A Candlelight Christmas from Spain and the New World

The San Francisco Bach Choir is pleased to sponsor this collaborative concert with Coro Hispano de San Francisco. While our musical heritages are different, both groups are committed to exploring the rich cultural traditions of the Baroque era. We thank Coro Hispano Director Juan Pedro Gaffney for sharing his expertise and the musical resources of his organization with us and with our audiences. In honor of this collaboration, we present the following article by Maestro Gaffney.

— David P. Babbitt

San Francisco Bach Choir audiences are long familiar with the wealth of choral and polychoral music of the German Early Baroque. This year’s Christmas program, derived wholly from the Iberian and Iberoamerican choral tradition, will provide new musical flavors, new shapes and new sounds to the ear; its basic musical language, however, will prove already familiar, for most of our program is from the Early and High Baroque.

If art-music of the High Baroque from Mexico and Peru comes as a surprise to more northern ears, it should serve as a corrective to consider that this is the fruit of a cultural ecology by then already 150 years old. Consider: two years after the fall of Tenochtitlán, seat of the Aztec empire, a Franciscan friar formed a choir of Indian lads to provide suitable music for the celebration of the Mass, vespers and paraliturgical events. He then built a school around the choir, and then a permanent church. But first came the coro! Within fifteen years, this same friar could write to his cousin Charles V that his choir could hold its own against the Emperor’s own chapel choir. This was no idle boast; Fray Pedro de Gante was himself a formed musician from the Cathedral of Ghent, and he knew the musicians of the Emperor’s capilla first-hand. Nor was his achievement an isolated phenomenon; in the process of evangelization, the missioners that preached a new faith planted the seeds of a new way to make music, both vocal and instrumental. Music was rightly seen as the key that opened doors to the hearts of the indigenous peoples.

The order of this program follows the sequence of feast-days around the Nativity of Jesus according to the Roman liturgical calendar (still much observed in Spanish and Latin-American folk practice), beginning with two works celebrating the pre-Christmas Marian feasts in December, and ending with a setting of the Magnificat for Second Vespers of the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6th.

The opening work, sung in Quechua and very likely composed by an Inca maestro, is a processional chant published in Cuzco in 1631, “set in four voices to be sung by the singers in processions on feast-days of Our Lady.” Such processions were typically accompanied by choirs of indigenous flutes and throbbing drums. Both musically and poetically, this simple, strophic song displays subtleties that may derive either from Spanish or native ingenuity: phrases lay out musically to bar-groups of 3+3+4, 3+3+4, with a lilting syncopation in the third, fourth and fifth phrases that creates a sort of lift to the propulsive motion of the compás. The six phrases obey a rhyme-scheme with its own counter-rhythm: ABB-AAC, the following verse picking up where the preceding leaves off: CDD-CCF, and so for each succeeding verse, thus creating a kind of daisy-chain in rhyme. The processions must have lasted a good walk, for the original runs some 40 verses, each one likening the virtues of the Mother of God to a particular wild-flower of the Andes.

The next work draws from 19th-century Mexican folk-verses and melodies celebrating Our Lady of Guadalupe, whose feastday falls on December 12th. To this day, throughout Mexico and the Southwest United States, the faithful assemble before 5 AM—the hour Our Lady appeared to the Indian Juan Diego in 1532—to sing these verses as a garland-in-song to La Madrecita, the gentle, dark-skinned Mother-of-God who watches over all the peoples of the earth as her own children. This arrangement, for seven-voice chorus, contralto soloist and strings, is an act of homage by one who rises at 3 AM each year to sing to the Virgin.

The awe-inspiring paradox of the Creator becoming a creature, Infinite Spirit being born in the midst of beasts, is the theme of the fourth responsory for matins of Christmas Eve, O Magnum Mysterium. The 12-voice setting of this text by the Valencian Juan Bautista Comes opens on the single syllable “O” as in a revery, creating clouds of sound before entering into the sense of the first phrase. In the succeeding phrases, while assigning linear activity to a given voice within each choir, Comes deploys the three choirs as blocks of sound, in call-and-response, in overlapping waves, and finally in a single mass of voices. The phrases themselves are declamatory, their internal rhythm wholely derived from the prosodic metre of their texts, producing thus a dance-like freedom from the regularity of the tactus, or bar.

The Latin responsory, used in matins as the musical meditation on the reading that precedes it, has here the form ABCB. For the versicle "C", setting the angelic salutation “Ave Maria, gratia plena...” ("Hail, Mary, full of grace! The Lord is with you"), Comes quotes the Gregorian melody Ave Maria, not as cantus firmus but rather as motif for his own inspiration.

