Antonio Juanas is the composer with the largest number of musical manuscripts in the Archivo del Cabildo Catedral Metropolitano de México (hereafter ACCMM), which is the biggest repository of vice-regal music from Hispanic America. Despite what one might imagine given this fact, Juanas is one of the least studied chapel masters from Mexico City Cathedral. Fifteen years ago Javier Marín López wrote that ‘con un catálogo que supera las 500 composiciones, Juanas pertenece al grupo de compositores hasta ahora prácticamente desconocidos’ (with an [extant] output of more than five hundred compositions, Juanas belongs to the group of composers who have been practically unknown until now) (‘Consideraciones sobre la trayectoria profesional del músico Antonio Juanas (1762/63–después de 1816)’, Cuadernos Musicat 2 (2007), 14). At the time these words were written, there was only one edition of music by Juanas, which had appeared in a DMA dissertation (Teresa Bowers, University of Maryland, 1998), and not a single recording was available. Now, at the time of publication of the score reviewed here, there has only been one more edition of Juanas's music, in a PhD dissertation by Dianne Lehmann Goldman (‘The Matins Responsory at Mexico City Cathedral, 1575–1815’, Northwestern University, 2014), and one CD (Antonio Juanas: Premiere Recordings of Selected Choral Works (Centaur CRC3663, 2018)), recorded by the Collegium Mundi Novi and conducted by Ryan Endris, the editor of the Ocho Responsorios para los Maitines de la Santísima Trinidad. Three years ago, another CD appeared, by La Real Capilla del Pópulo (Antonio Juanas: música coral para la Catedral de México (Sociedad Española de Musicología, 2020)).

As Marín has noted, Juanas belongs to a group of composers active in New Spain whose music is unknown to us, and there is a common characteristic that links some of these musicians: they worked in Mexico during its colonial period. In practically all of the research investigating this repertory published in the twentieth century, there has been a common prejudice that ‘Mexican music was unfortunately in a depressed state at the end of the colonial period’, as Robert Murrell Stevenson put it in his Music in Mexico ((New York: Crowell, 1952), 173). It is generally assumed that since the vice-regal regime was in decline at that time, the quality of its music must have been declining too. I say ‘prejudice’ because even today – in 2023 – listeners have not really been able to hear the music created in Mexico at that time, especially those works composed for Mexico City Cathedral in the final decades of the vice-regal period. Although there has been significant work to bring music composed in Mexico to light over the last few decades, the scope of the source material means that there is still much left to do. Moreover, there is one additional element to highlight: that the country that we now call Mexico was a part of the Spanish Empire between 1521 and 1821. For this reason, and because he was an immigrant, the compositions of Juanas can be considered ‘music from Spain’ and not ‘Mexican music’.

It is true that the Spanish Empire was in decline, and, although there have been recent efforts to redress the coverage of Iberia in Western music-history surveys, I think that the lack of attention paid to Spanish music in such texts and courses corresponds strongly to the so-called ‘Black Legend’ associated with that country. This term was used by Julián Juderías in a 1914 book that he later revised and published in 1917 as La leyenda negra: estudios acerca del concepto de España en el extranjero (Barcelona: Casa Editorial Araluce), and the concept has been debated ever since. A research project based at University College London (2013–2015) recently defined the ‘Legend’ as ‘the perception/theory that Spaniards are especially tyrannical, cruel, intolerant, lustful, and greedy people’ and notes that ‘these powerful stereotypes prevent an accurate understanding of Early-Modern, and even contemporary Spain’ (www.ucl.ac.uk/black-legend/). Whether or not this is the case, it is striking to note that, despite the flowering of the arts during the siglo de oro español (c1492–1659), the music of that time has scarcely been mentioned in most surveys written in English, including Donald Jay Grout, Claude V. Palisca and J. Peter Burkholder's A History of Western Music, tenth edition (New York: Norton, 2019) and Richard Taruskin's The Oxford History of Western Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). In these texts, the number of pages devoted to the music of the Spanish Empire (including peninsular Spain and its American colonies) in both this important period and the subsequent eighteenth century is alarmingly small.

