texts anymore? The University of New Mexico Press in this year of 2014 has released two impressive collections documenting the remarkable trove of traditional Hispanic song conserved, principally, in the towns and villages of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. New Mexican Folk Music, compiled by Cipriano Frederico Vigil, and Hispanic Folk Music of New Mexico and the Southwest, compiled by John Donald Robb, cover much the same repertoire and many of the same musical genres, even coinciding on a few specific songs, but their perspectives are complementary, and paired together, they provide a comprehensive account of the florid vernacular traditions they take as their object. The publication of these two anthologies underscores the value of making field collections available to the reading public.
John Robb (1892-1989) was a transplant to New Mexico who found in the vernacular music of Hispanic New Mexico the same simplicity and charm that Béla Bartók describes in the peasant music of the southern Carpathian region. Indeed, like Bartók, Robb was a composer and sought nourishment for his musical craft in the tunes and melodies of his Hispanic friends and neighbors. His massive anthology, Hispanic Folk Music of New Mexico and the Southwest, is the product of prodigious effort in collecting, transcribing, and annotating songs and instrumental pieces, and aims at nothing less than fixing in its pages a substantial portion of this repertoire along with related versions from across the Southwest and from Spain and Mexico (with the occasional reference to various other Spanish American republics) to boot. To call this project ambitious is to engage in serious understatement. The result is a feast of Spanish-American folk poetry and traditional music that stands as a touchstone for all comparative research on the vernacular poetry and music of the Spanish-speaking world.
Hispanic Folk Music of New Mexico and the Southwest was previously published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1980, when Robb was eighty-seven years old. This 2014 edition provides a welcome opportunity for new generations of scholars, musicians, and aficionados to become acquainted with this definitive collection. It is graced with a foreword by Jack Loeffler, prominent cultural activist and ethnomusicologist in New Mexico, and a prologue by Enrique Lamadrid, distinguished professor of Spanish, emeritus, at the University of New Mexico. Loeffler titles his foreword as “Reflections on the Author, John Donald Robb,” and conveys a feel for the man, his dedication to the cause, and his decency in his dealings with people, by citing accounts from those who worked with Robb, as well as drawing on his own experiences in collaborating with Robb after meeting him in Robb’s eighty-fifth year of life.
Lamadrid places Robb’s work in historical perspective and assesses its value to readers in the present. It emerges that Robb was in constant dialogue with those doing parallel research, featuring, in New Mexico and Colorado, such names (among many others) as Aurelio Espinosa, Arthur L. Campa, Rubén Cobos, Juan B. Rael, and Richard Stark; in Texas, J. Frank Dobie, Mody Boatright, and Américo Paredes; and in California, Terrence L. Hansen. The Mexican folklorist Vicente T. Mendoza plays an important role in this confluence of scholarly effort. Robb invited Mendoza and his wife, Virginia Rodríguez, to spend the better part of a year at the University of New Mexico, starting in 1946, and Mendoza and Rodríguez accompanied Robb in the field (and produced their own study from this period, published posthumously in Mexico City in 1986). Robb’s narrative makes it clear that he was deeply influenced by their contributions to his work in New Mexico and by Mendoza’s work in Mexico. Since Robb was not fluent in Spanish, he depended on the help of those who were, and here the name of Rowena Rivera, his “invaluable” assistant, comes to the fore. It is worth mentioning, as well, that the young Charles L. Briggs served as his grandfather’s field assistant, and went on to do important ethnographic work of his own in New Mexico and elsewhere.
In his prologue, Lamadrid is clear-sighted about Robb’s approach to his materials, acknowledging that “Robb articulates a romantic view of folk music that emphasizes its archaic qualities,” and noting that the work “values Spanish over Mexican origins, and overlooks the role of popular music in the cultural process” (xvi). Yet he argues that “the quality of Robb’s recordings stand as a tribute to the musicians and the music they created” (xvi), and concludes that “Robb was the right man with the right heart and the right machine, and he rose to the occasion for all the rest of us” (xviii).
Robb himself is forthright in his presentation of purposes and methods. He concedes that his approach is “primarily that of a musician” (xx), and, indeed, a strength of this collection is the close attention paid to musical detail, an uncommon trait in treatments of traditional song. Robb was intent on “cross-referencing” his materials, and this accounts for the numerous variants reproduced, not only from within his New Mexican collection, but also from collections made by other scholars in other Spanish-speaking regions, making his collection an excellent resource for comparative work. He points out the difficulty in settling on final translations of the lyrics, and describes his translations as free, “preserving the meaning of the original” while rendering that meaning in “intelligible, unstrained English” (xx). The end product of these judicious efforts is a vast compendium of traditional Hispanic song and music, present in hand-written (but clearly legible) musical scores and Spanish texts with their crisp English translations, framed with introductions, comparative notes, and annotations identifying key informants and historical features. Many of the singers and musicans and their families appear in the black-and-white photos included in the book, and there are photo essays as well on significant cultural events such as the folk play “Los Comanchis” and the Matachines dances.