The three choirs are not identical in voice-disposition; typically, the first choir is composed of high voices (here, SSAT); the other two, SATB. Nor are they equal in mass; the first choir is of two solo voices companioned by violins; the second a semi-chorus, the third the full chorus, doubled by the classic “banda” of corneta, sacabuches and bajón. Comes was among the first to specify instrumentation, especially in his polychoral works. Though the manuscript sources for this work are without instrumental names, other polychoral works of Comes indicate much this disposition of voices and instruments.

None of these features depart from classic polychoral technique found elsewhere; in its musical architecture, the Valencian school reveals much in common with both the Roman and the 17th-century Venetian schools. Where the modern listener might well find differences from more familiar early-Baroque literature is at the level of harmonic color, specifically the predilection for cross-relation (different inflections of the same scale-degree, e.g. f-sharp in one voice, f-natural in another) at very close quarters, even simultaneously, thus producing false octaves (always diminished) in a cadential chord. The clashes do not last long, but they imbue the chord with a blues-color most ears don’t associate with Renaissance or Baroque counterpoint.

Anything but a forward-looking gesture, this is the resultant of a characteristically Iberian conservativism regarding both ficta and hexachord. Throughout and beyond the Renaissance, Spanish theorists, composers, singers and players took for granted a much more liberal use of the raised “leading-tone” than prevailed on the European Continent; they applied it not only at cadences, but frequently at any stepwise approach to an octave. This usage is actually a survivor of a medieval sensibility that altered imperfect consonances in the direction of the perfect consonances they were approaching. By 1500, the application of the “rule of greater proximity” was much more relaxed on the European Continent. Not so in the Peninsula, where it held sway wel1 into the 18th century (and in fact provides some of the characteristic color of Spanish folk-music to this day).

The hexachord, too, remained alive in the creative and performing instincts of Iberian and Iberoamerican musicians longer than elsewhere. To cite only the application of hexachordal thinking that produces false octaves, consider: the hexachord has six syllable-named notes, but applies to music with seven nameable notes in the octave. If you’re singing by the hexachord syllables, what do you do when the melody arrives at the seventh degree? If the melody rises above the sixth degree (named la) by one note only and then immediately returns, by established convention the added note is to be sung as if a half-tone above, not a whole tone. This produces figures like A-B-flat-A, for instance, or D-E-flat-D, even where another voice below may be obliged to read B-natural or E-natural. Almost without exception, the melodic figure that demands the “soft” or flat note is in the octave above the corresponding “hard” or natural note, thus producing a diminished, not an augmented, octave. As with the application of ficta, the resultant falsas apply always to the penultimate chord of a cadence, never to the final. Their care in application reveals their intentionality in the mind of the composer (and performer). By all evidence, such momentary clashes were not endured so much as relished. So hear them with relish—they’re not mistakes; they’re salsa picante!

It is worth noting that in Spanish cathedrals, the choir-stalls are customarily situated not in or next to the sanctuary but in the nave, towards the center. By consequence, the choir-organ (generally of considerable size, and often the biggest of the several organs in a given cathedral) is located in the same space, in the middle from which, of course, any other accompanying instruments such as the harp, bass viol and bassoon would also play. Virtually without exception, the daughter cathedrals of the Americas followed this same plan. This spatial arrangement had important consequences for the way in which music functioned in cathedral liturgy; for one thing, it was physically closer to the people. A secondary consequence applies to the way polychoral music was performed: the separation between choirs, whether two or more, was not nearly so great as we might imagine. In fact, the polychoral practice at San Marco in Venice, where it all began, was not very far from this. The taste for placing ensembles at opposite ends of the building was a specifically German phenomenon, brilliantly developed by Prætorius and his contemporaries.

One of the true giants of the Iberian Early Baroque, Comes was born in Valencia in 1582, there receiving the musical education that was standard throughout Europe: at the local cathedral choir-school. In 1605 he was appointed maestro de capilla of Lérida Cathedral, but three years later was called back to Valencia, to serve first as the vice-maestro of the Patriarca, and five years later as maestro of the Cathedral. In 1618 he was named vice-maestro of the Royal Chapel at Madrid, returning to his native city in 1628, where he served as full maestro of the Patriarca, and, from 1632 to the end of his career, once again as maestro of the Cathedral. His writing is vivid, rich in drama and full of color.

