What role did music play in early-modern religious missions? How did religious orders and Indigenous communities react to and understand different types of music in this era of global encounters and interactions? These questions were centre stage in this three-day conference at which twenty-three delegates presented their research at the Abdij van Park just outside Leuven, and at the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) in Brussels.

The manifold ways in which music influenced religious missions formed a prominent thread throughout the proceedings. In the conference’s first paper, Daniele V. Filippi (Università di Torino) probed the knowledge, often tacit and unwritten, that lay behind the use of music in early-modern Jesuit missions. For Filippi, the abundance of music sponsored by the Society of Jesus lay counter to reservations about its use, as epitomized by Jesuit Florian Paucke (1719–1779), who decried missionary music for prioritizing aesthetic beauty over spiritual weight. The tensions between organizational cohesion and adaptation to local circumstances were the central question of a paper by Céline Drèze (Sorbonne Université; Institut de Recherche en Musicologie), which examined practices of copying for litany settings that circulated amongst Jesuit sodalities, particularly in northern France and the southern Netherlands. Drèze noted that devotional models in litany settings were adapted to specific contexts in order to cater to local communities. A conscious adaptation to time and place also formed the crux of the presentation by Christoph Riedo (Université de Genève), which examined the transmission of notated European music – in this instance, motets by Johann Melchior Gletle (1626–1683) – to Jesuit missions in what is now Argentina during the seventeenth century, at the request of Anton Sepp (1655–1733). Riedo gave a fascinating analysis of Gletle’s collection Expeditionis Musicae, the tantalizing title of which immediately suggests its mobility.

Soundscapes of cultural exchange were also a prominent theme. Théodora Psychoyou (Sorbonne Université; Institut de Recherche en Musicologie), in her paper on seventeenth-century Jesuit mission reports from the Cyclades, explored sources that document the sounds of cultural hybridity, where the dynamics of interconfessional difference existed alongside linguistic pluralism. Sound was also germane to the paper by Nathan Reeves (University of Tennessee) on Jesuit missions in early-modern Naples. Such missions aimed to convert Muslims, who had been imprisoned and then enslaved on the city’s galleys. In a cosmopolitan, maritime environment, music formed a tool of catechesis, and Reeves showed how sound mediated encounters between the Jesuits and those they wished to convert within a complex, transient space. Aurality and orality were a focus in the discussion by Cesar Favila (University of California Los Angeles) of saetas, texts that were sung in Franciscan missions in New Spain. Favila showed how meditation upon one’s sins helped bystanders to reflect upon and feel the consequences of their human frailty. Through singing and listening to the missionaries’ saetas, Favila argued, sinners could be led to salvation.

Cultural syncretism was a further theme that emerged in several talks. María Gembero-Ustárroz (Institució Milà i Fontanals de Recerca en Humanitats, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas) demonstrated the circulation of regional styles in early-modern Spain through the lens of the Cistercian nunnery of Santa Ana in Ávila. Focusing on solo arias composed for this house by Francisco de la Huerta (1733–1814), Gembero-Ustárroz emphasized the transfer of an Italian international musical language through the emergence of arias composed in the galant style. Meanwhile, Luisa Nardini (University of Texas at Austin) discussed the Augustinian monastery of San Giovanni a Carbonara in early-modern Naples. She showed how sources preserved at the house’s library chart links between post-Tridentine chant that were diffused across parts of Europe and the New World through the catechization of enslaved people in the Kingdom of Naples, mirroring many of the themes presented in Reeves’s paper.

For Pál Richter (Hungarian Research Network Zenetudományi Intézet), investigating the impressive oeuvre of Franciscan monk Joannes Kájoni (c1629–1687), the wealth of different styles preserved in the ‘Codex Kajoni’ and other books pays testament to the variety of genres that the composer mastered. These predominantly feature the monody typical of Franciscan music of the seventeenth century, and yet these sources also incorporate regional specificities such as Ammerbach organ tablature. This variety of styles and repertories indicates an awareness of local tastes that Kájoni wished to assimilate into his works. Both Willem Peek (The Warburg Institute) and Qingfan Jiang (Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University) addressed issues of cultural syncretism within Jesuit contexts. Peek’s talk focused on the Magnes sive de Arte Magnetica (1641) by Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) and its account of tarantism. Peek remarked that Jesuits consciously incorporated traditional Apulian song, dance and ritual into missionary activities. Meanwhile, in her talk on Matteo Ricci’s (1552–1610) Xiqin quyi, a collection of eight songs presented to Emperor Wanli in about 1608, Jiang showed that there are several textual references to Daoist religious principles. Both papers, therefore, demonstrated that assimilation and syncretism were both central techniques and ideals for the Society of Jesus.

The close links of early-modern missions with colonialism were a consistent point of discussion. Two papers explored how musical activities in missions were strongly intertwined with colonial endeavours stemming from Britain. For Rory Corbett (Maynooth University), the development of the banjo was deeply tied to the ritual and religious practices of slaves and free Afro-diasporic people in the English West Indies. He linked these practices to Black Brotherhoods, fraternal religious networks that were active across plantations in Jamaica and elsewhere. In a similar vein, a paper by Philip Burnett and Rachel Cowgill (both University of York) showed how the missionary activities of the Moravian church in British colonies frequently included music. Moravians’ writings reveal much about contemporary attitudes towards music from missionaries and Indigenous communities alike, and particularly so in the Cape Colony and the West Indies.

