1/5/23, 7:20 PM A Black Composer’s Legacy Flourishes 500 Years After His Birth - The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/05/arts/music/vincente-lusitano.html

A Black Composer’s Legacy Flourishes 500 Years After His Birth

The reputation of Vicente Lusitano, one of the earliest known composers of African descent active in Europe, was thwarted for centuries.
By Garrett Schumann
Jan. 5, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET 5 MI N READ

On a day in June 2020, Alice Jones was in her Brooklyn apartment getting ready to attend a Black Lives Matter rally. Dr. Jones, a flutist
and composer who serves as an assistant dean and faculty member at the Juilliard School, was adamant about expressing herself as a
Black classical musician.

“I felt like it was my obligation to make sure in this moment, when we’re talking about Black lives mattering,” she said, “that we also talk
about Black art and music.”

So, Dr. Jones designed a sign that listed Black composers throughout history. After adding Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges,
the 18th-century subject of the upcoming film “Chevalier,” she faintly remembered another, older name: Vicente Lusitano.

Lusitano was an African-Portuguese composer and music theorist who was most likely born between 1520 and 1522, and who died
sometime after 1562. Probably the child of an enslaved African woman and a Portuguese noble, Lusitano traversed Europe in a career that
saw him depart the Iberian Peninsula for Rome as a Catholic priest in 1550 and, around a decade later, relocate from Italy to Germany as a
married Protestant.

He wrote sacred and secular vocal music, taught extensively and produced scholarship that includes a unique manuscript treatise on
improvised vocal counterpoint. But until recently, Lusitano has been mostly overlooked by music histories. He has been omitted altogether
in some instances, and his appearances in centuries of academic literature have consistently minimized his biography.

Philippe Canguilhem, a musicology professor at the University of Tours in France, said, “I have always been shocked by the paradox
between the quality of Lusitano’s accomplishments and how little we know about his life.”

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1/5/23, 7:20 PM A Black Composer’s Legacy Flourishes 500 Years After His Birth - The New York Times
The front page of the Soprano part book for Lusitano’s motet collection “Liber Primus Epigramatum” : Bayerische Staatsbibliothek

The title page of the 1553 first edition of Lusitano’s Introduttione Facilissima, a short manual on counterpoint and composition that he used in his teaching throughout Italy.
IMSLP.org

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The final two pages of the 1553 first edition of Introduttione Facilissima. Here Lusitano discusses the subject matter of his famous dispute with Nicola Vicentino. IMSLP.org
The process that diminished Lusitano’s reputation followed a kind of circular logic: generations of historians and performers inherited
sources that did not discuss his music and writings in depth, so those practitioners repeatedly presumed Lusitano’s achievements must
lack artistic and academic significance. No standard practices of revision existed to reassess this understanding of Lusitano’s life and
music, and he became trapped in the margins of classical music’s history.

It took until the late 19th century for new scholarship to revisit Lusitano’s printed works, beginning a 150-year-old reclamation project.
Important strides were made in the 1960s and ’70s as new sources emerged, most notably a 17th-century manuscript that describes
Lusitano as “homem pardo,” a historical Portuguese term for certain mixed-race people of African descent. And since 2000, the internet has
become increasingly important to Lusitano scholarship; the summer of 2020 saw the onset of a new and ongoing flurry of interest whose
roots are entirely digital.

Dr. Jones’s demonstration sign played a part in the current wave of activity: A picture of her placard went viral on social media and
broadcast Lusitano’s name to a new audience. Joseph McHardy, a Scottish-Congolese conductor and early music specialist based in
London, was stunned when he saw Dr. Jones’s post, recalling, “learning about Lusitano reminded me of the feeling I got when I learned
there were Black people in the Roman Empire.”

After seeing the sign, McHardy quickly searched for scores of Lusitano’s music to perform with his church choir, but could only find scans
of the 16th-century originals. So, he spent that summer making his own updated versions. He’s one of many experts and enthusiasts who
produced the first modern editions of Lusitano’s compositions and shared them on free online databases. The result was a burst of new
performances in the months that followed. Nearly five centuries after Lusitano’s death, dozens of choirs in the United States, Canada and
Europe performed his music for the first time, largely because his scores were finally accessible.

