Priest, Organist, Composer: Repositioning Sumaya

By Drew Edward Davies

My interest in Manuel de Sumaya (1678–1755) began in graduate school, over two decades ago, when I started to research music from New Spain. At that time, the historiography positioned Sumaya—a near-contemporary of J. S. Bach born in Mexico City—as a progressive composer who introduced New Spain to fashionable Italian music. Around 2002, during dissertation research in north-central Mexico at Durango Cathedral, I located a villancico for St. Peter by Sumaya, “Del más soberano Olimpo,” that had been virtually unknown. It was evident in that piece that, despite the composer’s progressive reputation, the music exhibited an older seventeenth-century style with erudite harmonic and contrapuntal elements but little to suggest a date of composition in the 1710s. Finally, subsequent cataloging work with the Musicat Project in Mexico City brought me into contact with the corpus I would later edit for A-R editions, a series of villancicos that Sumaya wrote for religious services at Mexico City Cathedral during the 1710s and 20s.

Through the process of editing Sumaya’s Mexico City villancicos for A-R Editions, I came to interpret Sumaya in a different light—one that repositions him as a composer but perhaps appreciates him more are a multifaceted priest-musician. Like many composers, Sumaya’s music looks both forward and backward in time. His most progressive aspect is the use of violins in about twenty percent of his total works. By my count, approximately 113 works by Sumaya survive in Mexico and Guatemala, and twenty-six of those pieces have violin parts, some more idiomatic to the instrument than others.

Nonetheless, my overwhelming sense of Sumaya as a composer is of a church musician who preserved and perpetuated the tradition of Hispanic polyphony, a fundamental aspect of religious culture during the Habsburg era. Indeed, Sumaya ascended to the post of chapel master in 1715, only months after the resolution of the War of the Spanish Succession and the establishment of the Bourbon dynasty in Spain and its Empire. His music education, received at Mexico City Cathedral itself in the waning years of the Habsburgs, would have been steeped in tradition: he studied solfege, plainchant, and contrapuntal polyphony (canto de órgano) in addition to such subjects as theology. Unlike the Italian composers Santiago Billoni and Ignacio Jerusalem, who worked in New Spain several decades later as secular professionals brought from the outside and employed by the church, Sumaya spent his entire life in the service of the church, beginning as a choirboy, progressing through ordination as a prelate, and concluding with his tenure as chapel master in Mexico City (1715–38) and then Oaxaca (1745–55).[1] He would have witnessed the creation of some of the principal architectural elements and artworks present in the cathedral today, including the Altar of the Kings, the choir screen, and the two new organs, which were installed in 1736 toward the end of his career there (see figure 1).

Figure 1. Mexico City Cathedral, view toward choir. Photo by Drew Edward Davies.

Thinking about Sumaya foremost as a composer can make us forget that he was a priest who fulfilled a priest's duties and led a priest's lifestyle. As such, Sumaya left a unique legacy at the cathedral of his native city. He was the last chapel master at Mexico City Cathedral to compose contrapuntal polyphony copied in choirbook format. His work appears in several eighteenth-century choirbooks that survive there and the Museo del Virreinato in Tepoztlán, alongside pieces by peninsular composers of the Renaissance, such as Francisco Guerrero and Sebastián de Vivanco, and his own institutional predecessors Hernando Franco, Francisco López Capillas, and Antonio Salazar. For example, in this opening from polyphonic choirbook P04 of Mexico City Cathedral (see figure 2), we see Sumaya’s chant-based setting of the Marian hymn “Alma Redemptoris mater” as copied by Simón Rodriguez de Guzmán in notation reminiscent of the sixteenth century. Note the chiavette clefs and paired points of imitation also observed in some of his villancicos.

Figure 2. Archivo del Cabildo Catedral Metropolitano de México, Libros de coro, Libro de polifonía P04, fols. 121v–122r. Photo by Silvia Salgado. From Catálogo de libros de coro de la Catedral Metropolitana de México, Librería de cantorales, Proyecto Musicat—Libros de coro, Seminario de Música en la Nueva España y el México Independiente, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (forthcoming).

Appealing to tradition in another way, Sumaya also oversaw Rodriguez de Guzmán’s production of illuminated plainchant choirbooks for other New Spanish cathedrals, including Durango, which ensured that even peripheral institutions would have traditional materials for daily ritual. Furthermore, Sumaya followed the practice of earlier generations in selecting villancico texts expressive of Neoplatonic theological concepts, such as angelic choirs, animated natural elements, and universal harmony. While he did set some more modern, affective religious poems, the many Neoplatonic ones connect his work to the tradition of previous generations, as do his dozens of polyphonic works like “Alma Redemptoris mater,” seen above. Thus Sumaya comes across as a theologian in his villancicos.

