The music for the catechization of Nahua people in the Cantares mexicanos

Abstract

The Cantares mexicanos, a songbook preserved in the National Library of Mexico, constitute one of the New Spanish musical sources that confirm the importance of music for the catechization of Nahua people after the fall of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco (1521). The writing of his compositions in classical Nahuatl only in Latin letters, however, without the respective transfer of their musicality to the musical notation of the West, blocks the knowledge about the sound complex that missionaries and acculturated natives used to facilitate and/or turn more attractive the assimilation of the Christian god and other entities of the Catholic religion. In this article, I will present some hypotheses towards the reconstitution of the sonority of this corpus based on two musical indications present in the manuscript: the neologisms teponazcuicatl or “songs with teponaztli” and melahuac cuicatl or “plain songs”.