The study of colonial Latin American repertories within Anglophone historical musicology involves the mapping of what is still largely terra incognita: the discovery of untapped archival treasures and their insertion within theoretical frameworks that are constantly evolving. The boundaries of this musicological field in the English-speaking world were defined in large part by pioneering luminaries such as Robert Murrell Stevenson and Robert Snow, but over recent decades there have emerged new generations of younger scholars, including Drew Edward Davies, Bernardo Illari, Craig H. Russell and Leonardo Waisman. Davies, in particular, has been actively involved in projects to digitize the vast collections of music manuscripts in Mexican archives (see the description of the Seminario de Música en la Nueva España y el México Independiente at <http://musicat.unam.mx/nuevo/index.html>). In his work on Italian influence in the art music of the Spanish Americas he has raised numerous methodological and theoretical questions that give scholars pause to consider the role of genre and aesthetics in colonial Novohispanic repertories (see, for instance, his PhD dissertation ‘The Italianized Frontier: Music at Durango Cathedral, Español Culture, and the Aesthetics of Devotion in Eighteenth-Century New Spain’, University of Chicago, 2006).

The volume under review represents the first complete edition of surviving works by a composer from eighteenth-century New Spain (Mexico). This composer, Santiago Billoni (c1700–c1763), played a significant role in the dissemination of Italian musical styles across the Atlantic (along with his better-known Italian-born contemporary Ignacio Jerusalem (1707–1769), chapel master at Mexico City Cathedral from 1750). A composer previously unknown to musicology, Billoni represents a musician whose works open a window onto the complex picture of aesthetic transformation in the early eighteenth-century Spanish colonies in the New World (and further afield), widespread musical landscapes that were increasingly influenced by developments on the Italian peninsula and their resonance in the major metropoles of the Iberian peninsula and New Spain. Davies has played a pioneering role in studying Billoni's life and works, and his approach is appropriately interdisciplinary: he combines musical analysis with textual criticism, theology and art history, giving due consideration to the geographical contexts of cultural production in a region that was regarded as both ‘provincial’ and a ‘frontier’, while also acknowledging the historiographical and analytical challenges that confront any musicologist studying the history of Western art music in a colonial society.

Santiago Billoni was born in Italy at the dawn of the eighteenth century. Although no archival traces of him have yet been located in Europe, his Roman origins, and the birthplaces of his parents (Turin and Lucerne), are known from his marriage record held at Guadalajara Cathedral (see Davies's Introduction, page xi). Davies points out that Billoni styles himself ‘un autore romano’ on a surviving part of one of his works, and suggests that he may have been part of the Biglioni family of luthiers in Rome. Billoni migrated to Mexico at some stage in the mid-1730s (he was noted to be in Mexico City by 1737); his name appears in several different spellings, which Davies surmises may be the results of ‘Hispanicized rendering of the Italian “Biglioni” or “Viglioni”’ (xi). He worked as a violinist in Guadalajara Cathedral (1737–1739) and Morelia Cathedral (1740–1748), and was chapel master at Durango Cathedral (north-central Mexico) between 1749 and 1756; according to Davies, Billoni was ‘the first Italian-born musician to be named chapel master of a cathedral in New Spain’ (ix) – beating Ignacio Jerusalem at Mexico City Cathedral by one year.

Much of Billoni's oeuvre seems typical of Italianate composition of the mid-eighteenth century, so much so that Davies advises performers to approach Billoni ‘as a mid-eighteenth-century Italian composer, since the New Spanish cathedral context did not significantly alter the European performance practice’ (xvi). However, the transplantation and reproduction of Italianate music in remote north-central Mexico is highly worthy of analysis, especially if we are to explore how ecclesiastical and economic frameworks supported the making of music that was assigned a high cultural value, and if we seek to explain how colonial institutions overcame the ‘tyranny of distance’ to produce a musical canon that set a standard for local emulation. As Davies observes: ‘If nothing else, Billoni's repertoire shows that New Spain – even provincial New Spain – participated synchronically in the transatlantic, globalizing endeavor of Italianate music, and that the history of significant eighteenth-century music extends far beyond the cultural centers of Europe’ (xiv). The spatial-temporal dimensions of Italianized musical taste in the eighteenth century have been extended substantially by Davies's work, and this publication represents an important foundation for further research in the field.

