Sancta et Immaculata
Advent music from Renaissance Manila

A collaboration with Castello Consort!

In 1581 Domingo de Salazar, the first bishop of Manila, arrived in the newly colonised Philippines, bringing with him his own personal library which included several books of liturgical music. It was Salazar who founded the first Cathedral of Manila, initially little more than a temporary structure built from palm and bamboo, in which the first sung masses were celebrated by a dedicated choir of boys and men accompanied by recorders and shawms, as well as a pipe organ brought for this very purpose from Spain. While little is known about the music performed in these ceremonies, Salazar tells us, in a letter written in 1583 to Philip II, that the ‘divine office was celebrated on feast-days as it could be celebrated in any other cathedral more ancient and richer than this.’

This program is based on the Immaculate Conception, to which the newly built cathedral in Manila was dedicated, with the Seville-based composer Francisco Guerrero’s sublime Missa Sancta et immaculata functioning as centrepiece alongside the appropriate plainsong propers. While it is by no means certain that Guerrero’s music was included in those choirbooks which first made their way to Manila in the 1580s, we do know that his compositions were circulating in Manila around the turn of the seventeenth century, with the bookseller Pedro de Zúñiga including a collection of his music in his wares.

The work is Guerrero’s first published setting of the Ordinary of the mass and is based on a motet of the same name by his teacher, the renowned Cristóbal de Morales. Adding an additional soprano to the original four-voices, Guerrero creates a full and vibrant texture interspersed with moments of surprising tenderness. The work ends with a magnificent six-voice setting of the single Agnus Dei, the addition of an extra bass voice lending yet more gravitas to the plangent entries of the text “dona nobis pacem.”