They didn’t call it prima prattica and seconda prattica, but long before the dispute over styles of composition was crystalized by the finger-wagging of an Artusi and the response of a Monteverdi, Spanish composers wrote in two styles without much fuss over how they were named. Even in their “learnéd” style, the composers of 15th-century Spain eschewed the abstract geometrisms of the Franco-Burgundian school, adopting a declaredly simpler architecture that drew on traditional song-types deeply imbedded in popular culture. The centuries-old strophic romance was one such form; the more complex villancico was another. It was the villancico that would prove to be the onomastic model of an entire style—a specifically Hispanic sort of segunda practica. Sharing the same form as the 11th-c. Moorish muzvashshah-zahal, the villancico was initially a verse-structure of an opening strain with succeeding couplets that return to the strain, or a determined portion of it, in one of a variety of ways to do so. The musical form, adopted almost from its inception, sidesteps the variants in verse-structure to offer a remarkably serviceable albeit flexible formula (the same as the Provençal virelai): ABBA(BBA. . . ). In time, this formula itself would admit of a great number of variants, but the concept of refrain-couplets-refrain would remain a constant.

In Iberian practice, sacred and profane were not confused, but they had an easy-going interaction with each other. more so than elsewhere. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the music composed for liturgical practice. The distinction of styles was drawn more along lines of language than any other: the “learnéd” style was reserved for settings of sacred texts in Latin, the villancico style for texts in the vernacular. In time, the Iberian “learnéd” style would sound very much like prima prattica sacred music from anywhere in Europe. What remained distinctive in Iberia was not only the villancico genre itself, but the fact that, in the celebration of Matins, villancicos became part of a liturgical service. Perhaps Rome never issued a special indult permitting the practice, perhaps nobody on the Iberian side ever bothered to ask permission, but as early as 1493, Ysabela and Fernando heard Matins for the feast of the Epiphany in the Cathedral of Granada with a set of nine freshly-composed villancicos in Spanish, set to newly-composed music, replacing the eight responsories in Latin plus the Te Deum. In succeeding centuries, curial faces would frown on the practice (and the more-Catholic-than-the-Pope Felipe II would try to suppress it), but until practically the end of the 18th century, villancicos in the vernacular were being sung in sacred services throughout the Hispanic World; and the people loved it. Feast-day after feast-day, they packed the cathedrals to hear the latest set.

Six works on this program, including the following, are from this repertoire: villancicos specifically composed for the celebration of Christmas or Epiphany. The ebulliently joyous villancico that brings up the house lights, Vaya, vaya de cantos de amores, is from the pen of a maestro of the Metropolitan Cathedral of Mexico during the latter half of the 17th century, José Loaysa y Agurto. His birthdate and birthplace have yet to be determined, but he was a paid member (not a boy) of the Metropolitan Cathedral choir by 1647, which puts his birth at least twenty years earlier. In his history of service with the Cathedral, he was engaged as resident composer, first of villancicos, then as M^o Compositor de dicha Santa Yglesia. Only in 1685 does his name appear as Maestro de Capilla de dicha S^a Iglesia, and that for only a few years: in 1688 his successor, the layman Antonio de Salazar assumes the maestría. Living in nearby Toluca, Loaysa remained in the Cathedral’s service up until his death in 1695.

The author of these verses is unnamed, but the poetry is of a high order; indeed, it shows remarkable similarities in language, image and manner to the villancicos of the Mexican Tenth Muse, Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz. Only a ranking poet like Góngora, or the extraordinary Sor Juana, whose villancico verses were published independently, could be assured of attribution of the work of their hands. Sor Juana was prolific in the composition of villancico verse: twelve sets of nine poems each were published in her lifetime, with another ten sets unpublished, as well as fifty poems to be set to music; and they are brilliant. By turns witty, playful, earthy, yet always deeply and truly religious, they are exemplary of the canonic villancico genre at its best: the sacred at home with the profane.

It was Loaysa y Agurto, more than any other contemporary composer, who created the music for Sor Juana’s villancicos. His name appears on five of the published sets, and on two more of the unpublished. The present work does not figure in the Obras Completas of Sor Juana, but the poem’s internal stylistic traits and the working relationship between the two artists suggest that here, too, there was a collaboration of two of the most brilliant minds of the Mexican Baroque.

