Musicking in the Missions: The Opera and Living Legacy of San Francisco Xavier

2024 Jesuit Lecture with Phillip Ganir, S.J. 

  • phillip ganir

  • November 19, 2024 - 3:00 PM

    Christ the King Chapel, St. Paul's College

    Phillip Ganir, S.J., a priest of the Jesuits’ US West Province from Honolulu, serves as Assistant Professor of Religious Education at Boston College’s Clough School of Theology and Ministry.  Fr. Ganir earned degrees in music at the Manhattan School of Music and the University of Notre Dame and completed a PhD in Catechetics at the Catholic University of America, where he wrote on the mystagogical dimension of James MacMillan’s fifth symphony Le grand Inconnu.  He has been published in the Journal of Religious Education and The International Journal of Evangelization and Catechetics, and has worked as an Assistant Producer to the University of Notre Dame’s production and recording of Dante’s Divine Comedy funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  This past April he collaborated with La Asociación Pro Arte y Cultura to produce the indigenous Bolivian opera San Francisco Xavier at the 14th Biennial International Festival of Renaissance and American Baroque Music “Misiones de Chiquitos”.  He is currently working with a five-member research team on a Lilly funded grant which studies the state of children’s liturgical participation in the American Catholic Church.  

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ABOUT THE LETURE: 

Musicologist Christopher Small’s influential 1998 text Musicking, has helped scholars, performers, and teachers think of music not only as sound or score, but also as an activity that engages a broad network of persons who compose, perform, and listen to music.  His musicking theory resonates well with the story of 18th century Mission Opera, San Francisco Xavier, the only known Baroque opera composed a native South American language.   Since Jesuits themselves rarely composed or performed music, musicking more accurately describes the Society’s modo de proceder that engaged a network of persons and processes which transmitted doctrine and strengthened communal cultural identities popularized by Ronald Joffé’s 1986 film, The Mission.  This presentation features clips from the historic performance from the parish and municipality of San Javier, the first of the Jesuit Reductions in Bolivia’s Chiquitania region who performed this drama at the Festival Internacional de Música Renacentista y Barroca Americana “Misiones de Chiquitos” in April 2024.  Due to the work of musicologist Piotr Nawrot who restored the deteriorated music score in 2000, the recent performance is probably the first time the opera has been performed in its original mission since the 18th century.