We usually associate the arts of the baroque era with Europe. However, they were also vibrantly alive across the Atlantic—as the Vancouver Bach Festival presentation Music of Missions and Mysteries: Latin American Baroque attests. Works by composers born in the Americas and by Europeans who emigrated there were regularly performed in colonial mansions, missions, churches, and cathedrals from Mexico to Bolivia. They’re among the earliest expressions of a distinct “New World” identity.

“Latin-American baroque is a very special flavour of music,” says Stephen Stubbs, who directs the eight-piece ensemble Pacific MusicWorks, reached at his Seattle home. “I’ve been wondering why it has this feeling. I think it’s partly people coming from Europe and trying to retain their culture, so being conservative about that. The baroque language persisted into the classical period of [Joseph] Haydn and [Wolfgang Amadeus] Mozart. Also, the harmonic language feels very often as if it’s almost that of 20th-century pop. It wouldn’t sound foreign to the Beatles.

“There are some very straightforward and engaging harmonic patterns that you don’t equate with someone like [Johann Sebastian] Bach, who goes into such great complexities. Here, the harmonic language is easy to grasp. I wonder if one aspect of that might be that they had to appeal to a much less musically educated public, so that it had to be immediately engaging—as it is for us now.”

In addition to Stubbs, who plays baroque guitar and lute, Pacific MusicWorks comprises soprano singers Tess Altiveros and Danielle Sampson, baroque violinists Tekla Cunningham and Adam LaMotte, percussionist Peter Maund, keyboardist Henry Lebedinsky, who selected the material, and harpist Maxine Eilander. “Maxine will be playing the Spanish form of the baroque harp, which has pairs of strings that cross each other," Stubbs explains. “All the South American harps are set up that way. It has a very large bass and a pungent sound, and is more percussive than most harps. There will be a traditional Paraguayan-harp piece in the program.”

The material performed in Music of Missions and Mysteries is a roughly equal balance of secular and religious works. They bring together Spanish, Italian, African, and Indigenous elements, though it’s not always easy to trace the sources. “The African elements are hard to sort out. You’d expect them to be in the realm of rhythm and syncopation, but that was already the case for Spanish music in general—as distinct from the rest of Europe at this time. So you don’t know if the African influences have already happened in Spain.

“As for the Indigenous influence, some of these pieces are in a local Indian dialect, so that people could be communicated with directly. There’s a piece we practised yesterday, the canzona sacra ‘Zuipaquî’, by [turn-of-the-17th-century composer] Domenico Zipoli, who went from Italy to the New World, that has texts in both Latin and the Chiquitano language of eastern Bolivia set in this mesmerizingly accessible chordal world. You could make a hit single out of it—it’s that accessible.”

Pacific MusicWorks presents Music of Missions and Mystery: Latin American Baroque at Christ Church Cathedral on Thursday (August 10) as part of the Vancouver Bach Festival.