Alonso Xuares was an eminent composer of music of the first style, that is to say, sacred music in Latin, nearly all of it for double or triple choir. Yet the following work, Venid, venid zagales, is neither: it is a villancico in the vernacular, set to five voices and continuo. Born at Cuenca c. 1630, Xuares became maestro of the Cathedral there in 1654. So distinguished was his service and his reputation that in 1675 the chapter of Seville Cathedral offered him the maestría there without the usual three-day examinations. While at Seville, he produced a considerable body of polychoral masses, motets and vesper settings. Eight years later, however, he returned to Cuenca because of ill health; without resuming the burdens of directorship, he continued to compose for the Cathedral until his death in 1696.

Rather soon in their evolution, Christmas villancicos fell into certain genres; stock types were woven and rewoven from one year to the next. The present work belongs to the invitation-to-the-cradle genre, gathering singers around the crib to gaze upon the New-born. Frequently such poems would find the Child crying, and, as here, admonish the singers to tread softly, sing gently. Such an image can easily be dismissed as pious bathos, but in the hands of the best poets, the image turns to a reflection on the purpose of the Incarnation: the Eternal Word is born into the human condition not to be cuddled or cooed over, but to transform the way we live our lives. Such images serve as a premonition of the passion, death and resurrection, already present in the pains of being born. The response of the singers—to sing softly—is in fact one of respect for the mystery of human suffering and the divine involvement in it.

Like the opening processional, the work that follows, the haunting Canción de los Pastores (Haku Pastor) is from Peru, and is sung in Quechua. Unlike the processional, this work is virtually without European influence. Indeed, Andean folk-music of today is a true cultural survivor; it matches closely what European musicians described in the very first years of contact nearly five centuries ago. In certain mountain villages, the indigenous flutes used here were organized into choirs, reaching numbers of forty or more, whose sound would carry from hilltops across the valley to the neighboring mountain, there answered by a similar such choir. Polychoral indeed! The biggest pipes extended to twelve or more feet, sounding only a single pitch, and played in consort the way handbells are played: each player sounding his note in due order.

The work as here arranged derives from two distinct melodies, each with different texts. The first, from the mouth of a shepherd, urges other llama-herders to hasten across the mountains to see the new-born Christ-child. The other is a song of adoration of Christ present in the Blessed Sacrament, and was doubtless composed not for Christmas but for the feast of Corpus Christi. This second melody (in our arrangement played first by instruments only) is almost hypnotic in its rhythm, binary by the bar, but pentametric in phrase-length, creating a resonance between time and tone, both governed by five.

The tender duet that follows, Al dormir el Sol, is a villancico of the cradle-song type, in which the singers gaze upon the Infant, then call on all nature to assist them in bringing gifts to the crib. Its author, Sebastián Durón, was one of the first to compose zarzuelas—the new born Spanish form of opera. Born in Brihuega in 1660, Durón ended his days in southern France, exiled in 1706 because he sided against Philip V in the War of the Spanish Succession. In between, he pursued a brilliant career as virtuoso organist in several cathedrals, and as prolific composer in both styles. Most of his masses, motets, hymns and psalms were polychoral, for 8 or more voices, some calling for orchestral accompaniment. In the second style he produced villancicos, songs and tonadas for one to five voices, and zarzuelas. He wrote for violin before it was universally admired, and adventured into italianate forms such as the cantata, replete with recitative and da capo aria, and for his pains was savaged by a contemporary critic for “corrupting Spanish music with foreign admixtures.” But he was widely admired in his own time, and his works traveled to all parts of the Spanish-speaking World. The present work comes from the Sanchez Garza collection in Mexico.

The work closing the first half of our program, ¡Plaça, plaça! comes from the pen of one of the true giants of the Mexican Baroque, Juan Gutierrez de Padilla. Born in Málaga in 1590, Padilla emigrated to Mexico in 1622, where he served the community of Pueblo from that year to the year of his death, 1664. His case is emblematic of Iberoamérica’s maestros peninsulares: like virtually all composers of the time, Padilla received his earliest music training in the choir of the local cathedral; like many, he takes on his first assignment as maestro in a Spanish or Portuguese Cathedral, but at some point early in his career, comes to the Américas, commits to a place to work, and never looks back. By any reckoning, Padilla’s output is part of the musical legacy of México, not Málaga. At the age of 23 he is maestro of the Cathedral of Jerez; three years later, of Cádiz Cathedral. By October of 1622 he is already at Puebla Cathedral as singer and co-maestro to the aging Gaspar Fernándes; seven years later he is named full maestro, and maestro he fully proves to be, composing copiously and gloriously in both styles. Much of his sacred music in Latin is for double-choir, and favors two equal voice-dispositions: SATB-SATB. In this style he writes rather conservatively, but with the flair for pitched battle characteristic of the genre.

