Archivo de Guatemala: Music from the Guatemala City Cathedral Archive El Mundo / Richard Savino (director) Naxos 8.574295, 2021; one disc, 74 minutes

Abstract

The musical corpus of the old cathedral in Antigua Guatemala, which was heavily damaged by an earthquake in 1773, was moved to the country’s new capital city in 1779 and is preserved there in the Archivo Histórico Arquidiocesano Francisco de Paula García Peláez (frequently referred to as the Archivo Histórico Arquidiocesano de Guatemala). It is one of the most important in Latin America. According to Omar Morales Abril (‘Teatralización de villancicos paralitúrgicos del siglo XVII’ (PhD dissertation, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2021)), this corpus is divided into three large sections: plainchant choir books, polyphonic books and ‘music papers’ or parts. The last of these alone comprises about three thousand records of mainly manuscript pieces, two thousand of which are villancicos, that is, music with poetic texts in the vernacular. Along with local repertory, the collection includes music from various places in the Hispanic world, such as Mexico City, Puebla, Lima, Madrid, Toledo and Seville. In addition, it contains hundreds of works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, unlike other Spanish-American cathedral archives, which mostly preserve music from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is therefore one of Latin America’s largest and oldest musical collections. For this reason, a new recording dedicated to the music of the Guatemalan Cathedral during the colonial period can only be welcomed, especially an album such as this, performed by the experienced musicians of El Mundo under the able directorship of Richard Savino. Among the many options that this extensive corpus offers to performers, Savino has chosen to focus on the ‘music papers’ and, more particularly, on the villancico. The characteristics of this genre, which combines features of sacred and secular music (the latter mainly from theatre and dance), fit well with Savino’s idea of Latin American music of the time. As he expresses it in the booklet, this repertory would have been influenced by ‘folk music’, and its performers would have used percussion instruments, giving rise to a unique sound that would then persist to the present day. I leave for the end some reflections on this matter. Among the selected composers, the chief protagonist is the Guatemalan Rafael Antonio Castellanos (died 1791), chapel master of the cathedral in the second half of the eighteenth century, to whom six of the seventeen recorded pieces belong (tracks 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 and 16). The other local composer on the album is his predecessor, Manuel José de Quirós (died 1765), who is represented by two works (tracks 12 and 15). Savino also includes villancicos by composers who never visited the New World but whose work has been preserved in the Archivo Histórico Arquidiocesano de Guatemala: Sebastián Durón (1660–1716) (tracks 7 and 10) and José de Torres (c1670–1738) (track 11). This decision seems reasonable because it reflects the musical life of the time, characterized by the coexistence of local and peninsular repertory, particularly of composers linked to the Royal Chapel of Madrid. But Savino goes one step further and includes pieces preserved in Mexico City: two anonymous ‘Violin Sonatas’ (track 5) and a villancico by Juan García de