The first thing I did when I received the edition of the Ocho Responsorios para los Maitines de la Santísima Trinidad was to listen to the work by playing the CD recorded by Endris. Then I proceeded to check the source. The edition is based on the microfilm by Thomas Stanford and Lincoln Spiess made in the 1960s using the scores from the musical archive of the Mexico City Cathedral. With this in mind, the most natural thing for me was to consult my catalogue by Thomas Stanford, and there it was: ‘Rollo 1 | Ba1 | Juanas, Antonio . . . Ocho Responsorios Para los Maitines de la Santissima Trinidad’ (Stanford, Catálogo de los acervos musicales de las catedrales metropolitanas de México y Puebla (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2002), 4). Since that catalogue is outdated and certainty was required, the next thing to do was to locate the Ocho Responsorios in the new catalogue published by Lucero Enríquez and others, but an entry for this work by Juanas was nowhere to be found (Catálogo de obras de música del Archivo del Cabildo Catedral Metropolitano de México. Volumen III: maitines, oficios de difuntos, series de responsorios, invitatorios, lecciones y responsorios individuales (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México – Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 2019)). Searching under ‘matins’, there was only one entry, ‘Maitines de la Santísima Trinidad’ (ACCMM A0335), giving the following information: ‘Juanas | Echeverría [atrib.] | [arr.] Triujeque’. I thought I had located it, but, to my surprise, I found out that this is a different work. Then I searched the catalogue under ‘individual responsories’ and found two sets of responsories for the Holy Trinity (ACCMM A1944 and A1952) by Antonio Salazar (c1650–1715). These sets are two different versions of the same work and, as Drew Edward Davies states in his review of the recording by Endris, ‘these responsories are not the work of Antonio Juanas, but rather of former Mexico City chapel master Antonio de Salazar’ (Eighteenth-Century Music 19/1 (2022), 83). A critical edition of the earlier version (A1944) of Salazar's Responsorios de la Santísima Trinidad was published by Bárbara Pérez, scored for two SATB choirs a cappella (Antonio de Salazar: I. Obras en Latín, Tesoro de la música polifónica en México 15 (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura – Centro Nacional de Investigación, Documentación e Información Musical ‘Carlos Chávez’ (CENIDIM), 2016)).

The work edited by Endris is the newer version of Salazar's Ocho Responsorios (A1952), which is largely the same as the earlier version, but with two violin lines added by Matheo Tollis de la Rocca (1714–1781), who worked at Mexico City Cathedral in the 1770s. There are more substantial differences, however. In the older version (A1944), the last responsory – Duo Seraphim – is not present; in the newer version (A1952) this piece is, for the most part, Salazar's arrangement of a four-voice motet by Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548–1611) for two choirs. In 1732 a basso-continuo part was added to Salazar's arrangement, presumably by Manuel de Sumaya (1680–1755) after he became chapel master of Mexico City Cathedral. As Davies acknowledges, Goldman documented this process in ‘Adaptation as Authorship of Eighteenth-Century Responsories for the Holy Trinity at Mexico City Cathedral’, published in Conformación y retórica de los repertorios catedralicios, coordinated by Davies himself and edited by Lucero Enríquez (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México – Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 2016). Salazar can therefore be considered the composer of the first seven responsories and – although this is assuming a bit – Tollis the arranger. Duo Seraphim, the eighth responsory, is more complex, however. This is because Victoria and Salazar should be considered its composers, and Salazar, Sumaya and Tollis its arrangers. Goldman points out that in Tollis's adaptation, he does not attribute authorship to anyone, simply writing ‘Eight responsories . . . belonging to the Cathedral of Mexico’. She considers whether Salazar ‘had appreciated the musical contents of the piece and wanted to use the work as a basis for his own in order to honor Victoria’ or if he ‘was being practical’ because ‘his deadline for the Holy Trinity responsories was fast approaching’ (‘Adaptation as Authorship’, 152). Goldman then quotes Lydia Goehr: ‘the fact that musicians did not own their music, and the fact that music was functional, meant that one musician could make use of any other's music . . . without acquiring permission from the composer’ (The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 181). Goldman finally concludes: ‘Salazar's reworking of the Victoria motet, and Tollis de la Rocca's later adaptation of Salazar's cycle, are two examples of composers adjusting a piece of music – the same piece of music – to suit the needs of their time and place’ (‘Adaptation as Authorship’, 153).

