FROM GUEST CURATOR SEBASTIÁN ZUBIETA

Americas Society’s vocal ensemble Meridionalis had its NY debut in 2009, and since then we have presented programs of early and contemporary music in NYC and on tours in Latin America. In 2017, we gave a concert in Havana (with Ars Longa) and two concerts in Quito with our friends of Indiana-based Ensemble Lipzodes, with whom we have collaborated on other programs. This video, edited by the Festival de Música Sacra de Quito (we thank them for sharing it) is from the concert we presented at the church of San Agustín in downtown Quito, dedicated to the repertoire from the Cathedral at Ibarra, a beautiful city about 70 miles north of the capital. The program included 12 pieces, mostly anonymous and possibly composed locally, but I thought it would share this strange paraliturgical piece by Cristóbal Galán. The text, in which each line starts with a proparoxytone, is a typically baroque artifice that almost automatically demands dance-like music. The piece, called Óiganos, celebrar el misterio, is found, with a completely different and secular text by Alonso de Olmedo (still proparoxytonic) in the archive of the Hispanic Society in New York (I will share one of the many jewels of this collection later in the week). The music, also unusual, is a two-part canon in which the voices chase each other in a never ending ascending harmonic progression that stops as suddenly as it starts.

– Sebastiáno Zubieta, Music Director, Americas Society