How does one go about organizing a collection of this scale and variety? Hispanic Folk Music of New Mexico and the Southwest is divided into three parts: Part 1, Secular Song Texts and Melodies; Part II, Religious Song Texts and Melodies; and Part III, Instrumental Melodies. Robb uses, for the most part, genres that are named and recognized by members of his source communities: romance, corrido, décima, indita, trovo, cuando, alabado, himno, and so forth. But the limitations of genre as an organizing thread are apparent in the many items that he recognizes as potentially belonging to multiple genres, and the inclusion of categories such as “Occupations,” “Patriotism, History, Politics,” and “Courtship and Marriage,” in an effort to do justice to the content as well as the form of his materials. This organizing scheme, in conjuction with the “Index of Titles” and “Index of First Lines” at the back of the book, assists the reader in navigating through this extensive collection of song and music.
Turning now to Cipriano Frederico Vigil’s New Mexican Folk Music, we find a less copious collection (only 258 pages here!) focused on mostly the same forms and genres, but now richly contextualized in the experience of a native son of New Mexico, a man from Chamisal in the north. Since his early childhood, Vigil took an interest in the song and music of his community and, as a young man, opted to make his life’s work the conservation of this heritage by learning the best songs from the people who sang them and keeping these songs alive by performing them, both at community events and to outside audiences.
Vigil reports engagingly his exploits as a youngster, sneaking away to dances so he could study the hands of the guitar players, and seeking and obtaining mentorship from the renowned musicians in his town. Later, as a student at the New Mexico Highlands University, he pursued his interest in Hispanic language and literature, and he enjoyed the opportunity to apprentice with Los Folkloristas, a celebrated troup of musicians, based in Mexico City, who brought an ethnomusicological approach to their work with traditional song from different parts of Mexico and from around Latin America. Vigil returned to New Mexico and wandered the state, soaking up the song repertoire in the towns and villages of the north, and he has become an ambassador of New Mexican music, performing at festivals, concerts, and workshops in regional, national, and international settings.
Vigil describes a visceral relationship to the music he performs: “This is my culture; this is the music that lives inside of me, in the very fabric of my being. I know it. I’ve lived it. This is who I am” (xvii). Indeed, so intimate is Vigil’s positioning with regard to the tradition he nurtures, that he feels entitled to contribute his own compositions to the standard repertoire he is documenting. These include a romance about a 1720 conflict among Indians and Europeans in the plains of what is now Kansas, a corrido indicting Monsanto for its mistreatment of New Mexican farmers, and “Corrido de un Músico,” in which he depicts his own dedication to “el folklor.”
Enrique Lamadrid, in his foreword to this book, terms this collection “a performance anthology” (xii), indicating a very different slant from the cataloguing work of John D. Robb. It is a pleasant experience to open Vigil’s New Mexican Folk Music and immediately find the songs embedded in the daily and seasonal rounds of the community, his home town of Chamisal serving as the crucible for his narrative. Thus, the first set of texts--there are no musical transcriptions here--takes us into the major rites of passage celebrations, and we perceive these songs as companions to, and sometimes the centerpiece of, important social events. The entregas featured here, songs that help transact the business of baptism, marriage, and burial, are presented as essential equipment in the social life of the northern New Mexican communities, and this deep contextualizing of the songs remains a constant and most attractive feature of the anthology. In the end, a picture emerges of a population that highly values, and is sustained by, the craft of making and performing traditional verse.
New Mexican Folk Music is a welcome contribution, as Lamadrid has it, “the cancionero that everyone has been waiting for” (xii). It is a bilingual product, with all texts and commentaries present in both Spanish and English, and it has, tucked into the back cover, a compact disc with a selection of twenty songs performed by Cipriano Vigil, accompanied in some of them by his son, Cipriano Jr., and his daughter, Felicita. There are several black-and-white photos, without captions, and a number of delightful drawings tied to the themes of the songs, evidently made by the younger generation in the author’s family.
Setting Vigil’s New Mexican Folk Music side-by-side with Robb’s Hispanic Folk Music of New Mexico and the Southwest, the reader can enjoy both a panoramic and embedded vista on this abundant harvest of New World poetry and song.
--------
[Review length: 1824 words • Review posted on September 10, 2014]