The Ocho Responsorios edited by Endris (A1952) are indeed a peculiar mixture of musical styles. The foundation of the work is the cycle of responsories written by Salazar (A1944) in a polychoral style characteristic of many religious works in Latin from New Spain in the seventeenth century. Particularly in Duo Seraphim – except for the ‘Gloria Patri’ – we find that the vocal parts are in an imitative renaissance style which, although the responsory was based on a motet by Victoria, is not unusual in some of Salazar's works, including the Salve regina for two choirs. The vocal parts of Salazar's responsories appearing in the Ocho Responsorios have a basso continuo added to them, and two violin parts are superimposed whose melodic lines, considered in isolation, are more characteristic of eighteenth-century writing.

Part of the problem that caused the misattribution of the Ocho Responsorios is that Juanas's music, as mentioned earlier, is practically unknown. Endris acknowledges that Juanas composed in the galant style and considers it odd that, in his setting of the Ocho Responsorios, so much appears in the stile antico. Yet there are only a few pieces by Juanas that have been edited or recorded to check against to determine if the composer also wrote in a renaissance style. Thanks to the list of the responsories written by Juanas at Mexico City Cathedral given in Goldman's 2014 dissertation (322–325), we know that there are some characteristics of the Ocho responsorios that do not fit with Juanas's music, for instance the instrumentation. Of the 114 responsories indexed, there are only a couple for two choirs, and these do not include two violins and basso continuo. Juanas wrote some responsories with that instrumentation, but he did so in pieces for one or two voices only; in most of his responsories for four-voice choir, he preferred a large instrumental ensemble.

Endris's edition is clear and easy to read. Facilitating performance, both the choral score and the instrumental parts are available through the publisher. Because the source was accessed on microfilm, most of its description in the Critical Report is based on the 2002 catalogue by Stanford cited above. One section of the Critical Report outlines the general editorial principles, most of them concerning modernization and standardization of the source material. The individual editorial changes are specified in detailed remarks on the last page of the edition, although they are not indicated graphically in the score itself.

Ocho Responsorios can be viewed as a case of ‘collaborative working’ in the terms given by Rubén López Cano (Música dispersa: apropiación, influencias, robos y remix en la era de la escucha digital (Barcelona: Musikeon, 2018), especially 21–32). Or it can be regarded as an example of ‘multiple writing’, as Roland Barthes states in ‘The Death of the Author’: ‘a text consists of multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each other . . . but there is one place where this multiplicity is collected, united, and this place is not the author . . . but the reader’ (‘Three Essays’ (item 3), Aspen: The Multimedia Magazine in a Box 5+6 (1967) [paragraph 7]). In music, the unity of a text lies not with the composer, but rather in the listener.

I regard music as a relationship among human beings, mediated by sound. To address this phenomenon, I have adapted Robert Darnton's ‘communications circuit’, devised for the history of books, and proposed a ‘circuit of the musical process’, which begins with the composer and reaches the listener after passing through editors, publishers, distributors and performers, among others (Jesús Herrera, ‘Manejo digital de fuentes documentales’, El Sincopado Habanero 5 (2020), 12). Every part of the process plays an active role, with the listener as a focal point. The composer is no longer the only ‘star’ in music research. The lights on the academic stage have also focused on reception studies and, more recently, on performance studies. Today, as in the eighteenth century, the performer has the power and freedom to create music – understood as a sonic phenomenon – alongside the composer and every actor in the circuit of the musical process. In this sense, a list of different performers of the work reviewed can be made: Endris and the Collegium Mundi Novi, as well as Salazar, Sumaya, Tollis or Juanas, even the chapel of Mexico Cathedral. Authorship no longer matters: the work can be the creation of Salazar, Tollis, Victoria, Sumaya, Endris or even those listening to the recording of the Ocho Responsorios. This I would call ‘the death of the composer’. And I celebrate this new edition by Endris for offering us the chance to study, perform and listen to music from the eighteenth century housed in Mexico City Cathedral.