His villancico style is something else; full of surprises, metrically playful, quick to exploit the sprung rhythms of declaimed verse, with an ear for contrast and color, this is music that delights in delighting. Sometime around 1650 the Cathedral chapter sent Padilla a memo noting that the villancicos for the preceding years were floating about; henceforth he should take care to have them properly put away in the cathedral archives. Whoever wrote the note, we should thank him; because of it we have all but one of the complete sets of the villancicos composed for Christmas matins from 1651 through 1659. The works from before are gone forever.

The present work is the seventh villancico from the 1656 set, transcribed by Mauro Correa and edited by this writer for its 20th-c. re-premiere two years ago. Here, the crib is not an occasion for tears of tenderness but rather a stage of triumphal entry of the Lord of the Four Elements and his attendant angel-warriors; yet all to make peace between elements and do away with warring.

The manuscripts give no clue to the name of the poet who authored this and the rest of the Puebla villancico verse-sets—it is indisputably the same person—but whoever, he is a poet of a very high order, and what is more, a theologian of real depth. The imagery is subtle, sometimes street-smart, but never without catechetical purpose. This was what the villancicos were for: to celebrate the Christian mysteries in a way that opened the mind by opening the heart, and all to the beat of the latest dance.

The second act of our program opens with another of Padilla’s villancicos, this one from the 1653 set, and belonging to the sub-genre captured in its title: A la xácara xacarilla. The jácara was a narrative song-type with a defining element of dance in its rhythmic backbone. In Padilla’s usage it is always a bravura piece both technically and attitudinally; it pushes singers and players alike to the edge of their technique, and for the listener, it’s bold, it’s in your face, it’s painted bright red. And the texts? They are always hero-songs, celebrating the deeds and feats of someone slightly bigger than life. The jácara is in fact the predecessor of the corrido, less fiery in color than the jácara, perhaps, but no less celebratory of the hero whose story it narrates in song.

The ode that follows, En un portalejo pobre, is for three voices and lute, and is the moment of calm for the program’s second half. Set by Gaspar Fern´ndes (noted above as Padilla’s predecessor at Puebla), its suppleness and simplicity provides the ideal vehicle for letting the verse tell its own story. Again by an unnamed poet, the verse contemplates the inversion of values that the Incarnation puts to us: straw and chaff this Child’s bunting, spiderwebs his covers, but because he is who he is, the abandoned shed in which he is born is more than palace. What a double-dare to our middle-class notions of comfort and Christmas cheer! This is Hispanic Baroque devotional verse at its best: nothing convoluted or gongoresque here, just a very pointed meditation on things sacred applied to things profane, the message of the sacred mythos applied to the world we live in.

Of Fern´ndes’ birth we know neither date nor place, but his name and later career data would put them at c. 1570, somewhere in Portugal. By 1590 he was serving as both singer and instrumentalist in the capela of Évora Cathedral; in 1599 he was engaged, first as organist, then as maestro for the Cathedral of Guatemala (now Antigua). Seven years later he left Guatemala for Puebla, where he secured the position of maestro de capilla. There he remained active until his death in 1629, though, as already noted, in his declining years he was assisted by Gutierrez de Padilla. Fern´ndes may not have been a composer of the first rank, but what he did compose has charm and ingenuity. He left behind a considerable quantity of ethnic and dialect villancicos, some of them in the Amerindian dialects spoken in the region around Puebla. They are as engaging as the present work is winning.

In the Tridentine Roman ordo, the five psalms sung at vespers can be sung in any of the eight church modes; what determines the mode is the antiphon assigned to each psalm for a given feast-day. The antiphon situates the psalm in the themes celebrated in that feast (or fast). In our performance of Juan de Araujo’s Dixit Dominus, the antiphon is taken from the Feast of the Holy Family, which used to fall on the Sunday after the Epiphany, as part of the prolongation of the Nativity cycle extending to Candlemas, on February 2nd.

Vesper-psalms (together with verset-form canticles) are a type to themselves, and are distinguished from motet-type psalm-settings in that the latter are through-composed, the former in individual verses, with intervening verses to be sung in chant, or sometimes as organ or instrumental versetti. To those unfamiliar with the form, it seems a very choppy way to compose: a few lines sung, barely developed, and then a full stop. To those who know the psalms and their singing, it is a graceful way of alternating between plainchant and polyphony, the simple and the adorned; and the people in prayer received them as meditations on the psalm and on its appointed tone.

