Lectures in Music Studies: Cesar Favila, Yale Institute

Cesar Favila, fellow at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music (New Haven, CT) and associate professor of musicology at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, presents "Seeking a Franciscan Theology of Voice."

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Franciscan Order in New Spain published small books containing missionary songs for convincing nominal Catholics to confess their sins and amend their lives. While musicologists and historians have focused on the effectiveness of missionary music in the conversion of Indigenous people with no prior knowledge of Christianity, the musical implications of the Franciscan missions of spiritual renewal to the “faithful” in the centuries that followed the conquest of New Spain remain understudied. This talk explores the contents of these songbooks and the broader missionary context, revealing a Franciscan awareness of the effectiveness of song, aurality, orality, and voice to understand divine presence and to convey the Church’s post-Tridentine sacramental and reconciliatory messages that aimed at maintaining a faithful citizenry in Spanish territories. This talk also demonstrates how this missionary process provided for the Franciscans to imitate Christ through voice and reveals the voice as a medium for sacramental expression. 

Cesar Favila’s work resides at the intersections of music, religion, and art in the Ibero-American world. He is currently a fellow at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music in New Haven, CT and associate professor of musicology at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. He is the author of the multi-award winning book Immaculate Sounds: The Musical Lives of Nuns in New Spain, available open access with Oxford University Press.