ABSTRACT
In 1843, when Frances Calderón de la Barca, the wife of the Spanish ambassador to Mexico, wrote that for Mexicans, “music is a sixth sense,” she joined a long line of distinguished observers singing the praise of Mexican musical performance. Evidence of the musical achievements of Mexico’s indigenous people is abundant. Archaeological remains bear witness to the complexity of musical instruments and performance in native American cultures more than a millennium before contact with Europeans. Sixteenth-century European chroniclers described the prestige and prominence of musical life among the indigenous peoples they encountered, and twentieth-century documentation has revealed that many distinctive native musical cultures survive nearly five centuries after the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés defeated the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma.
