A Roman Catholic religious order of priests and brothers that grew out of an association of men who formed themselves around Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556), a minor Basque nobleman. Dedicated to ‘the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine and to the propagation of the faith’, the order was inaugurated by Pope Paul III in a bull of 1540. Jesuit history falls into two periods: 1540 to 1773 and 1814 to the present (the intervening years represent the period of suppression). This article focusses on the first period, the more significant as regards the musical involvement of the order.
T. FRANK KENNEDY
Jesuit spirituality is rooted in the experience of the gospels as reflected upon in the Ejercicios espirituales, a manual of spiritual exercises developed by Ignatius. These exercises gave rise to a new kind of ministry, that of the retreat or time set apart for private prayer, which further generated an outward, missionary concern for service to others. The early works of the order consisted of preaching, hearing confessions, teaching Christian doctrine to children, visiting the sick and imprisoned, and guiding persons in the practice of the exercises. To ensure the flexibility of this vocation and its itinerant nature, Ignatius and his first followers stipulated that the common recitation or chanting of the liturgical hours, hitherto an integral part of the daily life of a religious order, would not be required. The members were therefore able to be out in the world at the service of the gospel, ministering to the people, rather than bound together in the common recitation of the psalms.
In 1548 an important new direction came about with the foundation of the first Jesuit college, sponsored by the order in Messina, Sicily. By 1560, with the success of this college and others, education had been defined as the order’s primary ministry. Because of the different needs of the students, the constitutional ban on the use of liturgical music and musical instruments in Jesuit houses could no longer be strictly observed, if indeed it ever was.
Music came to be used as part of the Society’s apostolic ministry in four principal contexts: in liturgical and paraliturgical services within the order’s churches and colleges; in college dramatic productions; in college academic assemblies and public disputations; and in the Marian Congregations (pious societies of students dedicated to the Blessed Virgin) within the colleges. Since the order had no previous connection with a particular musical tradition, and none had been prescribed in its Constitutions, that which developed did so almost wholly by default: the work in which the Jesuits became involved demanded certain levels of musical participation; for example, music was required for services in parish and collegiate churches.
Until the founding of the Roman Seminary in 1564, most of the statutes concerning music dealt with the need for musical training within the curricula of the various colleges. Generally speaking, the Jesuits were neither composers nor maestri di cappella, and in the early years music masters were engaged by the colleges to teach the students, both clerical and lay. The earliest reference to the performance of liturgical music in a Jesuit college is that by Jerome Nadal, principal assistant to the Jesuit General in Rome, in a set of instructions written for the college in Vienna in 1566. Polyphony was allowed for the Ordinary of the Mass and the Magnificat at Vespers; the other vesper psalms were limited to falsobordone and everything else was to be sung to Gregorian chant. Exceptions were allowed on special feast days but only with the permission of the rector of the college or the provincial. As Jesuit institutions grew up during the 16th century and became stabilized throughout Europe, it appears that the musical practices permitted in Jesuit chapels conformed more or less to Nadal’s instructions of 1566. However, various other documents provide interesting information concerning, for example, the use of motets in the liturgy, the paraliturgical services and devotional services such as the Friday afternoon Passion meditations that took place in Jesuit churches with increasing frequency after 1600, the Quarant’hore service, popular in the 17th century, and the music for the Marian Congregations (later called the Sodalities of the Blessed Virgin).
With the vast proliferation of Jesuit colleges in Europe in the late 16th century, music was established as a normal part of the curriculum, especially when allied to the dramatic arts with which Jesuit education came to be so identified. Since dramatic works could often act as a living catechism of Christian doctrine, they became important vehicles for the order’s apostolic work. The first drama mentioned together with its music was the Acolastus, performed in Lisbon in 1556. In 1606 Agostino Agazzari composed the Eumelio for the carnival celebrations of the Seminario Romano, and by 1622, the year that Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier (one of the order’s founding members) were canonized, the Collegio Romano sponsored the performance of three complete dramas in celebration of the event. One of these, J.H. Kapsberger’s Apotheosis sive Consecratio SS Ignatii et Francisci Xaverii (in F-Pn), more properly belongs to the genre of early opera, for the text by the Jesuit Orazio Grassi was set to music in a fully mounted production of five acts. The other two dramas, Vincenzo Guiniggi’s Ignatius in Monte Serrato arma mutans and Alessandro Donati’s Pirimalo (the music for both is lost), made extensive use of chorus and dancing. During the 17th and 18th centuries throughout Europe the texts of hundreds of such plays were written, many of which are extant (in more than one language), although the music has rarely survived.
Within the colleges, a system of awards was instituted to encourage serious study. In the late 16th century the award ceremonies, to which the public and local dignitaries were often invited, began to take on significant musical importance, choruses being specially composed for the occasion. Music was also composed for the ceremonies at which theses were defended in public; none of this music now exists, but the texts of choruses are frequently to be found printed on the surviving pamphlets (in I-Rv) advertising the defences of particular students. The Marian Congregations provided similar opportunity for musical performance, and motets and sacred madrigals were sung in processions and at devotional meetings and formal paraliturgical ceremonies.
