Renaissance choral music from Mexico? At first blush, most Americans, I suspect would consider such a title a joke or an error. When we think of Mexico, I fear that we think of it as still pretty primitive and godforsaken--a land that includes Tijuana, wetbacks, and a notable lack of adequate plumbing and highways.
Last summer in Belgium we stopped in at the Cathedral at Mechlin. No one else was there, except an affable elderly sacristan who insisted on giving us a guided tour. He was both dulce et utile, though his lecture was in an incredible amalgam of Flemish, French, German and English, but we were several times at the point of strangling on suppressed laughter when he pointed out this or that object donated by "Charlie Five." Now Charlie Five in 1519 came to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire, and in the same year his subject Hernando Cortez entered what is now Mexico City in triumph (such as it was). In 1523, Charlie Five's relative Pedro de Gante (Peter of Ghent) opened the first music school in the New World. Three years later Juan Ortiz inaugurated the first school of dance. And in 1556 the first American book containing music (the Ordinary of the Mass) was published in Mexico City. The English settled Jamestown in 1608.
In short, while our ancestors were scrabbling to get a handhold on North America, there was a thriving westernized civilization in the Spanish lands to the south. True, the culture was an imposed, and, to a considerable degree, an imported one, and largely centered in the governmental-military-religious centers, but it left evidence of its effectiveness, and, apparently, nowhere more impressively than in its musical documentation.
So far as we northerners (and, I gather, the rest of the world) are concerned, Spanish colonial music has remained terra incognita for the better part of two centuries. Why? Quien sabe? Ignorance? Indolence? Lack of interest? A hesitation to touch the leavings of a shameful time? Certainly very little of it has come to my attention on records--but then I am only what used to be approvingly termed a "dedicated amateur," not a certified authority. At any rate, up to now, the only extensive recording of such material I've encountered is one by the Roger Wagner Chorale, published by Angel nearly a dozen years ago. It has Hernando Franco in common with MHS 3718, but ranges much farther afield than does that disk. The music is hardly revolutionary--though "Hanacpachap cussicuinin" by Juan Perez Bocanegra is exotic enough if only for its Quechua text; but most of it represents capable handling of the European formulae of the times'(1550-1750) and provides, for me, quite pleasant listening. I wonder, however, if the liner note by the director of the Latin American Center at UCLA may not be a little hyperbolic when it claims that the search of Latin America's musical archives will be "fully as exciting as any quest for hidden gold in Zapotec tombs or for long forgotten stones on Machu Picchu cliffs." But then I've never sought long stones forgotten at Machu Picchu.
Professor Boe, unlike Roger Wagner, has focused on the Cathedral of Mexico City and specifically on the music of four of its early choir directors whose lives cover a span from 1532 to the early eighteenth century. To judge from the credentials of the record, the performances clearly benefit from the special expertise available at Southern Illinois, especially that of Steven Barwick, who also contributed his knowledge to the Wagner recording. John Boe has devised instrumental accompaniments for several of the pieces, in keeping with the practice of their era.
