Latin American Baroque

What comes to your mind when you hear the term “baroque music”?

Most of us automatically picture the embellished courts of Europe in the 17th and early 18th centuries, with the music of Vivaldi or Bach being performed for royals and nobles. Well, it’s a fair image, but not the only one.

We don’t think about it, but there was also baroque music on another continent. As a result of colonialism, European music had made its way to Central and South America, even if most of the Baroque composers in those regions don’t show up in the music history books.

Picture a Baroque cathedral: white stone, domed towers with open belfries flanking a pillared façade, with a scrolled gable between the towers and a triangular portico. Now add some palm trees on either side and mountains in the background, and you could be in any one of the old colonial cities of Latin America, from Mexico City or Bogotá down to Lima, Santiago de Chile or Córdoba in the south. The architecture of the age when Spanish power and wealth were at their height clearly left its mark on the culture of the continent, and in recent years,

we’ve become more aware of the equally important role played by music from the same period, in terms of the amazing legacy left from the colonial period and the influence of the European Baroque style on popular and traditional music.