In addition to his role as a priest, Sumaya was also an organist. According to the documents of the cathedral chapter, he was the eldest organist at Mexico City Cathedral by the time he was in his early thirties, before becoming chapel master. He taught organ and counterpoint to younger students at this time. As I worked on editing Sumaya’s villancicos, several things suggested to me that the composer approached writing music as a keyboardist. First, Sumaya often begins phrases, one after another, with points of imitation that dissipate into homophonic cadential patterns, even in concerted music. Second, in double- and triple-choir pieces, he builds large chordal textures encompassing a wide vocal range but with predictable harmonic motion. Such sections resemble the music of older New Spanish composers Antonio Salazar and Miguel Dallo y Lana in style, yet could almost have been notated—or at least drafted—using figured bass alone. Sumaya then embellishes these homophonic sections with motives built from passing tones that ricochet through the polychoral texture but have no voice-leading function. Finally, his string parts often resemble his voice parts in functioning as contrapuntal lines rather than as idiomatic music crafted for a specific instrument.

Organists in New Spain at Sumaya’s time would have improvised much if not most of their music for church services, including substitute verses for hymns and psalms. To me, Sumaya’s works bear the vestiges of improvisation. While I do not claim that the pieces are written-out improvisations or that Sumaya necessarily composed at the keyboard, I do suggest that the way Sumaya begins, elaborates, and concludes musical phrases may echo his improvisational processes as an organist. Furthermore, as an organist, he wrote in a very different style from composers of galant music, who in the Spanish world tended to be string players and wrote more lyrical and idiomatic string parts than polyphonists did. I suspect that the line between an improvised and composed work was relatively fine in Sumaya’s time, and that thinking this way might also give us an idea about how his organ improvisations sounded.

The other factor I have been thinking about since beginning this editorial project is sound. Editing alone does not reveal what music sounded like in the past, but the editorial decisions made can help shape contemporary performance. For example, the introduction to my Sumaya edition presents new research showing that the men singing alto and tenor lines would not have had to use their falsetto range or head voice in any of the villancicos, so long as the pieces with chiavette clefs were transposed downward. Transposing chiavette pieces downward—justified not only by scholarship and period theory, but also by the local evidence of instrumental parts written a fourth lower than their corresponding vocal parts—is one example of how the edition can modestly guide performance practice.

That said, I am still looking for historically minded performers eager to attempt these villancicos with an ensemble close to what Sumaya had: a mixed-age all-male choir accompanied by bajones, harps, and portative organ, as well as violins in some pieces (violins may have played colla parte with the boy sopranos in the pieces without violin parts). Of course, all performances of Sumaya are exciting—including creative, modernized renditions—but their historical performance setup remains insufficiently explored. I believe that the sound world to be glimpsed from historically informed performances of Sumaya’s works will be remarkably different from what we are accustomed to hearing in performances of Latin American baroque music: a thick sound of bajones and portative organ articulated by harps, accompanying boys and men of various ages and abilities (most singers were choir chaplains, not professional singers)—perhaps a bit heavier than what can be heard on Chanticleer’s wonderful album Mexican Baroque, which contains two works by Sumaya from Oaxaca Cathedral’s archive.

In conclusion, repositioning Sumaya as a highly competent creole priest-musician grounded in tradition, yet active at a time of change, does not reduce the significance of his music. To the contrary, it draws attention to the contrapuntal aspects of some of his strongest works, including “Dios, sembrando flores,” the Lamentations (edited by Stephen Barwick), and “Celebren, publiquen” (edited by Aurelio Tello). The stakes for constructing a progressive Sumaya were inherently nationalist, with an aim for legitimizing the composers of colonial Mexico within a universal historical narrative. Now, with editions of almost all his works available in print, and many professionally recorded, Sumaya no longer needs to be legitimized or introduced. I hope that my edition of Sumaya’s Mexico City villancicos facilitates performance and further study, so that we can learn more about this fascinating New Spanish musician, the texts he set to music, and the social environment of Mexico City in the early eighteenth century.

Drew Edward Davies, a music historian specializing in the music of New Spain, is Associate Professor of Musicology and Chair of the Department of Music Studies at Northwestern University. He is Academic Coordinator of the Seminario de Música en la Nueva España y el México Independiente in Mexico City. Among his publications are Manuel de Sumaya: Villancicos from Mexico City (A-R Editions, 2019), Santiago Billoni: Complete Works (A-R Editions, 2011), Catálogo de la Colección de Música del Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Durango (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2013), and articles in A Companion to Music at the Habsburg Courts in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Brill, 2020), Music and Urban Society in Colonial Latin America (Cambridge, 2011), and journals such as Early Music. With Javier Marín-López he edits the series Ignacio Jerusalem (1707–1769): Selected Works (Dairea Ediciones, 2019–), and with Lucero Enríquez and Analía Cherñavsky he co-authors the Catálogo de obras de música del Archivo del Cabildo Catedral Metropolitano de México (8 vols., Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2014–).