Ocho Responsorios para los Maitines de la Santísima Trinidad Antonio Juanas (1762/1763–after 1816), ed. R. Ryan Endris Leinfelden-Echterdingen: Carus, 2019 pp. viii + 72, ISBN 979 0 007 18884 9

Abstract

Antonio Juanas is the composer with the largest number of musical manuscripts in the Archivo del Cabildo Catedral Metropolitano de México (hereafter ACCMM), which is the biggest repository of vice-regal music from Hispanic America. Despite what one might imagine given this fact, Juanas is one of the least studied chapel masters from Mexico City Cathedral. Fifteen years ago Javier Marín López wrote that ‘con un catálogo que supera las 500 composiciones, Juanas pertenece al grupo de compositores hasta ahora prácticamente desconocidos’ (with an [extant] output of more than five hundred compositions, Juanas belongs to the group of composers who have been practically unknown until now) (‘Consideraciones sobre la trayectoria profesional del músico Antonio Juanas (1762/63–después de 1816)’, Cuadernos Musicat 2 (2007), 14). At the time these words were written, there was only one edition of music by Juanas, which had appeared in a DMA dissertation (Teresa Bowers, University of Maryland, 1998), and not a single recording was available. Now, at the time of publication of the score reviewed here, there has only been one more edition of Juanas’s music, in a PhD dissertation by Dianne Lehmann Goldman (‘The Matins Responsory at Mexico City Cathedral, 1575–1815’, Northwestern University, 2014), and one CD (Antonio Juanas: Premiere Recordings of Selected Choral Works (Centaur CRC3663, 2018)), recorded by the Collegium Mundi Novi and conducted by Ryan Endris, the editor of the Ocho Responsorios para los Maitines de la Santísima Trinidad. Three years ago, another CD appeared, by La Real Capilla del Pópulo (Antonio Juanas: música coral para la Catedral de México (Sociedad Española de Musicología, 2020)). As Marín has noted, Juanas belongs to a group of composers active in New Spain whose music is unknown to us, and there is a common characteristic that links some of these musicians: they worked in Mexico during its colonial period. In practically all of the research investigating this repertory published in the twentieth century, there has been a common prejudice that ‘Mexican music was unfortunately in a depressed state at the end of the colonial period’, as Robert Murrell Stevenson put it in his Music in Mexico ((New York: Crowell, 1952), 173). It is generally assumed that since the vice-regal regime was in decline at that time, the quality of its music must have been declining too. I say ‘prejudice’ because even today – in 2023 – listeners have not really been able to hear the music created in Mexico at that time, especially those works composed for Mexico City Cathedral in the final decades of the vice-regal period. Although there has been significant work to bring music composed in Mexico to light over the last few decades, the scope of the source material means that there is still much left to do. Moreover, there is one additional element to highlight: that the country that we now call Mexico was a part of the Spanish Empire between 1521 and 1821. For this reason, and because he was an immigrant, the compositions of Juanas can be considered ‘music from Spain’ and not ‘Mexican music’.