A remarkable story from the LA Times about a music festival in Bolivia – one fruit of the reducciones

The melodious spirit of this merry Jesuit has been much in evidence here for 10 days as hundreds of musicians from Europe, the United States, Asia and Latin America have converged for the sixth edition of what is surely one of the most unusual celebrations of its kind: the International Festival of Renaissance and Baroque American Music.

The event, which ends Sunday and is also known as the Chiquitos Missions Festival, boasts a unique musical pedigree. Along with the standard Baroque repertoire, invited groups typically perform one or more works rescued from the "lost" mission archives — almost 11,000 pages of sacred music rescued in the 1970s during renovations of the remaining 17th and 18th century Jesuit missions situated in two vast regions known as Chiquitanía (hence "Chiquitos") and neighboring Moxos.

That extraordinary archive, now preserved in tiny Concepción and at another site in Moxos, includes choir music, much of it with texts in Latin or Indian languages, instrumental pieces and several full-length operas, says Piotr Nawrot, a Polish missionary with a doctorate in music from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., who has made transcription of the pages his life’s work. Nawrot, who received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his efforts, is also the artistic director of the festival.

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Initially, the Jesuits were summoned here in part to provide the forest Indians a measure of protection from the depredations of human traffickers seeking workers for the hellish mines of Potosí, the fabled Andean mountain whose lode of silver subsidized the Spanish crown for generations. Several thousand Indians lived on each Jesuit settlement in a kind of communal setting, but one always focusing on the church.

The Jesuits used music as an inspirational tool, and each mission had an orchestra and choir, with great allure for the Indians, who had their own music and dance traditions. The composers of the recovered music were a mix of Europeans, European-ancestry settlers and Indians, experts say, and most remain anonymous — though a new trove of previously unknown works by the Italian Domenico Zipoli (1688-1726) was discovered.

"The Jesuits considered music one of the best instruments of evangelization," said Alcides Parejas Moreno, a historian who is now president of the festival.