The Italianized frontier: Music at Durango Cathedral, espanol culture, and the aesthetics of devotion in eighteenth-century New Spain

By the mid-eighteenth century, the cathedrals at Durango and elsewhere in New Spain had turned toward Italianate musical aesthetics in order to adorn the liturgy with contemporary music on important feasts. Characterized by solo singing with independent string accompaniment, Italianate music encapsulated dramatic, rhetorically effective compositional strategies expressive of internalized conflict. Whilst this style proved consistent with the forms of interior devotion advocated by the contemporary hierarchy of the Roman church, it had replaced traditional musical forms in the Spanish world. This dissertation, by focusing on the repertoire of Durango Cathedral (Mexico), situates Italianate musical aesthetics within eighteenth-century devotional culture, and in so doing, departs from nationalist traditions in Hispanic music scholarship that have considered Italianate music decadent.;Durango, a settlement on the northern frontier of New Spain, marks one of the furthest places from the Mediterranean in which Italianate liturgical and devotional music flourished, and the cathedral's reception of that music illustrates an institution of mostly espanol-identified people (criollos) appropriating elite European culture within a colonial reality. Durango's musical chapel rivaled those of cathedrals in Spain itself in structure and expenditure on music making between the 1740s and 1780s---remarkable facts given the city's isolation. Its repertoire included arias and duets from Metastasian opera seria reworked into Spanish-language, devotional contrafacta; intellectual, experimental compositions by its Roman-born chapelmaster Santiago Billoni; and unconventional works mimicking elements of the Italianate style written by local composers without direct access to European training, in addition to traditions of liturgical chant and stile antico polyphony. These aspects of the repertoire, all approached in scholarship for the first time with this dissertation, show how Italianate music could be adapted to local needs, and how it contributed to the multimedia devotional experience on the feasts of the Virgin of Sorrows, St. Peter, the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin of Guadalupe. By engaging Durango's musical repertoire within a transatlantic purview, this study shows that the musical culture of New Spain did not "lag behind" that of typical cathedrals in Europe, as generally claimed by music historians, but rather that it participated synchronically in globalizing trends in church music.