How Scholars and Musicians Recreated a Song Lost for More Than 400 Years

How do you recreate a song when the music has been lost for more than 400 years?

That question connected Yale professors and graduate students with a group of scholars and musicians for an event at the University of São Paulo, bringing together specialists in fields ranging from early music and Indigenous languages to history, theater, and literature. From May 14-16, the group worked to contextualize and recreate the Chorus Brasilicus, a song in Tupi—an Indigenous language of Brazil—that was performed before the king of Portugal and Spain in 1619. The lyrics of this song survived in a text describing the play in which it was performed, but the music did not. The effort culminated in a live performance of the reconstructed work and continued in a workshop at the University of Brasília on May 18. The convening was funded by a LASA-Ford Special Projects grant with supplemental support from the MacMillan Center's Council on Latin American & Iberian Studies, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and the University of São Paulo.

For Lisa Voigt, Yale professor and chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the project was the culmination of more than two decades of research into early modern Iberian and colonial Latin American festivals. It builds on her previous collaboration with scholars and musicians in Portugal, as well as with University of São Paulo professor Íris Kantor, who hosted the event. 

After the event, Kenneth David Jackson, chair of the MacMillan Center's Council on Latin American & Iberian Studies, discovered that a rare copy of the seventeenth-century play containing the Chorus Brasilicus had come onto the market, and alerted the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The Beinecke was able to acquire it, along with another edition of the play. In a course that Voigt is co-teaching this fall with PhD candidate Brais Lamela, SPAN 3610: Multilingual Encounters: Polyglot Literatures of Spain and Latin America, students will be able to compare these versions as well as the recording of the musical recreation in São Paulo. 

Recreating the Chorus Brasilicus raised broader questions about the role of music and performance in preserving cultural memory. During the conference, scholars discussed the sonic cultures of Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples across the early Atlantic world, focusing on communities whose histories have often been overlooked because they left behind fewer written records.

Those conversations also highlighted the continued relevance of Tupi today. “We arrived in São Paulo with three proposed musical settings for the lyrics in Tupi, based on historical models,” said Hugo Sanches and Irene Brigitte Puzzo, who were responsible for the music. “It was an invaluable opportunity to receive feedback from Tupi language specialist Kian Sheik during the ensemble rehearsals. His insights helped us capture the language's distinctive musicality.” The Indigenous community members who Sheik told about the project expressed enthusiasm that researchers from around the world were taking an interest in the language and its history, opening the door to future collaborations.

“The Chorus Brasilicus is an exciting example of interdisciplinary research, creating a dramatic historical, linguistic, and social panorama of the diverse Luso-Hispanic world,” Jackson said.

“I’m incredibly grateful to LASA and the Ford Foundation, the University of São Paulo, and Yale for the financial and organizational support that made the event in São Paulo possible,” Voigt added. “But I’m even more moved by the generosity of the musicians and colleagues in the US, Portugal, and Brazil who took an interest in the Chorus Brasilicus and shared their scholarly and musical expertise for us to be able to listen to it and understand it better.”

For Voigt, Jackson, and their collaborators, the project demonstrated how music can offer new ways of understanding the past, not just through archival research, but through performance itself. With plans to share recordings and continue collaborations in Brazil, the team hopes the work will inspire new research into the voices, languages, and histories that are within colonial archives.