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Recording sessions with members of the Marian Consort, who released albums featuring
Lusitano’s sacred music in 2021 and 2022. Nick Rutter

Britain has been the epicenter of Lusitano’s current musical resurgence. In June, McHardy partnered with the Chineke! Foundation to
produce a tour highlighting Lusitano’s sacred works with an ensemble composed entirely of vocalists of color. The motets’ beauty
astonished McHardy, who said, “We had no idea Lusitano’s pieces would be so enjoyable to sing.”

His collaborators, too, were impressed. “I have fallen in love with Lusitano’s music,” said Malcolm J. Merriweather, an American baritone
and conductor who performed on the tour.

The Marian Consort, another British choir, led by the conductor Rory McCleery, preceded McHardy’s tour with a 2021 concert series
featuring one of Lusitano’s works, which they also performed at that year’s BBC Proms. In the last two years, McCleery’s ensemble
released the albums “Josquin, Lusitano & Williams: Inviolata” and “Vicente Lusitano: Motets” on the Linn Records label; these are the
first commercial recordings to feature selections from Lusitano’s 1551 volume “Liber Primus Epigramatum.”

Vicente Lusitano: Mo
Vicente Lusitano

PREVIEW

Praeter rerum seriem

1
Vicente Lusitano, The Marian Consort

Regina caeli
2
Vicente Lusitano, The Marian Consort

Aspice Domine
3
Vicente Lusitano, The Marian Consort

Ave spes nostra Dei genitrix

Lusitano’s legacy has always been subject to information technology, whether in today’s digital world or that of the 16th-century printing
press. This is particularly evident in the history of Lusitano’s 1551 dispute with his Italian contemporary Nicola Vicentino.

That summer, the two faced off in a formalized set of arguments debating analytical definitions of chromaticism. Ultimately, a panel of
three senior Vatican musicians declared Lusitano victorious, but Vicentino quickly began to stoke skepticism and work to invalidate the
judges’ decision.

Vicentino used an influential 1555 treatise to publish distorted and fabricated accounts of the dispute; it harmed Lusitano’s reputation by
portraying him as equivocating and old-fashioned. That Vicentino’s perspective was printed and countervailing evidence was not played a
key role in advancing his constructed narrative. Italian academics working later, in the 16th and 17th centuries, then preferred Vicentino’s
point of view and amplified it, despite their awareness of contradictory sources.

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Giordano Mastrocola, an associate researcher at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, has also identified important political contexts
that magnified Vicentino’s influence. “Lusitano was an outsider,” Dr. Mastrocola said, “and it is so clear that Vicentino had some important
relationships in the higher spheres of Italian society at that time.” Whatever the motivation for scholars to favor Vicentino, Lusitano
suffered as a result. Later generations of historians simply accepted easily available information about the dispute without examining its
veracity: Vicentino’s story transformed into established fact.

Lusitano was a skilled, accomplished musician, not a pariah. Dr. Mastrocola noted that Lusitano’s religious conversion indicates that he
had access to certain powerful, though heretical, social circles. Yet the episode with Vicentino demonstrates that Lusitano’s merits could
not overcome factors like the incuriosity of future scholars.

Today, Lusitano is not easy to study, even if you can find performances of his music on YouTube. Little correspondence and few records of
his life are known to have survived, both because earlier scholars had no interest and because his sociopolitical disenfranchisement
constrained the production of such documents. Contextual evidence is critical, especially with respect to his identity.

We know other pardo people existed in 16th-century Portugal. At the time, thousands of African and African-descended people, most of
whom were enslaved, lived in the country, including in Lusitano’s birth city, Olivença. Furthermore, the details of Lusitano’s peripatetic
career align with a 1518 papal bull prohibiting Black priests’ employment within the Catholic Church.

Particularly in its recursive moments of erasure, Lusitano’s experience as a historical figure illustrates the kind of collective activity that
has traditionally excluded composers of African descent from classical music’s conventional performance and academic institutions.
Melanie Zeck, a reference librarian at the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center and former reference librarian at the Center for
Black Music Research, emphasized that the first historians of Black classical music responded to these exclusionary tendencies by
developing what she called a “totally separate practice from mainstream academic scholarship.”

“People would come together, musicians, business people, teachers, in search of historical truth,” Dr. Zeck said. That is the same reason Dr.
Jones made her protest sign two years ago.

Now, the internet and social media can empower these principles of Black music scholarship, though, as Dr. Zeck said, “misinformation
abounds.” But for Lusitano, these technologies nevertheless have helped the truths of his life and music become more accessible than ever,
500 years after his birth.
Garrett Schumann is a composer and scholar who teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Mich.

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