The Mission choir book

[Originally authored on September 7, 2019]

Presented in 1888 to Jane Stanford by Monterey pastor Rev. Angelo Casanova, the impressive Mission choir book, measuring 40 by 57 cm, was a part of the Stanford Museum until 1974, when it was transferred to the Stanford Libraries.[1] Mrs. Stanford had helped procure financial resources for the reconstruction of the Carmel Mission; as a result, Casanova bestowed upon her not only this choir book, but also a large quantity of mission papers, most of which unfortunately disappeared between 1941 and the present day.[2] That the choir book survived is fortunate. Belonging to either Mission Carmel or Mission San Carlos, it is an important historical artifact. But it is the inscription on the cover that is of particular interest. It states that the choir book dates from the early years of missions in California, from between 1770 and 1784, and even more significantly, that it was used by Rev. Junipero Serra “to teach the indians [of] San Carlos in Carmelo Valley.”[3]

A longtime celebrated figure in the Catholic Church, Pope John Paul II beatified Serra in 1988.[4] But there is no shortage of controversy today surrounding the eighteenth-century priest: in 2018 Stanford opted to rename Serra Mall in honor of Jane Stanford based on the careful recommendations of faculty, students, staff, and alumni, in large part because of the relationship Serra had with the Indigenous peoples he encountered.[5] Born in rural Majorca in 1713, Serra spent eighteen years studying, teaching, and preaching in Palma, but he became disenchanted as an academic at some point during his mid-30s. He was one of more than 15,000 priests and members of religious orders to come to the Americas when he did so in 1749, and like many of them, he was inspired to convert and baptize the Indigenous peoples.[6] Serra founded a mission in Baja California, and then in 1769 got permission to establish missions in Alta California. He ultimately founded nine before his death in 1784. Serra regularly exploited unequal power dynamics: he would invite the Indigenous peoples “to taste the sweetness of his religion” and then “punish them when they transgressed norms they had no part in establishing,” often by flogging (a practice that superficially bore resemblance to Christian self-flagellation).[7] His successors followed him in mixing invitation and coercion.

Just 36 pages (18, front and back) survive of the original musical contents, held between two boards covered by rawhide. The largely black notation (with red used for lines and capitals) transmits chant for both the proper of the mass (music for specific days in the liturgical calendar) and the mass ordinary (for days that are not specified). One example of the choir book’s mass ordinary material is the two-voice Credo Parisiense, which Owen Da Silva transcribed in the early 1940s.

Much of the chant in the Mission choir book, and in the Western Hemisphere at large, was filtered through the lens of Toledo, Spain. The Cardinal of Toledo Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros attempted to have “Old Spanish” chant copied out in new notation, though this music was really a sixteenth-century invention. Toledo even received a special papal dispensation to continue practicing its regional tradition.[9] Works specifically associated with Toledo include the Missa Toledana (Mass of Toledo), found midway through the choir book.

Reports of Serra’s priestly practice emphasize the large amount of time that he spent listening to confessions, and they recount a preaching style that was highly dramatic.[10] Both Serra and others describe that he often led the singing of mass and of specific chants, and that on many occasions, his singing had to make up for a lack of musical instruments, like the organ. But Serra’s exact relationship to this particular book, outside of the late-nineteenth-century inscription, remains somewhat unclear. Complete trust in an attribution is always a matter of faith.[11]

Notes

1. Owen da Silva, Mission Music of California: A Collection of Old California Mission Hymns and Masses, Los Angeles: Warren F. Lewis, 1941: 127.
2. Craig H. Russell, From Serra to Sancho: Music and Pageantry in the California Missions, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009: 240.
3. Craig H. Russell, From Serra to Sancho: Music and Pageantry in the California Missions, 28.
4. Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz, Junípero Serra: California, Indians, and the Transformation of a Missionary, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015: 32.
5. Stanford News, “Stanford will seek to rename Serra Mall in honor of Jane Stanford,” Stanford News (September 13, 2018)
6. Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz, Junípero Serra: California, Indians, and the Transformation of a Missionary, 60.
7. Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz, “Juníperso Serras Approach to the Native Peoples of the Californias,” in The Worlds of Junípero Serra: Historical Contexts and Cultural Representations, 148–61, at 158.
8. Owen da Silva, Mission Music of California: A Collection of Old California Mission Hymns and Masses, Los Angeles: Warren F. Lewis, 1941: 77.
9. Craig H. Russell, From Serra to Sancho: Music and Pageantry in the California Missions, 28.
10. Karen Melvin, “Serra Among the Faithful: The Popular Mission,” in The Worlds of Junípero Serra: Historical Contexts and Cultural Representations, ed. Steven W. Hackel, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018: 107–24, at 116.
11. Craig H. Russell, From Serra to Sancho: Music and Pageantry in the California Missions, 124–45.

Benjamin Ory received his Ph.D. in musicology from Stanford University in 2022.

This article is one in a series highlighting rare music materials in the Stanford Libraries collections.