FROM GUEST CURATOR SEBASTIÁN ZUBIETA

In 2015, Meridionalis participated, alongside The Bishop's Band, in Trinity Wall Street’s Twelfth Night Festival (we thank them for this video). We presented a program developed by Guatemalan musicologist and colonial music expert Omar Morales Abril, who has done extensive archival and analytical work on this and other archives in the region. "Con la armonía del cielo" featured Christmas villancicos that were in use for 200 years at the Guatemala cathedral, and included works from Guatemala, Mexico, and Spain. Established in 1534, the Diocese of Guatemala is one of the first created by the Europeans in the Americas, and its archives include a large collection of sacred music by local and European composers. The Bishop’s Band is named after the Bishop of Trujillo (in northern Peru), Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón who compiled, in the late-18th century, a fascinating collection containing watercolor depictions of life in the region and 20 popular songs and dances. The group was founded in 2013 by Tom Zajac and Nell Snaidas to perform repertory from this collection as well as other 18th-century Latin American music. The poetic and musical form villancico was extremely popular in the courts, theaters, and churches of the Spanish empire from the 16th to the 19th centuries. They were particularly favored at Christmastime and, in the Americas, were often inspired by local popular music and dialects. From the intimate settings found in Renaissance Spanish collections such as the Cancionero de Palacio, the villancico grew in scope to polychoral, theatrical compositions such as Nace y al frío, by Gerónimo González de Mendoza, Spanish composer who worked in Seville in the mid-17th century. Very few of his works have survived, mainly in Latin American archives.

– Sebastiáno Zubieta, Music Director, Americas Society