Seeking a Franciscan Theology of Voice: ISM Fellows Lunch Talk with Cesar Favila

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Franciscan Order in New Spain published small books containing missionary songs for convincing nominal Catholics to confess their sins and amend their lives. While musicologists and historians have focused on the effectiveness of missionary music in the conversion of Indigenous people with no prior knowledge of Christianity, the musical implications of the Franciscan missions of spiritual renewal to the “faithful” in the centuries that followed the conquest of New Spain remain understudied. This talk explores the contents of these songbooks and the broader missionary context, revealing a Franciscan awareness of the effectiveness of song, aurality, orality, and voice to understand divine presence and to convey the Church’s post-Tridentine sacramental and reconciliatory messages that aimed at maintaining a faithful citizenry in Spanish territories. This talk also demonstrates how this missionary process provided for the Franciscans to imitate Christ through voice and reveals the voice as a medium for sacramental expression.

This event is free, but registration is required. Lunch will be provided.

Open to Yale Community only.

Contact: Katya Vetrov

Speaker Bio:

Cesar Favila is associate professor of musicology at UCLA. He is the author of Immaculate Sounds: The Musical Lives of Nuns in New Spain (Oxford, 2023), which received the Sixteenth Century Society’s Natalie Zemon Davis Prize, and he is co-editor of the The Virgin Mary’s Essence in New Spanish Song (WLSCM, 2025), both available open access. His research explores the intersections of music history, art, and religion, and often examines how the sacred and the profane animate beliefs about salvation in the Ibero-American world. He is currently working on a project called Divine Eloquence, which analyzes the songs known as saetas, from their Franciscan missionary origins across the Spanish Empire to their contemporary vocalization in Andalusian Holy Week, to trace a transhistorical resonance of penitence and suffering in the teachings of the Catholic Church.