Araujo’s setting of Ps. 109, first of the vesper psalms, is for eleven voices grouped into three choirs, and is in the first tone transposed: g dorian. Again we find the first choir given to higher voices: SAT; the other two, SATB. The predilection for cross-relation noted above in the responsory by Comes is, if anything, even stronger in the present work. Indeed, the very melodic figures found in works by Tallis and other Tudor composers are used at cadences to create and enhance the clash. (There is no question of more than similitude here; the last link between insular and peninsular musicians was Cabezón and the capilla of Felipe II in Mary Tudor’s time.)

South America’s greatest composer of the Early- to Mid-Baroque, Juan de Araujo was the last significant voice of the older Iberian tradition, before the invasion by Elizabetta Farnese’s Italians in Madrid (and in short order the Américas) around 1715. Born in Extremadura in 1646, he crossed the ocean at an early age with his father, a civil servant, and completed his education at the University of San Marcos in Lima, studying composition with Tomas de Torrejón y Velasco. Banished for some years from Lima by the then Viceroy, he went to Panamá (where some of his works survive), was ordained to the priesthood, and returned to Lima in 1672, now as maestro of the Cathedral. In 1676 he moved, apparently to Cuzco Cathedral, where others of his works survive. Four years later he moved again, to the Cathedral of La Plata (present-day Sucre, Bolivia) there to serve until his death in 1712. His output of sacred music in Latin is relatively small; where his genius overflowed in abundance was in the production of villancicos of all sorts and combinations of voices and instruments from two to at least thirteen parts. Serving during a prolonged economic boom, he enjoyed resources permitting him an orchestra that few cathedrals could boast, even in Europe.

The following work, Exsultate Justi, is a through-composed (motet-type) setting of Psalm 32, which is sung in the Nativity-cycle office on the Monday after Christmas. A fine example of Gutierrez de Padilla’s prima prattica, it displays skillful voice-leading, a sure sense of architecture and a knowing ear for exploiting the inherent excitement of declamatory rhythms. Our performance is without instrumental accompaniment (the only such piece in the program), always an option at the time it was written.

Bernardo de Peralta’s 12-voice setting of the Magnificat on the first tone is a jewel in the crown of polychoral works presented in this concert. Arranged in three choirs and through-composed, the work moves fluently from verse to verse, yet creates a tripartite form by reserving v. 5 to the four voices of choir I, the full forces resuming in v. 6. Peralta is a consummate master of the genre, exploiting the contrasts between the three choirs in texture, space and weight to maximum effect. In setting the entire canticle (i.e., leaving no verses to be sung in chant), he occasionally quotes the psalm-tone of the mode as a reminiscence of the chant that would otherwise be heard in intervening verses. His depiction of the sense of each verse by telling tonal imagery reveals a vivid sense of drama; such word-painting was not common in Spain, and Peralta was among the first to use it there.

Born in Falce, Navarra in the late 16th century, Peralta was maestro at Alfaro by l605; in 1609 he was appointed maestro at Burgos Cathedral, a post he held until his death in ]617. Highly esteemed throughout his career, he was content to blossom where his roots were; invited to accept the maestría of Saragossa Cathedral, and later, of the Royal Chapel in Madrid, he declined both positions, saying of the latter that he would "prefer the galleys to Madrid."

Our program concludes with yet another villancico, this one composed in 1977, showing that as an art-form the viilancico is anything but a museum-piece: in popular culture throughout Latin America, Spain and Portugal, it functions to this day as a living vehicle of artistic expression. From the folk-idiom of his own people, the Nicaraguan song-writer Carlos Mejía Godoy gives us the spirited song that somehow captures our entire message in this Candlelight Christmas of 2000: the Divine Being is born, not long ago and far away, but ongoingly: here, and now.

Mejía was born in 1938 in Ocatal, Nicaragua, into a family that for generations has figured strongly in the cultural and intellectual life of the country. He wrote this song in the last, oppressive years of the Somoza dynasty, at a time when the entire country was rising up to throw off the shackles of more than fifty years of a dictatorship. Two years later, the people of Nicaragua did triumph; but the song sings of a yet deeper triumph: Christ is born within us and around us when we join in the cosmic struggle to build a new world—one of justice, one of peace, one of love. But first, justice, without which neither peace nor love are possible.