Northwestern music detective resurrected a trove of 400-year-old Christmas carols

What did “Christmas past” sound like, exactly?

Courtesy of a Chicago-area music scholar with a talent for digging up the past, local audiences will be the first in centuries to hear a series of old carols that trace back to 16th- and 17th-century Mexico and Guatemala.

The group behind the project is the Newberry Consort, which plays old music using instruments and techniques from the period. The Consort hosts its annual “Latin American Christmas” concerts Dec. 13–15, culminating in a matinee at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen.

This year’s program features something unique: The “backbone,” in director Liza Malamut’s words, is nine pieces studied and edited by Paul Gustav Feller-Simmons, a Ph.D. student at Northwestern University. Four of the works were written and performed in a convent in Puebla, Mexico, between 1630 and 1740 and now reside at the Centro Nacional de Investigación, Documentación e Información Musical (CENIDIM) in Mexico City. The other five were discovered in a chest in the Guatemalan highlands and are even older, dating between 1562 and 1635. Those manuscripts are now held at Indiana University.

Featuring eight instrumentalists and six singers, this weekend’s performances will mark the first time this music has been performed since the works were rediscovered and catalogued by scholars in the 1960s. Furthermore, these old carols will soon be available to anyone who wants to perform them; Feller-Simmons is publishing an anthology of this music and more in 2025.

“Paul has transcribed all of these to modern notation. We’re very, very grateful to him for making these available to us,” Malamut said.

How these carols were reintroduced to the present-day holiday canon is a story of scholarship, patience and modern-day musical archaeology, the kind practiced by Feller-Simmons, 35.

The digging started back when he was an undergraduate student in Chile, assisting musicologist Alejandro Vera in his recovery of a rare manuscript by Santiago de Murcia, a renowned composer of Baroque guitar music. In recent years, he’s worked with another scholar, Cesar Favila, on a project documenting the centuries-old music of Latin American nuns.

Ultimately, Feller-Simmons’ research was a great fit for the Newberry Consort, which wanted to broaden the concept of its annual “Mexican Christmas” concerts to encompass more historical sounds of Latin America.

Just like travel in those days, it took some time for musical fads to cross the Atlantic. The music of colonial Spain tended to be old-fashioned compared to what was happening in mainland Europe. Even the earliest pieces on the Newberry Consort’s program, from the 1560s or so, contain music more akin to that composed in 1510.

“It would be like listening to swing today,” Feller-Simmons said.

Some of the music is signed by composers or copyists, while other pieces are anonymous. But the manuscripts offer up clues that Feller-Simmons has worked to decode.

For example, some of the Old Spanish inscriptions in the Guatemalan manuscripts contained enough unusual misspellings and syntax errors that he suspected their copyists were non-native speakers — quite likely some of the countless Indigenous Americans who converted under duress by Spanish missionaries. Other songs in the collection were written in the Mayan languages spoken in the region.

Names also appeared in the Puebla manuscripts — of women, most likely the nuns tasked with copying down the music. Those signatures tell us a lot about how the music was created and credited, Feller-Simmons said.

“We tend to privilege composers, sidelining the invisible labor of historical performers and other musical actors. This music was made for the nuns, copied and performed by them in a female space,” he said.

Those convent performers would have had to navigate a whole different set of culture clashes than those in present-day Guatemala. Gender roles in Indigenous cultures don’t easily map onto the patriarchal attitudes of colonial Spain. Catholic authorities forbade nuns from playing “improper” instruments, like percussion or brass. Even those playing “acceptable” instruments were often not “acceptable” to see: Some convents had nuns perform behind the cloister for outside visitors.

To emphasize the context of the convent music, Newberry Consort director Malamut, who is also a trombonist, will have only female musicians play the Puebla pieces. But most of the program, like the Consort itself, is co-ed.

“If we’re really trying to get as close to reality as possible, I wouldn't even be on the stage,” she said.

Deciphering these manuscripts, as Feller-Simmons has, takes time and patience. Besides the expected wear and tear, worms nibbled through some of the sheets. It was even more challenging to convert them into a performance-ready edition. The music doesn’t exist in a full score, with all the lines printed on the same page. Instead, only the individual parts survived — meaning researchers needed to round them all up to reconstruct how the works might have sounded. The notation style and clefs used in the manuscripts are also archaic.

“Some historical performers can probably read from the manuscripts, but it’s not the most comfortable thing,” Feller-Simmons said.

As is typical for the time period, instrumentation is also never specified in the manuscripts. The Consort has made educated guesses about what instruments might have been at the musicians’ disposal and how they might have functioned in the ensemble. For that, Malamut scoured primary sources — correspondence, receipts, transatlantic cargo lists — for clues.

“We have a lot of plucked instruments: harp, guitars and sometimes even lute or theorbo could have been used,” she said. There is even evidence of a bajón, more or less an early version of the bassoon.

“The convents would have used those instruments to play the bottom of the range if they didn’t have a woman who could sing that low,” said Malamut.

How the Guatemalan manuscripts ended up in Bloomington, Indiana, reflects the fraught colonial history of the region. Catholic missionaries who returned to the Huehuetenango region’s parish in the 1960s were shown some old chests in its holdings. Inside were some 50 books of music, preserved and venerated by area parishioners like relics. Interspersed in the books’ pages were brief accounts of local history, noting visits from church dignitaries and documenting births and deaths.

The books were taken for research, but most were sold off at auction to collectors. To date, only 19 of the 50 books survive and 17 of those ended up at Indiana University. Microfilm copies were made of some of the lost texts, but not all.

“They might be somewhere in some private collection, and they don’t even know what they have,” Feller-Simmons said.

Despite the remarkable detective work by Malamut, Feller-Simmons and others, some basics — like when and why these pieces were performed — remain lost. Yet another open question is how much Indigenous Mayan instruments and musical traditions mingled with Western ones. European written sources are unlikely to be objective or accurate on that point.

So, what you’ll hear this weekend is a beautiful approximation of what one might have heard 400 years ago. For perfomer–scholars like Malamut, that uncertainty comes with the craft.

“In a certain sense,” she said, “we have to respect that we’re never really going to know.”