Four Years With Vicente Lusitano
The title header to Grove Music Online’s newly revised article on Vicente Lusitano
Today, Grove Music Online published an updated version of their article on Vicente Lusitano (ca. 1522 - ca. 1561), a sixteenth century Portuguese composer and music theorist of African descent. In addition to other changes, today’s publication marks the first time Grove, or any music encyclopedia published outside of Portugal, has properly acknowledged Lusitano’s racialized identity.
My research partner Joseph McHardy and I began working on these urgent revisions over a year ago, when we approached Grove’s editorial team at Oxford University Press (OUP). The original article on Lusitano was written in 2001 by a senior Early Music scholar named Bonnie J. Blackburn, who gave me and Joe her blessing to revisit her work in August 2021. Scott Gleason, an Acquisitions Editor for OUP, welcomed our request and remained tremendously generous partner through the production and peer-review process.
This revised article is the newest of several outcomes in my collaboration with Joe, which began over the summer of 2020. But, my experience with Vicente Lustiano’s life and music goes back even farther to the summer of 2018, when I connected with Melanie Zeck, then a Reference Librarian at the Center for Black Music Research (CBMR). Melanie told me about Vicente Lusitano as she introduced me to a wealth of research on Black classical musicians and their music I had never encountered in nine years of music school. I immediately incorporated the only recorded work of Lusitano’s I could find, a motet called Heu me domine, into the music courses I taught over the next couple of years at Appalachian State University and then Western Michigan University.
But, I did not learn much more about his life until the winter of 2020, when I wrote this article about Lusitano for VAN Magazine with enormous support from Melanie. I will never forget writing this piece, not only because of where it has led me, but also because I typed almost all of it with one hand as I held our newborn son, Isaac, during the night. The publication in VAN is part of the reason Joe and I found each other — the real spark was this tweet by Alice H. Jones, a flutist and composer who serves as an Assistant Dean and faculty member at The Juilliard School, which caught Joe’s attention and prompted him to look up Lusitano and find what I had written a couple months earlier.
Joe is an Early Music specialist and choral conductor based in London. When first we met over zoom (we’ve never met in person!), he had no formal scholarly experience, though his innate skills as a researcher, music analyst, and writer were immediately impressive. Now, he is pursuing a PhD at the University of Nottingham. Our updated Grove article is the first publication out of a handful of variably in-progress pieces of scholarship we are working on together. We also have appeared as a duo at conferences and workshops hosted by the University of Tours, the University of Birmingham (England), the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, and Bowling Green State University. You can watch a video recording of one of our presentations from October of this year, which we gave at the Ann Arbor District Library.
My work with Joe over the last two years has coincided with an international flurry of interest in Vicente Lusitano’s music that began in the fall of 2020 as soon as the first-ever modern engravings of his works were published on open-access databases. Since then, college, church, and professional choirs in the United States, Canada, and Europe have performed a wide range of Lusitano’s works for the first time ever, and many posted recordings to YouTube. Of the videos produced between 2020 and 2021, I am personally fond of this performance of the motet Hic Michael archangelus by Jean-Sébastian Vallée and the choir of The Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul in Montreal, as well as Andrus Madsen’s string quartet arrangement of the motet Aspice domine performed by X-tet in partnership with Boston Baroque.
When I listen to Lusitano’s music, I find it both beautiful and extremely representative of Renaissance vocal polyphony. His compositions should appear in music history textbooks because they encompass a broad range of styles, from melismatic sacred Catholic settings to syllabic Protestant counterpoint against a cantus firmus. Lusitano’s extant catalog also includes a madrigal in Italian, as well as the aforementioned motet Heu me domine, which is more of a compositional etude than a piece created for performance. A simple internet search can help you listen to an enormous proportion of Lusitano’s compositional output, and modern transcriptions of his works are free to download on the sheet music databases IMSLP and CPDL.
