Global Music and Religious Orders in the Early Modern Era

What role did music play in early-modern religious missions?How did religious orders and Indigenous communities react to and understand different types of music in this era of global encounters and interactions?These questions were centre stage in this three-day conference at which twenty-three delegates presented their research at the Abdij van Park just outside Leuven, and at the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) in Brussels.The manifold ways in which music influenced religious missions formed a prominent thread throughout the proceedings.In the conference's first paper, Daniele V. Filippi (Universit di Torino) probed the knowledge, often tacit and unwritten, that lay behind the use of music in early-modern Jesuit missions.For Filippi, the abundance of music sponsored by the Society of Jesus lay counter to reservations about its use, as epitomized by Jesuit Florian Paucke (1719-1779), who decried missionary music for prioritizing aesthetic beauty over spiritual weight.The tensions between organizational cohesion and adaptation to local circumstances were the central question of a paper by Cline Drze (Sorbonne Universit; Institut de Recherche en Musicologie), which examined practices of copying for litany settings that circulated amongst Jesuit sodalities, particularly in northern France and the southern Netherlands.Drze noted that devotional models in litany settings were adapted to specific contexts in order to cater to local communities.A conscious adaptation to time and place also formed the crux of the presentation by Christoph Riedo (Universit de Genve), which examined the transmission of notated European music -in this instance, motets by Johann Melchior Gletle (1626-1683) -to Jesuit missions in what is now Argentina during the seventeenth century, at the request of Anton Sepp (1655Sepp ( -1733)).Riedo gave a fascinating analysis of Gletle's collection Expeditionis Musicae, the tantalizing title of which immediately suggests its mobility.Soundscapes of cultural exchange were also a prominent theme.Thodora Psychoyou (Sorbonne Universit; Institut de Recherche en Musicologie), in her paper on seventeenth-century Jesuit mission reports from the Cyclades, explored sources that document the sounds of cultural hybridity, where the dynamics of interconfessional difference existed alongside linguistic pluralism.Sound was also germane to the paper by Nathan Reeves (University of Tennessee) on Jesuit missions in early-modern Naples.Such missions aimed to convert Muslims, who had been imprisoned and then enslaved on the city's galleys.In a cosmopolitan, maritime environment, music formed a tool of catechesis, and Reeves showed how sound mediated encounters between the Jesuits and those they wished to convert within a complex, transient space.Aurality and orality were a focus in the discussion by Cesar Favila (University of California Los Angeles) of saetas, texts that were sung in Franciscan missions in New