Huehuetenango: Music from an interrupted songbook

Concert of 16th- and 17th-century music from the Huehuetenango collection—a repertoire of polyphonic music and Gregorian chant fragments compiled between 1582 and 1635 in a remote region of what is now western Guatemala—performed by Argentine tenor Jonatan Alvarado and Argentine lutenist and vihuelist Ariel Abramovich.

The Indiana University Library (USA) holds a collection of 15 volumes and fragments of polyphonic music and Gregorian chant from the present-day Department of Huehuetenango in Guatemala in its Latin American music collection.

Originally compiled between 1582 and 1635, these rare books bear witness to the musical practices of a remote community, surrounded by the highest mountains in Central America and therefore far from the large colonial urban centers, their imposing cathedrals with their choirs and desks...

The quantity and quality of the pieces represented in this collection—more than 350 works—make it an essential repertoire for anyone interested not only in gaining a deeper understanding of the circulation of printed and manuscript music in colonial America, but also of the complex and mysterious ways in which European modes of expression manifested themselves through the minds, hands, and voices of the indigenous peoples.