The works in the edition are organized according to language and genre: Spanish paraliturgical music (arias and duets, cantadas, villancicos and alabanzas) and Latin liturgical music (music for Vespers, Marian hymns and antiphons, music for Holy Week and Pentecost, and mass settings). As may be expected, the four mass settings represent the most substantial portion of the volume – 104 of the 327 pages of music – but their scoring is relatively simple: two masses are for two violins, three voices (SAT) and continuo, and two are for three voices (SAT) and continuo. Credidi propter (99–113), a setting of Psalm 115, has the most lavish scoring, but this still seems quite restrained: oboe, trumpet, two violins, three voices (SAT) and continuo. The Salve regina setting in B flat major (184–186) has an interesting scoring of trumpet, three voices (SAT) and continuo. Billoni was an innovative composer within the Mexican musical landscape in the mid-eighteenth century, and Davies observes that ‘his thirty-one concise works stand as unique in New Spain for their use of chromatic harmony, virtuosic yet unmechanical violin technique, and emotive musical rhetoric grounded in the contemporaneous preference for interior devotion’ (ix). The compositional style of these works is largely galant, with occasional use of stile antico (as in the Mass in F major). That the ensemble vocal parts are for soprano (tiple), alto and tenor is common in Hispanic choral scoring at this time (xvi). Of particular note is the frequent virtuosity of the first-violin part – for example, in his settings of the Vespers psalms Beatus vir (Psalm 111), Credidi propter (Psalm 115) and Lauda Jerusalem (Psalm 147) – which suggests that Billoni possessed a high level of technical skill as a violinist himself, and that he probably received his earliest training in the Corellian school of violin-playing in Rome (see page xiii of the Introduction for Davies's discussion of possible influences on Billoni as a violinist).

One of the most interesting aspects of Davies's Introduction is his description of the relatively small performing forces at Durango Cathedral in the mid-eighteenth century: ‘most of the time there were no more than two or three violinists and two or three trained singers in addition to the continuo players, part-time horn and oboe players, choirboys, and chaplains who intoned chant and sang’ (xvi); ‘the original continuo ensemble would have consisted of a cello or bass viol, organ, and bassoon’ (xvii). However, he encourages performers to explore ways of interpreting these pieces that go beyond the recreation of performances in their original context (xvii). Two of the works published here (the arias Celeste aurora hermosa and Mariposa inadvertida) have recently been recorded on the album Al Combate: Rediscovered Galant Music from Eighteenth-Century Mexico by the Chicago Arts Orchestra, directed by Javier José Mendoza (Navona NV5902, 2013; to be reviewed in issue 11/2 of this journal). This performance is on modern instruments, in a fairly large-sounding ensemble.

The manuscript sources of Billoni's works survive at the Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Durango; this archive contains an enormous number of music manuscripts, which have been recently catalogued by Davies (Catálogo de la Colección de Música del Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Durango (México) (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México – Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, in press)). Davies's editing of Billoni's surviving oeuvre is clear and logical, and his editorial decisions are explained with full justification in the Critical Report. The production standard of A-R Editions is up to its usual excellent quality, and information about separate performance parts for instruments is available on the publisher's website (<www.areditions.com/rr/rrb/b170.html>). One hopes that more hidden gems from eighteenth-century Mexico – and other parts of Latin America – will be published in this series. My only criticism is that separate instrumental parts seem quite expensive at an additional $89, especially since the full score is already priced at $245. Given that they are unlikely to constitute huge numbers of pages, perhaps the publishers could make them freely available as PDFs to owners of the full score who would like to organize performances.