Sánchez Garza Collection, Centro Nacional de Investigación, Documentación e Información Musical Carlos Chávez (CENIDIM), Mexico

This edition features thirteen villancicos transcribed from the Sánchez Garza Collection held in Mexico City’s Centro Nacional de Investigación, Documentación e Información Musical Carlos Chávez (CENIDIM). Their publication provides ensembles music for performance that was originally notated for and performed by women, in this case the nuns of Puebla’s Santísima Trinidad convent. This convent was founded in the seventeenth century in colonial Mexico (New Spain) and left behind the largest collection of women’s notated music from New Spain. The novel organization of this edition, featuring villancicos for various Marian feasts, highlights the Virgin Mary’s life as an exciting narrative possibility for contemporary ensembles. In addition, because seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music from the Ibero-American world remains marginalized in US American early music performance circles, this edition heeds the global turn in music history deliberately to consider the musical legacies of the European imperial endeavor outside of Europe.

The Virgin Mary's Essence in New Spanish Song, PDF, 188 pages, 2.36MB