The Oaxaca Cathedral Examen de oposicion

When a vacancy occurred in the chapel-mastership of Mexican cathedrals during the colonial period, it was customary to open a competition, an examen de oposición, inviting composers from near and far to submit their works. The candidates would "oppose" each other for a chance to obtain what was usually the most prestigious musical appointment in the region. By the seventeenth century, the competitive contest usually required participants to show their skill at composition, counterpoint, and organ performance. A number of exámenes de oposición1 have recently emerged from the archives of the Oaxaca Cathedral. They include compositions by Mateo Vallados, Francisco de Herrera y Mota, Juan Pérez de Guzmán, Luis Gutiérrez, and two by Juan de Tobar Carrasco. These works shed light on the process of selection at the cathedral, and on the level of musical skill and sophistication of style expected by the cabildo and offered by the candidates. Table 1 provides a time line of events in the Oaxaca Cathedral, and shows the years in which vacancies in the chapelmastership occurred. The custom of evaluating candidates for high musical posts by the composition of contrapuntal settings over given tenors can be traced back to Spain and Italy, where the practice had been prevalent since the sixteenth century and continued during the Baroque period. The examen de oposición in Spain has been well documented by musicologists and historians, including Simón de la Rosa y López,2 Antonio Lozano Gonzáles,3 José Artero,4 and Robert Stevenson, who observed that "the heart of Baroque Spanish church music pulsed in its maestro de capilla system."5 In 1904 Rosa y López described the procedure of the examen in the cathedral of Seville, on which most of the cathedrals in the New World based their own traditions. The candidates were expected to: (1) Add a counterpoint above a bass and below a treble cantus firmus in and meters. (2) Do the same, using circle mensuration. (3) Same, bisected [End Page 1] Click for larger view Table 1

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  Robert Stevenson, Robert L Stevenson•Christmas Music from Baroque Mexico•1974

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