Lusitano was a skilled, accomplished musician, not a pariah. Dr. Mastrocola noted that Lusitano’s religious conversion indicates that he had access to certain powerful, though heretical, social circles. Yet the episode with Vicentino demonstrates that Lusitano’s merits could not overcome factors like the incuriosity of future scholars.
Today, Lusitano is not easy to study, even if you can find performances of his music on YouTube. Little correspondence and few records of his life are known to have survived, both because earlier scholars had no interest and because his sociopolitical disenfranchisement constrained the production of such documents. Contextual evidence is critical, especially with respect to his identity.
We know other pardo people existed in 16th-century Portugal. At the time, thousands of African and African-descended people, most of whom were enslaved, lived in the country, including in Lusitano’s birth city, Olivença. Furthermore, the details of Lusitano’s peripatetic career align with a 1518 papal bull prohibiting Black priests’ employment within the Catholic Church.
Particularly in its recursive moments of erasure, Lusitano’s experience as a historical figure illustrates the kind of collective activity that has traditionally excluded composers of African descent from classical music’s conventional performance and academic institutions. Melanie Zeck, a reference librarian at the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center and former reference librarian at the Center for Black Music Research, emphasized that the first historians of Black classical music responded to these exclusionary tendencies by developing what she called a “totally separate practice from mainstream academic scholarship.”
“People would come together, musicians, business people, teachers, in search of historical truth,” Dr. Zeck said. That is the same reason Dr. Jones made her protest sign two years ago.
Now, the internet and social media can empower these principles of Black music scholarship, though, as Dr. Zeck said, “misinformation abounds.” But for Lusitano, these technologies nevertheless have helped the truths of his life and music become more accessible than ever, 500 years after his birth.
Garrett Schumann is a composer and scholar who teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Mich.
