MUS Talks – The School of Organ Singing (Bahia, 1750-60) and the crossroads of eighteenth-century music theory

Prof. Dr. Mariana Portas, researcher at the Group of Historical and Cultural Studies in Music of the Institute of Ethnomusicology, Music and Dance (NOVA-FCSH); author of the thesis Models and singularities in Luso-Brazilian musical theory of the Ancien Régime. The “Organ Singing School” of Caetano de Melo de Jesus (Salvador da Bahia, 1759-60). She is also the Coordinator of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s Publishing Plan. Among other roles she has held throughout her career, she was International Relations advisor to the Gulbenkian Portuguese Language and Culture Plan, and coordinator of the Gulbenkian Choir.

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The School of Organ Singing (Bahia, 1750-60) and the crossroads of eighteenth-century music theory.

In 1759, Salvador da Bahia, capital of the Viceroyalty of Brazil, witnessed a political and social drama in several acts: the expulsion of the Jesuits and the closure of their colleges and seminaries, which contained the best libraries in Brazil; the establishment of the Pombaline policies of reform and secularization of society; the creation of new cultural centers for the Bahian elite, such as the Academia Brasílica dos Renascidos, which brought together dozens of literate people, plantation owners and ecclesiastics; the decline of the “sugar cycle” and the peak of the “gold cycle”, which in 1763 led to the transfer of the Viceroy’s capital to Rio de Janeiro and the shift of the economic axis to the south. It was in the same year, 1759, that Fr. Caetano de Melo de Jesus, born in Bahia, completed the largest treatise on music written in Portuguese – the Escola de Canto de Órgão, with 2 volumes and 1,200 handwritten pages – and sought a patron to send the volumes to Lisbon for printing.