In the preface to Forging Repertories: Cathedral Music in New Spain and Its Performance, Drew Edward Davies acknowledges that this is not the book he originally set out to write. His initial aim was to produce an updated version of Robert Stevenson’s landmark—and still valuable—Music in Mexico: A Historical Survey (1952). Ultimately, however, Davies abandoned that project, writing, “I no longer feel that such a narrative history is possible or even desirable to construct” (xiii). This shift appears to have emerged, in part, from two decades of sustained archival research in Mexico and, I would suggest, from a critical reassessment of the historiographical framework upon which Stevenson’s work relied—particularly the “nationalist” agendas of his Mexican predecessors (a topic Davies addresses in Chapter One). The result is a welcome—if idiosyncratic—yet undeniably important contribution to our understanding of the religious culture in New Spain.

Although Forging Repertories spans from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, it deliberately avoids the linear or progressive historical arc found in Stevenson’s work and in the writings of Mexican historians active before and after the Mexican Revolution in 1920. Instead, Davies embraces the discontinuities, contradictions, and heterogeneities that shaped musical life in colonial Mexican cathedrals. Drawing on extensive archival work—especially in the cathedrals of Mexico City and Durango—he resists the impulse to craft a sweeping chronological narrative. In its place, he offers a series of focused inquiries into people, places, and repertories that collectively illuminate broader patterns of musical production under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church in New Spain. As Davies puts it, “what began as a revised narrative history has transformed into a non-chronological rumination on the nature of colonial cathedral music repertories, their genres, creators, rhetorical uses, and performance revival” (xv).

The book’s idiosyncrasy lies primarily in its structure. Rather than a traditional monograph, Forging Repertories comprises six self-contained essays that, as Davies notes, “can be read in various ways: continuously from front to back, or a random section at a time” (xv). In my own reading, the most coherent progression begins with Chapters One and Three, which articulate the book’s central observations and arguments, followed by the more topically focused discussions in Chapters Two and Six, and concluding with the case studies in Chapters Four and Five. Since Davies leaves the reading order open, I will adopt this order in the overview that follows.

Chapters One and Three together form the conceptual and argumentative core of Forging Repertories, offering a coherent framework for understanding cathedral music in New Spain and the institutional, ideological, and practical forces that shaped its creation. With further development—occasionally warranted within the chapters’ individual subsections—these two chapters could have stood alone as a compelling monograph: more focused as a whole, yet more fully elaborated in its parts, in treating musical production in New Spanish cathedrals.

Chapter One (“Approaching Cathedral Music from New Spain”) lays the conceptual foundation by situating music within the institutional life of the Roman Catholic Church. At its center is a comparative examination of two major archival collections, Mexico City Cathedral and Durango Cathedral, which Davies uses to illustrate the distinctive character of local institutions. A key subsection critically engages with the nationalist historiographical agenda that has long shaped Mexican musicology. Chapter Three (“Making and Composing Cathedral Music”) builds directly on this foundation, challenging prevailing assumptions about compositional originality and institutional artistic grandeur. Rather than casting the Mexican chapel master as a colonial analog to renowned Iberian figures such as Francisco Guerrero, who loomed large in colonial New Spain, Davies presents him as an “arranger, editor, technician, director, teacher, and administrator” whose multifaceted role has been underestimated by scholars (116). The chapter’s six case studies—of uneven analytical depth—illustrate how music was created, acquired, and adapted for local use. The most engaging examples involve building and maintaining a requisite yearly cycle of hymns, the multi-generational revision of a European Office of the Dead, and the adaptation of operatic music for sacred purposes.

Each case study in Chapter Three could have been developed further—several, in fact, might have formed the basis for stand-alone chapters in a more tightly focused study. The discussion of instrumental versets and their implications for improvisatory practice is too brief to capture the genre’s significance. Another case, addressing counterpoint and extemporaneous composition, is underdeveloped and undermined, moreover, by mislabeled musical examples. (This issue contributes to a broader pattern of distracting typos and misspellings that should have been addressed during editing.) Davies refers to these cases as “microhistory” (81), but the term is applied too loosely to these interesting yet compressed treatments of important topics collapsed into a single chapter.

Following the core narrative laid out in Chapters One and Three, Chapters Two and Six present topical essays on related themes. Chapter Two (“The Black Reveler in Christmas Villancicos”) examines the villancico de negro (or negrilla), a Hispanic Baroque genre that portrayed Black Nativity celebrants using exaggerated racial tropes in both text and music. Davies argues that the recurrence of specific gestures and signifiers, some of which are also present in contemporary Spanish literature and theater, provided seventeenth-century audiences with an immediately recognizable interpretive framework. These same features, he suggests, also invite critical engagement by modern scholars, educators, and performers. Adapting a theoretical model more commonly used in the analysis of eighteenth-century instrumental music, Davies refers to these recurring elements as the “Black Reveler topic.”

