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May 12, 2021Read More
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 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. 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 these 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.
