IDENTITY AND OTHERNESS: THE CODEX TRUJILLO, MUSIC AND DANCES OF THE VICEROYALTY OF PERÚ DURING THE 18TH CENTURY

Abstract

The Codex of Trujillo, also called Codex Martínez Compañón, is a document that records the social and natural life of the Viceroyalty of Peru in the 18th century, made up of watercolours. As a body of work, it is the cultural expression of the most important and developed political entity in South America from the colonial period under the Spanish crown; that is the reason for its ethnographic and archaeological value.

Among the watercolours, dances are illustrated and there are twenty scores written in the European notation system with songs and instrumental pieces called tonadas, cachuas and bayles. To analyse this repertoire is to highlight the culture of the American late baroque period in music and dance.

This work gives an account of the basis and criteria considered when facing the task of reconstruction-recreation of dances of the past that are not written down. Through an approach methodology that articulates questions of identities/otherness, semantic fields derived from historical and cultural aspects plus the necessary approach of the diachronic axis, the extraordinary phenomenon of viceregal dance is presented and problematised.