Earlier this summer, Joe partnered with the Chineke! Foundation to lead his own tour showcasing Lusitano’s music with an ensemble made up entirely of singers of color. And, in September, another British choir, The Marian Consort, released the first commercial recording to feature works from Lusitano’s 1551 motet book Liber Primus Epigramatum. Joe’s tour drew the attention of the BBC’s Holly Williams, who interviewed both of us, along with The Marian Consort’s conductor Rory McCleery and others, for a June 2022 article highlighting recent Lusitano performances in the UK.
Today’s publication in Grove Music Online marks a major advancement in Lusitano scholarship, which has been plagued by misinformation, bias, and indifference for hundreds of years. Our contribution does not so much involve revealing newly discovered information, but, rather, a richly-informed consolidation of a disparate and multi-lingual scholarly record into a concise, authoritative, English-language document. Our specific revisions incorporate expert work on Lusitano’s career produced by musicologists Philippe Canguilhem and Giordano Mastrocola around a decade ago, in addition to several interdisciplinary sources that clarify our understanding of Lusitano’s identity as a mixed race person of African descent.
More broadly, the work Joe and I have presented to date and continue to write draws on and is indebted to countless scholars of music (Samuel Floyd, Maria Alves Augusta Barbosa, Robert Stevenson, Hebe Mattos, Sam Brannon, etc.) and other subjects (Rinaldo Walcott, Mary Rambaran-Olm, Esperança Cardeira, Kate Lowe, Saidya Hartman, etc.). We have learned that studying Lusitano requires such a far-reaching and exhaustively constructed foundation because he embodies and symbolizes a richly complex topical web. This style of research is informed by the incredible precedents of earlier generations of Black music scholars who constantly worked outside the music academia’s mainstream because its practices and institutions are incapable of fully accounting for people of African descent, their history, and their music.
Vicente Lusitano was born around eighty years after Portugal began importing enslaved Africans. The direct source indicating Lusitano’s racialized identity, a seventeenth century manuscript, describes him as ‘homem pardo’, which refers to a specific socio-political class of mixed race, Black Portuguese individuals that is well documented before, during, and after Lusitano’s lifetime. There is also significant circumstantial evidence to support our understanding of Lusitano’s heritage, namely his inability to secure a benefice from the Catholic Church, which aligns with restrictions placed on Black priest’s employment early in the sixteenth century.
In addition to being one of the earliest evidenced composers of African descent born in and active in Europe, Lusitano led a fascinating trans-European career that took him from the Iberian peninsula, to Italy, and finally southern Germany, where he arrived as a married Protestant in the early 1560s. The extant traces of his life disappear at this point, though the fate of one of his manuscripts suggests he may have gone to France before his death.
Depending on how you approach Vicente Lusitano’s life and music, you could observe his significance in either narrow or expansive terms. In the niche of Renaissance music studies, it appears likely he is the only Iberian-born composer of the time to create sacred music for both Catholic and Protestant use. With respect to the cultural ramifications of the transatlantic slave trade and African diaspora, he can represent something more global. The most important year of Lusitano’s career was 1551, which is when he published his motet book Liber Primus Epigramatum and also when he participated in a notorious academic dispute with his Italian contemporary Nicola Vicentino. 1551 is also the year Don Antonio de Mendoza, the inaugural viceroy of New Spain, entered Lima, Peru for the first time, accompanied by an ensemble of enslaved African musicians.
2022 may very well be Vicente Lusitano’s five hundredth birth year. That it has taken until now for Grove, or any other major music encyclopedia in the United States and Europe, to accurately describe his identity powerfully demonstrates the intentional, inadvertent, and sometimes haphazard effort classical music’s academic enterprise has made over centuries to exclude members of global majority populations and insulate its tradition from historical truths. Vicente Lusitano, in addition to women and members of other oppressed groups who created music in a European style during the Early Modern Period, powerfully undermines this enduring mythology.
