The Viceregal Period

For that he/she makes to the musical contribution of the Spaniards, it can be said that as long as the missionary intrudujeron the flat song and the sacred polyphony, managing them basically as auxiliary instruments in the process of religious conversion, the military and adventurous of all kind that followed them contributed the forms of the profane music of the Europe of that time, amen of the popular music of their origin regions. This way, the songs and Andalusian dances, Castilians, Galicians and exteme�as spread until the most remote corners in the colony, giving this way an alive representation to some of the very varied national traditions of the Iberian peninsula. And although it is certain that the heterogeneous ethnic and social mixture of the emigrants didn't allow them to reproduce its ancestral society faithfully besides that the persecution of the achievement of certain utopias common to all they spread to standardize its attitudes, rules and customs, so that the call culture of the conquest turned out to be different from the culture mother, it is also true that the auditory-musical habits have -for obvious reasons psicofisiol�gicas - an adult roots that other, so that, in spite of the tendencies to the uniformaci�n that allowed to feel in other fields, in the land of the music was introduced in the Spanish colonies an incredible variety of local peninsular traditions.

On the other hand, the natives -that seemingly assigned until the moment of the Conquest an eminently religious function to the music - they discovered, as it seems, the secular possibilities of this art and they absorbed the recently cared musical forms acquiring, among other things, a great ability in the art of the lauder�a, this is, of the production of musical instruments of European origin, situation this that determined that, although soon they were discriminated against in the musical activities of the emigrants, they were already flings in form irreversible the bases of a new artistic tradition.

Finally, the European music of concert also showed the impronta of the cultural crash, because it incorporated to its wealth in ways some dances of origin novohispano, such as the sarabanda, the pavana and the chacona. Indeed, the investigation modern musicol�gica has left definitively established that the sarabanda and the chacona arose like popular dances in the colonial Mexico -of indigenous origin the first one, and possibly permeadas both for strong African elements - and the specialists still dispute, to still lack a conclusive information in this respect, about if the pavana shares the same origin or rather it comes from Italy.

It didn't have left everything without effect: on one hand, a school of Baroque music of an accent arose distinguible clearly, because although the European learned music didn't modify in its constituent elements and technical procedures when being transplanted to territory novohispano, if he/she acquired in peculiar stamp when absorbing in more or smaller degree -according to each composer's individual temperament - certain elements rhythmic, melodic and harmonic coming point of the music of the aboriginal ones as of the black ones that were brought of the Africa in the first shipments of slaves. With it the music novohispana became a specific chapter of the western Baroque music and in one of the American contributions to the common cultural wealth. This school - almost unknown today - it reached a level and such splendor that it could have illustrious teachers like Hernando Franco (1532-1585), Juan of Lienas, Pedro Berm�dez and Bernardo of it Banks (the three of around the second half of the XVI century at the beginning of the XVII one) Juan Guti�rrez of Padilla (c.1595-1664), and Manuel of Zumaya (c. 1680-1740), among other, and to have important activity centers in the cities of Mexico, Puebla, Morelia (then Valladolid), and Oaxaca that competed to each other for the artistic supremacy.

Now then, in spite of the already pointed, during three centuries the New Spain was not but a cultural outpost of the metropolis: when the concert music prospered in the Spanish trunk, buds appeared in the branch novohispana of the same one, and when the sap stopped to flow in him, the musical life of the viceroyalty, lacking of any own root, it also languished. This situation obeyed fundamentally to that had not been developed in Mexico music schools that you/they imparted a teaching of a wide professional level and, to the long one, this lack of schools, more than the same lack of capable musicians, came to constitute the most deleterious effect in the metropolitan dominance on the musical life of the colony.

In eves of the Independence it was evident that the weaknesses that you/they suffered to the Spanish music of the XVIII century were in fact the same ones that allowed to feel in Mexico, this is, the affluence of European, mainly Italian musicians, of second or third category that exercised the most disastrous influence. Also, and in contrast with what happened in Madrid, the musical activity in the viceregal court was practically null, what is explained by the circumstance that, during the government of the Bourbon dinast�a in Spain, the crown requested the services of the half nobility preferably, and the viceroys were welded as a rule or marines that -obviously - they lacked artistic restlessness besides that had to concentrate their efforts, in first term, in the resolution of the arduous social and economic problems of its administration.

On the other hand, the panorama of the popular music at the end of the viceroyalty was very different. When treating this point one cannot stop to indicate that the definitive distinction, radical, between the call learned music and the popular one -with all that such a distinction implies, this is, the deep difference of aesthetic nature and of expression type that separates to both categories - it is rather a characteristic of the areas of western culture, since, essentially, it is not but a result of the peculiar evolution that followed the musical art in such areas, as well as of the specific nature of its relationships with its respective social context. And inside these peculiar conditions, it is obvious that when he/she weakens the influence of the learned music, the musical folclor he/she spreads to consolidate and to strengthen (it sews that, we add, perhaps be happening again in our days). Also, given the structure characteristic of the western societies, their socio-economic socialization and the differences in the education opportunities that toast to the members of their diverse constituent classes, differ that -spite to be open societies" - they are an important factor for the appearance of " subcultures " in them, it cannot refuse a certain classist character before to the phenomenon pointed although, like it is natural, this character he/she is certainly a so much vagrant and diffuse.

This way, it should not miss us the one that the music popular novohispana had a sense a so much plebeian, opponent and until revolutionary inside the colonial society, of strong feudal features and dominated by the peninsular ones. For it, it can be affirmed that, in what concerns to the sound art, the time of the fight for the Independence not only represented the phase of the emergence and consolidation of the folclor like espresi�n of a subgrupo or of the population's certain segment, but of an authentic national conscience. And this way, although this period of the history of the country has not contributed big names neither realizations or spectacular advances in the field of the music, he/she doesn't stop to constitute a stage of supreme transcendency in the evolution of our sound art, because in the same one they sat down the bases of everything that that, walking the time, he/she would come to make possible that acquired an own and distinctive musical physiognomy.