Although villancicos de negro represent only a fraction of the broader villancico repertory, they have received disproportionate attention in both performance and pedagogical contexts—often to the exclusion of more nuanced or more interesting works. One reason for this prominence, Davies suggests, lies in the history of mid- to late-twentieth-century sound recordings of colonial Latin American music, which, as he subsequently explains, often favored these works for their rhythmic vitality, dramatic character, and marketability.

Chapter Six (“Imagining Latin America through Performance”) explores that broader history in appreciable detail, demonstrating how recording and revival practices—particularly by (mostly white) North American and European early music ensembles—have shaped public and scholarly perceptions of colonial Latin American music. A central concept in the chapter is what Davies terms the Latin Baroque: “a mode and ideology of performing Latin American colonial music that began subtly in Robert Stevenson’s circle in the 1960s and later became adopted internationally, in exaggerated form during the 1990s (192).” Hallmarks of this style include prominent roles for percussion, guitars, and other extraneous sounds, elements that are minimally supported by historical sources but can be used to evoke a (false) sense of authenticity.

Davies illustrates these ideas through a case study of the villancico Convidando está la noche, the most frequently recorded piece of colonial Latin American music, whose recordings typically exemplify the Latin Baroque esthetic. Within this context, he returns to the theme of the Black Reveler with a discussion of Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla’s familiar Ah, siolo Flasiquiyo (presented earlier in Chapter Two), raising the ethical question of whether such racially charged works should be performed at all.

Chapters Four and Five present compelling case studies of musical devotion tied to advocations that served as powerful local markers of identity in New Spain. Chapter Four (“The Miraculous School of St. Peter”) examines the veneration of St. Peter that reached an extraordinary level in Mexico leaving a rich legacy of literature, sermons, art, and music. As a symbol of Rome, the papacy, the cathedral, its bishop, and the secular church more broadly, St. Peter functioned as a metonym for ecclesiastical authority. Davies argues that this uniquely robust Petrine devotion in New Spain was intended to assert “the sovereignty and legitimacy of the secular church” (117) in a context largely shaped by religious orders—first the Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, and later the Jesuits.

Chapter Five (“Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, from the Empyrean to Mexico”) expands the discussion of ecclesiastical authority and localized identity through an exploration of musical settings for the Immaculate Conception, the American saints Rose of Lima and Philip of Jesus, and, most prominently, Our Lady of Guadalupe. Especially noteworthy is Davies’ analysis of sources for the monumental cycle of Guadalupan responsories composed by Ignacio Jerusalem in 1756 and later modified by Antonio Juanas, the last chapel master of colonial New Spain at the Mexico City Cathedral. The chapter’s concluding sections, which turn to popular expressions of Marian devotion in civic life (including the processional alabanza and alabado, simple songs of praise and penance), present interesting areas for future historical and ethnographic inquiry.

Regardless of the order in which one approaches these chapters, Davies’ central thesis remains consistent: New Spanish cathedral repertories were forged through the practical labor of composition, adaptation, and creative recombination, often over extended periods of time, the products of “a multi-sited European heritage that transformed into specifically American music” (230). Rather than seeking to uncover lost treasures of church music or emphasize the artistry of cathedral chapel masters in New Spain, Davies highlights their thoughtful engagement with pre-existing models, their sensitivity to institutional continuity, and their attentiveness to liturgical needs and customs as they evolved over time and varied across locations. This adaptive process—true to the forging metaphor—produced what Davies calls “a uniquely Mexican alloy of music” (81): repertories that were cosmopolitan yet deeply local, resourceful, and above all, practical.

Forging Repertories is a significant collection of self-contained studies that challenge long-standing historical frameworks for understanding music in colonial New Spain. Davies deserves particular credit for calling out performance practices that, since the 1990s, have often been derivative and—frankly—passive, stale, and uncritical. The book’s structure is idiosyncratic; it is not without editorial flaws, and its case studies vary in analytical depth. Yet, these limitations are outweighed by the project’s larger achievement: a decisive break from the conventional, tidy historical narrative that Davies initially set out to revise. In abandoning that earlier ambition, he has forged a book that is itself an alloy, less a polished monument to lost musical genius and institutional splendor than a candid reconstruction of the practical, improvisatory labor through which cathedral music was created, adapted, and reimagined over time. This is a meaningful and timely contribution, one that will help shape future scholarship on Latin American colonial music and, ideally, inspire more thoughtful, better-informed, and creatively engaged performances of the repertory.