<i>Immaculate Sounds: The Musical Lives of Nuns in New Spain</i>, by Cesar D. Favila

In Immaculate Sounds: The Musical Lives of Nuns in New Spain, Cesar D. Favila offers a much-needed study of convent culture and nuns’ musical practices in the New World. Focusing on specifically Spanish gradations of Roman Catholic belief and ritual, Favila’s work is thoroughly researched, bringing a variety of theories, thinkers, and scholars into the discussion while still being readable on an interdisciplinary level. Immaculate Sounds is legible, accessible (both in its writing and as an open-source book at https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/77184), and of interest to a variety of readers—scholars and early-music practitioners alike. Favila uses little jargon of any kind; indeed, he explains even basic Christian mythological concepts as needed.The book begins with a poem and a beautifully written account that interlaces a neighborly outdoor gathering during the COVID-19 pandemic with Favila’s personal experiences with nuns who allowed him into their convent archives. After this preface, the introduction pairs Favila’s questions and arguments with background information, shedding light on details of nuns’ lived experiences in New Spain, many of which resonate with scholarship on European nuns, including issues of enclosure, propriety, space, and economics. For example, the class hierarchy of choir nuns over servant nuns and the existence of dowry waivers for young musicians appear in convents in both locales. Yet the introduction also elucidates major differences between European convents and those of New Spain: issues of race and racial “purity” held much more weight for Spanish society in New Spain, and therefore Favila centers race frequently. Furthermore, Favila argues for nuns’ liminality as inflected by colonization. He notes that nuns were positioned “between colonizer and subjugated” and thus actively silenced other women even while they themselves were being silenced (p. 12). Nuns’ positioning within the colonial framework is fascinating and important, and while Favila touches on this issue periodically, much room exists for further work in this area.Favila brings a host of Spanish-language scholarship to bear on this globalized contribution to early modern nun studies, a welcome addition to previous publications of convent musical history that have focused nearly exclusively on European convents. Favila’s exploration of various source materials, including nuns’ biographies (authored by men), order rulebooks, notarized documents, visual art and marginalia, poetry, and musical scores, elegantly evokes the sonically detail-rich lived experiences of nuns at numerous convents in sixteenth- through eighteenth-century New Spain. He moves among several interdisciplinary analytical methods, bringing Latin American and Spanish literary criticism to bear on nuns’ biographies and the texts of villancicos, as well as using occasional harmonic analyses and to a greater extent sonic and performative analyses, all while maintaining a thread of historicized spirituality and mysticism throughout.In focusing on the “devotional synergy” (p. 4) among the literary, visual, and performative arts, Favila organizes the five chapters of Immaculate Sounds into two main parts, each posited as one of Favila’s main themes: acousmatic discipline and unity. Within part 1, “Acousmatic Discipline,” chapters 1–3 explain the sonic histories and spiritual underpinnings of nuns’ beliefs in New Spain: that the Virgin Mary herself is the voice of God, that nuns’ own voices could “echo . . . a divine, if veiled, sonority,” and that any woman could become a “resonator” of the divine and a conduit through which divine messages could sound (p. 22). Part 2, “Unity” (chapters 4–5), examines the intense emotions and mystical experiences that accompany disciplined life, as nuns seek to embody the Virgin Mary and unite with Christ in heaven.Instead of working chronologically, Favila employs Stefan Tanaka’s call to “decenter chronological time,” and draws on Julia Kristeva’s notion of “women’s time” to focus cyclically on cultural stories, voices, revelations, and doctrine as they pertain to nuns’ temporal experiences (p. 8).1 Each chapter’s subtitle includes a somewhat performative question that centers a specific nun as a case study within the chapter’s larger argument. While little archival material exists about individual women, Favila foregrounds individual identities (sonic and otherwise) as much as possible. As he states, these women’s “names were worth writing down in the past because of their voices” (p. 23).Chapter 1, “Immaculate Conflicts,” historicizes theological conflicts within the Spanish Catholic Church over Immaculate Conception—was the Virgin Mary herself conceived immaculately? The chapter follows the virginal trajectory of Mary herself as well as the expectation of virginity among nuns. Favila teases apart the concepts of physical virginity and spiritual virginity, explaining how even previously married women could later in life profess as nuns. Overall, he frames the chapter as a series of conflicts, traversing them freely in making his overall argument: that nuns imitated Mary, understood as the voice of God at the Creation, via “auditory imagination,” that is, the sonic memory of voices once sounded aloud (p. 69).Chapter 2 focuses on important physical spaces within the convent—the coro, the grates, and thresholds—and explores both their metaphysical symbolism and how these spaces influenced the spiritual