Professor Lisa Voigt (Yale Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese) organized two related conferences this month: the first conference was held at the University of São Paulo (May 14-15, 2026) and the follow-up conference was held at the University of Brasília (May 18, 2026). Please find below a description of this innovative, interdisciplinary workshop between musicians, performers, and academics.
What would a song in Tupi, an indigenous language from Brazil, performed in Lisbon in 1619 have sounded like? What would it mean to the performers—including a mixed-race student at a Jesuit college playing the role of a Brazilian king—and to the audience, which included the king of Portugal? Does the performance of such a song evince the success of Iberian colonial and Jesuit evangelical projects, or is it an example of how the “empire sings (strikes) back”? The Tupi song, entitled “Chorus Brasilicus” in the text that transcribes it, was recited in a Jesuit play written in Latin that was performed during a festival celebrating the royal entry of Philip II into Lisbon, all of which is described in a narrative written in Spanish. Clearly, a multilingual and interdisciplinary approach incorporating historical, literary, musical, linguistic, performance, theater and festival studies is necessary to address these questions. But this project posits that transnational and hemispheric collaboration—involving not only scholarly workshops and exchange but also musical practice and performance—is also essential to fully attend to them.
A LASA-Ford Grant supported a unique multidisciplinary event in São Paulo, Brazil, that brought together musicians and scholars of the early modern Atlantic world, in order to explore collectively the role of music in both fostering and unsettling the processes of evangelization and imperial expansion. The event convened musicians specializing in early music and scholars of early modern history, literature, and music from the US, Brazil, and Portugal. Through dialogue, these scholars from a wide variety of fields and language traditions within the early Atlantic world considered the sonic cultures of Indigenous and Afro-descendent peoples, which have received less scholarly attention because of their lesser visibility in written archives. The academic workshop at São Paulo culminated with the performance of three original versions of the Chorus Brasilicus, which were also filmed and recorded. These recordings were then presented to students at faculty at the University of Brasília, where participants engaged in dialogue about the process of working together in São Paulo and plans for future work.
Support from the Yale Department of Spanish & Portuguese Batchelor Funds also enabled two of the department’s graduate students, Eviatar Oren and Inês Forjaz de Lacerda, to attend the workshops; they are now planning to recreate a teaching module for Portuguese language classes using the recordings. As Inês noted, “This is a great opportunity to contribute new, equitable and community-minded materials to our Portuguese language curriculum. It’s a very exciting project for our program!”
