Abstract

Studies on music of the Conquest and the Colonial Period in Spanish America usually favor information obtained from ecclesiastical sources or about religious topics while frequently neglecting other sources and documents which would allow assumptions about the relationship between music and the development of the earliest Spanish-American theater. To question this behavior, in the first part, I comment on some data related to the Archive of the Town Council of the City of Mexico, an outstanding secular source as it records a great deal of data about Spanish music in sixteenth-century Mexico. In the second part, I comment on a jácara kept in the archives of the Cathedral of Bogota, which is interesting because the popular character of the composition goes beyond what is strictly liturgical.