Contents
For several years, the members of the Echeverria family gathered different kinds of musical scores in this binder’s volume. Therefore, we can think of it as a collection of inscribed sounds produced in different places and published using different techniques, from manuscript copies to printed music. While the musical repertoire that contains the Echeverría Album illustrates the sonic preferences and fashionable genres in Colombian salons during the 19th century, the diverse nature and origin of its contents also reveal a larger network of sounds and materials that made possible the circulation of music and ideas between Europe and America as well as those operating between Latin American countries.
Printed Music
This binder’s volume contains several examples of music published by some of the pioneers of music printing and publishing in Colombia and Venezuela. In some cases, elaborate illustrations can be spotted in the cover of the sheet music, which indicate that these scores had artistic value beyond their musical purposes, becoming special objects that came about as a result of the new Colombian print culture that emerged during the mid-19th century. An example of this is the score of “La Melancolía,” a “religious andante” for piano composed by the Venezuelan composer Jesús María Suárez, published in Caracas by the German immigrant Alfred Rothe around 1870. Some music scores, however, do not contain any illustrations whatsoever but have a significant historical value. The score “La Gratitud,” a waltz by the Colombian composer José Joaquín Guarín that brothers Vicente and Jerónimo Martínez (1825-1854) published, is one of the earliest examples that we have of music lithographs in Colombia.
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La Melancolía, Andante Religioso de Jesús M. Suárez (ca. 1870). Intérprete: Manuela Osorno. Ingeniería de grabación y mezcla: Noelia Rego y Daniel Eduardo Rodríguez Castellanos.
Periodicals
Periodicals aimed at women such as fashion magazines and music newspapers were crucial in establishing a new print culture in late 19th-century Latin America. Periodicals also shaped the contents of the Echeverria binder’s volume. The sisters and their family acquired some issues of music magazines and newspapers in local stores or through a network of friends and family members in the Colombian Caribbean and Venezuela. Later, the sisters bound these periodicals together in this collection. Among these periodicals, we find the German music magazine Die Musikalische Welt, the Venezuelan music newspaper El Zancudo, and newspaper clippings like a piano adaptation of Boccherini’s Minuetto by Ramón Jimeno published in the Spanish magazine La Moda Elegante Ilustrada.
Manuscripts
The Echeverria family also collected a significant amount of manuscripts in this binder’s volume. Some are manuscripts by composers like Rosa Echeverría or Jesús M. Suárez. However, some are manuscript copies of European and US-American editions made by copistas (copyists), such as the copy of Sidney Smith’s Fantasie Brillante sobre La fille du Regiment, Op. 115 made by Antonio J. Caicedo in 1885. Copyists like Caicedo usually had the musical training necessary to make manuscript copies, which they sold to their clients. Indeed, the prominent presence of such manuscript copies in the Echeverria Music Album suggests that in late 19th-century Colombian consumers like the Echeverría sisters looked for affordable music methods and other musical scores, establishing a commercial niche for manuscript copies.