The Jesuit order maintained a highly centralized administrative structure, assuring efficient communication throughout the provinces and extending to the colleges. One of the more interesting by-products of this structure as regards the Jesuit musical tradition was the use and development of music in the foreign missions. Even though Jesuits in mission territories shared the same vision as their European brothers, the missionary context often dictated a more flexible, less cautious approach to the use of music in support of the order’s apostolic enterprise. The musical tradition that developed in a large number of mission countries was, in fact, so successful that it is now possible to identifiy ‘mission music’ as a genre distinct from the cathedral music that existed in those countries.
In the ‘Jesuit republic’ of Paraguay, for example, where the order was present from 1607 to the time of its expulsion from Spanish lands in 1767, the Society established separate townships for the Guaraní Indians and several other indigenous peoples. Virtually every town of about 2000 members boasted its own orchestra, and several of the larger towns were set up as conservatories or as factory towns for making musical instruments. Jesuits would constantly ask their European colleagues to send the most recently composed music to the townships, and a musical trade route developed between Europe and the La Plata basin of Argentina whereby Jesuit musicians and artists as well as music scores could be channelled to the South American jungles. The order sent several musicians to Paraguay, among them Antonius Sepp (1655–1733), once a member of the boys’ choir at the Stephansdom in Vienna, who set up one of the Guaraní towns as a conservatory so that Indians from all the other towns could be trained in the art of music and instrument building.
As the Jesuits brought Western art music to far-flung lands, they were also the agents for a reverse kind of cultural borrowing. Perhaps the most borrowed of Chinese tunes, wannian huan, was first brought to the knowledge of Western readers in a geographical work by the French Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Du Halde (1674–1743) in 1733. The tune was quoted in Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique of 1768. Although a mistake in copying ruined the original pentatonic, the tune nevertheless served as the main motif of Weber’s Overtura chinesa of 1806 (lost), which the composer later used as prelude to his incidental music to Schiller’s Turandot (1809). The second-hand borrowing continued in Puccini’s Turandot (1926) and in the scherzo of Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes by Carl Maria von Weber (1943). It was not only in the more famous missions like Paraguay or China, however, that music played an important role in the Society’s missionary activity; it now appears that India, the Philippines, and indeed all of East Asia were subject to such influence.
As mentioned above (§1), the Society of Jesus was founded with an institutional bias against musical practice. Even though the reason for that bias was not in itself anti-musical, a certain degree of suspicion about music was generated within the ranks of the order; there were always members who felt that music was dangerous because of its ability to stir the emotions, thereby evoking sensuality, and they argued that music should therefore not be accorded a significant place within the Jesuit tradition. It was in spite of this bias that a worthy musical tradition developed throughout the early years of the order, and by the mid-17th century the principal arguments about music in Jesuit colleges and chapels concerned matters of finance. From the beginning, although Jesuits themselves may have been cautioned against or even prevented from a deep involvement in the musical arts, the Society nevertheless appointed some of the finest musicians available to be maestri di cappella, especially at the Jesuit colleges in Rome, including the Collegio Romano, the Collegio Germanico, the Seminario Romano and the Collegio Inglese. At one time or another Palestrina, Victoria, Agostino Agazzari, G.F. Anerio, Domenico Massenzio, J.H. Kapsberger and Giacomo Carissimi all worked for the Jesuits, as did M.-A. Charpentier and André Campra in France at a later date.
Throughout the Society’s history, there have nevertheless been a number of composers, musicians and scholars who were themselves members of the order. Francisco Borgia (1510–72), former Duke of Gandía and third Father General, was known to have composed a polyphonic mass setting. The polymath Athanasius Kircher (1601–80) was one of the most influential music theorists of the Baroque era. Domenico Zipoli (1688–1726) from Prato, sometime organist at the Gesù in Rome, entered the Society in 1716 and spent the rest of his life using his musical talents in the Jesuit reducciones of Paraguay. After Zipoli, the musician and architect Martin Schmid (1694–1772) dominated the history of the last days of the Jesuits in Paraguay immediately before their expulsion in 1767, while the French Jesuit composer Joseph Amiot (1718–93) worked at the close of the Jesuit period in China. A number of Jesuits have been more renowned for their scholarly research in music: Louis Lambillotte (1796–1855), chant scholar and composer of hymns; G.M. Dreves (1854–1909), medievalist and co-editor of Analecta Hymnica Medii Aevi; J.W.A. Vollaerts (1901–56), chant scholar; and Jóse López-Calo (b 1922), influential musicologist in the field of Spanish sources.
Much documentation exists about the music of the Jesuits before the order’s suppression by Pope Clement XIV in 1773, but very little of the music itself seems to have survived. Apart from the Kapsberger opera, the other collections of music manuscripts linked to the Society have come to light mostly outside the European orbit, and virtually all of that music is connected with the Jesuit mission lands. The most substantial manuscript collection is that of the episcopal archive in Concepción, Bolivia, but music associated with the Society has also been found in Brazil, Canada (Quebec), Chile, Colombia, Mexico and the Philippines. A collection of printed music, most of it dating from the 19th century but with a few 16th–18th-century prints, was discovered in the early 1990s in the church of the Gesù, Rome (it is now part of the Jesuit archive in I-Rcg). The disappearance of music manuscripts and prints belonging to the Jesuits is probably a result of the suppression; while some Jesuit libraries survived or were reconstituted after the restoration of the order in 1814, music from the college chapels and churches associated with the professed houses did not.
MGG2 (H. Hüschen/D. von Huebner)
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