understanding of the nuns within. Favila posits the coro as a threshold to the divine realm, as a place that sparked two-way communication between nuns and the divine. While he explains his argument well, he doesn’t state it outright, focusing instead on the physical grates containing the nuns as well as how nuns understood and used the coro space. Particularly interesting in this chapter is Favila’s exploration of nuns’ lips and mouths as bodily thresholds and their significance when placed alongside the coro’s grates.Chapter 3 examines the concept of discipline through notarized dowry waivers and race. Favila’s goal in this chapter is an “acoustically tuned exploration” of the sound of discipline, how it might have been heard, and how it might continue to be heard today (p. 109). His analysis of profession portraiture and dowry waivers reveals a kind of visual discipline to show the multisensorial elements that kept nuns, their bodies, and even their ethnic heritages within a strict disciplinary framework. Throughout this monograph, Favila avoids mentioning that the nuns in New Spain’s convents might have been displeased with their situation or that families routinely cloistered their superfluous daughters, as we see in scholarship on European convents. Indeed, Favila’s only period source that mentions unease with the plight of young women professing as nuns comes from a nineteenth-century narrative by laywoman Fanny Calderón de la Barca. Despite the strong language used by Calderón, Favila glosses over the suggestion of unhappy nuns, and I would have liked more attention to that point, even to refute it.Chapter 4, “Feasting Sounds,” explains the concept of the Eucharistic honeymoon: a nun, when taking communion, remembers her first communion as Christ’s bride and reexperiences that ritualized unification with Jesus. Physical communion and spiritual communion (the memory/imagined act of taking communion) are distinguished, and Favila suggests that spiritual communion might have prompted stronger and more frequent mystical experiences among nuns. This chapter explores nuns’ bodily and sonic relationships with Christ through the Eucharist. In pointing out that the Body of Christ and music are invisible, Favila argues that nuns’ spiritual communion can and should be understood sonically—that listening to and performing music about Eucharistic devotion is itself a form of spiritual communion. Communion, the most sensual of the sacraments (p. 145), requires swallowing, during which nuns’ vocal cords touch the host. The host then continues its interior journey of “deep penetration” to reach the heart/chest (p. 146). As Favila notes, musical resonance also physically penetrates, even without the physical host of the Eucharist; thus, in musical listening, nuns could more readily experience spiritual communion.Chapter 5, “Redeeming Sounds,” asks: what did constant imitation of Christ’s Passion mean for nuns, how did they perform that imitation sonically, and how did music reward nuns’ perfection? In answering these questions, Favila weaves together concepts of love and the bodily pain of mortification, self-flagellation, fasting, and chastity. Favila links this chapter’s strongly antisemitic source material to the book’s earlier discussions of racial purity and calidad (“social standing” or “quality”), expanding his analysis of race and painting an even more uncomfortably detailed picture of New Spain’s intolerance of the Jewish faith. Indeed, throughout the book, examples, arguments, and ideas continue to reappear and intertwine in interesting ways, and this is one of Favila’s strengths. In this case, José Sarmiento’s 1697 sermon posits Jesus on the cross as a cithara which Jews “tune” via the torture of Christ’s body, while Mary sings counterpoint at his feet (p. 187). These period sources thus align love and pain via sonic imagination for spiritual purposes.Unlike preexisting studies of convent music, Favila’s work cycles back to theological discourse and nuns’ personal spirituality with every point he makes. He offers in-depth explanation and theological analysis unique to Spain and its colonies, such as the emphasis on the Virgin Mary’s Immaculate Conception, belief in the Virgin Mary as the voice of God, and her identity as Our Lady of Sorrows. While European societies viewed convents as a kind of heaven on earth, with nuns as “terrestrial angels,”2 societies in New Spain took this idea further, believing nuns to be co-redeemers with the Virgin Mary. Immaculate Sounds thus depicts nuns and their music as crucial for entire communities’ salvation.The book is not without flaws: explanations are not always as easily accessible as they could be, certain scholarly frameworks come into play with little to no background information for those who may be unfamiliar with them, and sometimes sentence construction obfuscates rather than clarifies. However, the overall effect of Favila’s work is beautifully conceptualized and well executed. In Immaculate Sounds, Favila binds mystical ideas, spiritual belief, and sound together to create deeper understandings of how nuns might have understood sacred music in the rituals and cyclic experiences of their lives. And while he focuses on theologies particular to New Spanish Catholicism, deep spiritual understanding through music need not be specific to Spanish spirituality. Favila thus offers a framework for future scholarship on sacred music that brings together doctrine, mysticism, the body, and sonic experiences, all while drawing widely from fragmented source material.