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Tess Knighton, The Spanish Golden Age and beyond, Early Music, Volume 51, Issue 2, May 2023, Pages 317–320, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caad017
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Extract
While the polyphony of the great triumvirate of the Spanish Golden Age—Morales, Guerrero and Victoria—has long held its well-established place in the discography, the presence of the music of the 17th-century Iberian world has been more sporadic and somewhat random. There is an abundance of repertory to explore from the later period, but much of it remains inedited and many of the composers’ names have yet to leave the archive, let alone cross into the household. Various historiographical and aesthetic factors have come into play here: music by Morales, Guerrero and Victoria was disseminated through print throughout the Iberian world and beyond, while early Baroque works by composers such as the Valencian Juan Bautista Comes or Francisco López Capillas, active in Mexico, remained (and largely remain) in manuscript sources that, until quite recently, were little accessible. Within the Iberian world the Latin-texted polyphonic works of the second half of the 16th century continued to be sung in cathedrals and other ecclesiastical institutions throughout the 17th century and beyond, forming a canon of works that were not superseded but rather complemented by new repertory that was often in the vernacular, composed for specific occasions and, primarily, for local use. Some of it did travel, especially through Iberian networks, but it travelled less well and less far, and little beyond Castilian- or Portuguese-speaking regions. A curious exception was the motet Audivi vocem de caelo by Duarte Lobo, the Portuguese composer of a generation after Victoria whose works were published by the Plantin press in Antwerp in the early decades of the 17th century, a work that found favour in the English choral tradition from the second half of the 19th century.