Both keynote speakers were keen to stress the strong role that missions played in shaping musical awareness abroad, in British and French colonies respectively. David R. M. Irving (Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats & Institució Milà i Fontanals de Recerca en Humanitats, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas) offered a fascinating insight into the Quakers (Religious Society of Friends), from their establishment in the early 1650s up until the late eighteenth century. He showed that many early Quakers had a complicated relationship with music, viewing it as a distraction from an inward experience of the divine. Quaker leader George Fox (1624–1691) even decried the seven liberal arts (trivium and quadrivium) and the Guidonian gamut as elite, inaccessible and contrived. Meanwhile, Solomon Eccles (c1617–1682) burnt his musical instruments in a public setting at Tower Hill. Others, however, were more open to viewing music as a ubiquitous social phenomenon. Irving explored the case of Quaker artist and botanist Sydney Parkinson (c1745–1771), who travelled to the Pacific as part of James Cook’s voyage of 1768–1771. He showed a keen interest in Indigenous peoples and their cultures, including their musical practices, although he was not a musician himself.

The second keynote address, by Glenda Goodman (University of Pennsylvania), focused on Jesuit missions in North America, specifically in the territories of the Illinois Confederacy in Mississippian North America. One manifestation of diplomatic and spiritual ritual amongst these communities was the calumet dance, which one Jesuit, Jacques Marquette (1637–1675), described in his journal. Critiquing attempts to compare the calumet dance to French ballet in order to laud its civil ideals, Goodman emphasized the ineffable nature of this genre, which inevitably escaped proper description because of European observers’ inadequate epistemological tools, including the system of musical notation with which they were familiar. This wonderfully rich discussion highlighted the limited skills that missionaries possessed when encountering Indigenous ceremonies that involved music and dance, thereby echoing debates throughout the conference that addressed the complexities of missionary encounters.

Given the cultural diversity of religious missions, the papers covered not just a wide range of contexts for which music was used, but also an impressive breadth of sources. Hana Studeničová (Ústavu hudobnej vedy Slovenskej akadémie vied) provided a fascinating overview of musical fragments found in archives in Slovakia, Austria and Germany. These fragments bear witness to a thriving musical environment throughout central Europe in the early-modern era, and provide an opportunity for musicologists to consider the global implications of sources that are often assumed to be local or peripheral. The recondite nature of some sources was also a thread for Lucia Denk (Princeton University), who focused on a manuscript preserved in New Brunswick that contains a mysterious chant setting of the Kyrie. This chant was written in diastematic notation and transcribed by an unknown member of the Maliseet tribe, someone who was ostensibly associated with (or influenced by) Jesuit missionaries. In a similar vein to Goodman’s paper, Denk showed how prevailing musicological models for identifying and ascribing repertories, based on European-derived epistemological frameworks, often fall short when it comes to intercultural religious missions and colonial contexts.

Yevgeniya Ignatenko (Natsionalnaya muzykalnaya akademiya Ukrainy im. P. I. Chaykovskogo) explored the circulation of liturgical repertory throughout late medieval and early-modern Ukraine, and questioned the identities of monodic chants described in sources by various toponyms: for instance, ‘Greek’, ‘Wallachian’ and ‘Serbian’. For Ignatenko, these chants point to a close relationship between neighbouring traditions that have too often been viewed as discrete, and it is through very early missions that such assimilation was achieved. Katarina Šter (Muzikološki inštitut ZRC SAZU) turned attention to the Carthusian monk Nicholas Kempf (c1415–1497), whose attempts to lure disenfranchised academics to the peace of the monastic cloister surely resonated with many in attendance. Kempf viewed chant as the ideal means to connect with would-be members, given its close association with the divine and with personal salvation. Meanwhile, Ágnes Papp (Hungarian Research Network Zenetudományi Intézet) discussed the transfer of musical repertories between printed books in northern Hungary in the sixteenth century. Her talk focused on content shared between hymnbooks of the Protestant Czech Brethren and of Catholic communities. For Papp, the Catholic sources, intimately connected with the Jesuits, subscribe to the recurring trend observed throughout the conference of conversion through cultural assimilation.

Several papers addressed circulation between Iberia and the early-modern colonial empires of Spain and Portugal. In his presentation, Emilio Ros-Fábregas (Institució Milà i Fontanals de Recerca en Humanitats, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas) offered a ‘deep dive’ into polyphonic repertories that circulated between Iberia and the New World through the ‘Books of Hispanic Polyphony’ project at his institution. This digital-humanities initiative has been developed with functions that allow users to search for sources associated with specific religious orders. Such a rich repository of searchable data can be a crucial academic resource, and Ros-Fábregas’s work has provided a foundation for ground-breaking studies that chart the circulation of sources from the Iberian peninsula to Latin America. Meanwhile, Ascensión Mazuela-Anguita (Universidad de Granada) looked at the interstices between Iberia and elsewhere by focusing on Carmelite nunneries. Despite numerous restrictions on performance, including a ban on singing from memory, these female communities facilitated global transmission of repertories. In her rich overview of the order’s notated and oral transmission, Mazuela-Anguita demonstrated links between early-modern practices in France, the Low Countries and Mexico.

Following the final session on 28 June, delegates were treated to an exclusive exhibition at the KBR. This exhibition, kindly organized by Ann Kelders, Antonio Chemotti and David Nivarlet, showcased several sources from the library’s holdings that were discussed in delegates’ papers. Some of the most memorable items were two copies of Kircher’s Magnes sive de Arte Magnetica, published accounts of Anton Sepp’s mission in Paraguay and passages from the Jesuit Relations (missionary reports) from New France. This rare chance to view such documents and the KBR’s wider collection led to much fruitful discussion beyond the conference’s conclusion.