The sheet music collector: Playing pieces from the early 20th century preserved by Indigenous people

Raquel Maldonado Villafuerte trained as a pianist, conductor, and classical composer in La Paz, Bolivia, but ended up graduating as a music collector in San Ignacio de Moxos, an Amazonian village in Beni, bordering Brazil, 502 kilometers from the highland city where she was born. A collector, yes, but not of wild fruits. A collector of musical scores. At 26, fresh out of university, in 2004 she accepted the position of director of the San Ignacio de Moxos School of Music, a decision that transformed her life and, above all, the lives of the Moxos people, one of the Indigenous nations recognized by the Plurinational State of Bolivia.

The term “collector” is arbitrary. In reality, she defines herself as a director, composer, and musical researcher. However, “collection” is a concept that encapsulates her early years of work in Gran Moxos, the region of plains and tropical forests adjacent to San Ignacio, where the inhabitants live scattered in small communities. Upon arriving at the school, which had been founded by a nun of the Ursuline order, she understood that she could not limit her work to teaching folk and world music, but rather that she had to work on the long tradition of native music that had taken root in the region for centuries.

“We weren’t landing like aliens in a place devoid of culture; rather, there was a strong cultural and musical foundation. That was precisely the tool we needed to begin building a musical foundation,” Maldonado recalls. Soon, she discovered neighborhood festivals and the songs played there. And she stumbled upon a treasure she knew little about at the time: a musical archive containing several thousand scores. “Then, we decided to finish the work ourselves, and we found much more than we had imagined, because we quadrupled the archive,” she says.

It was then that the most intensive work of collecting began. “We conducted field research that resulted in the recovery of more than 7,000 pages of handwritten musical scores,” she notes. The musical texts had been handwritten by the Indigenous people themselves, from communities primarily located within the Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park (TIPNIS), a nationally protected area that, for years, has been threatened by the construction of a highway and the progressive encroachment of settlers. “These weren’t obsolete scores. We’re talking about a living culture that has never severed its ties with that Jesuit past,” he says.

The documents were copied and treasured by different generations of Mojeño people, even though many no longer knew how to interpret the musical notation transcribed on old papers inherited from their ancestors, and which were deteriorating due to the heat, humidity, and harsh conditions of the jungle. “That’s what’s so impressive. In the communities, traditional musicians continue to copy these manuscripts. Even though they have lost their knowledge of musical notation, they consider all this writing valuable and believe it has been saved by the Indigenous people themselves. They have copied them as one would copy a drawing.”

Music to ascend to the ‘holy hill’

In their book, The Jesuit Work in the Royal Audiencia of Charcas, historians Roberto Salinas and Mario Linares write that San Ignacio de Moxos was founded in 1689 by the Jesuit priests Antonio de Orellana and Juan de Espejo. Its establishment was part of the ambitious evangelization project of the South American Amazon region, promoted by the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church. It is named after the founder of the Society of Jesus, the Basque Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Before the Jesuit settlement, Iberian conquistadors had sporadically explored the Moxos plains, drawn by legends of gold treasures and the enslavement of indigenous people.

San Ignacio de Moxos is located 94 kilometers from Trinidad, the capital of the Amazonian department of Beni. In his Compendium of Indigenous Ethnic Groups and Ecoregions, anthropologist Álvaro Díez Astete states that the Moxos population numbers over 81,000 people, a figure that, according to data from the most recent Bolivian Census (2024), represents less than 1% of the country’s total population. Their language is Moxos, which has variants (Ignaciano, Trinitario, Loretano) and is descended from Antillean Arawak.

Their post-Spanish conquest cultural history was marked by the Jesuit presence, from which they inherited, in addition to the Catholic faith, the cultivation of certain arts, the most important of which was music. Anthropologist Fernando Hurtado also affirms that, despite the cultural clash with the European religious figures, “there were some changes that the natives readily accepted, among them, evidently, was music, which was one of the most important reasons for the spiritual conquest of the Moxos people.” In his research, The Indigenous Council of San Ignacio de Moxos, Hurtado refers to chroniclers of the colonial era to acknowledge that the Moxos people “were very fond of, very skilled at, and very predisposed to music due to their distinctly musical cultural heritage.”

The Jesuit mission remained in San Ignacio de Moxos for 79 years, between 1689 and 1768. However, its musical legacy was kept alive by the Moxos people. The Indigenous people began to preserve and copy the inherited musical scores. “We are talking about a heritage that has waited centuries to be reinterpreted and that has not been preserved by institutions like the Church or by famous figures, but by the indigenous people,” Maldonado emphasizes.

In fact, the musical documents were passed down from generation to generation, surviving dramatic historical events that befell the Moxos people, such as enslavement by rubber barons or conscription into the Chaco War (1932-1935) between Bolivia and Paraguay. For the conductor, the preservation of the scores is a symbol of the Moxos people’s commitment to keeping their cultural identity alive.

The archives discovered by the researcher and her collaborators date mostly from the early 20th century. It is believed that the transcriptions were encouraged by an Italian priest who arrived in the area in the first decades of the last century and breathed new life into musical training. It was then that the figure of the music copyist emerged.

The archived documents comprise pieces from various genres, formats, and musical styles. “There’s music ranging from Renaissance to Republican, likely brought by new priests, and it’s primarily choral music for Catholic catechism,” explains the orchestra conductor. These are the compositions performed by the Moxos Ensemble, directed by Maldonado, which they have recorded on eight albums and toured throughout Europe. However, this is not their only repertoire. It also includes pieces from the native and oral tradition of San Ignacio.

The project’s musical symbiosis is expressed not only in the alternation of missionary (Renaissance, Baroque, and Republican) and native compositions, but also in the incorporation of instruments created by the indigenous people themselves. In addition to violins and cellos, the Moxos Ensemble makes music with native flutes (adaptations of Baroque versions made with bamboo) and bassoons, monumental tubular wind instruments that replaced European organs and became part of the traditional liturgical ensemble within the Church.

The use of bass guitars continues to amaze Maldonado, considering the narrow-mindedness of the Jesuits of the time, who, while acknowledging the exotic beauty of Moxos cultural creations, viewed native instruments as inferior. Only such a tenacious musical vocation could overcome the mental prejudices, social adversities, and natural limitations they faced for centuries. Just as they preserved musical scores from the ravages of time, they invented instruments to ensure that music continued to be made. These are expressions of a strategy of cultural resistance that, as Maldonado recalls, harks back to the myth of the “holy hill”: a sacred place immune to the tropical floods of the Moxos plains, but also beyond the reach of the white slaveholder. A hill that is climbed with spiritual music that makes it holy. A path on which a collector of memories has accompanied them for more than 20 years.

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