by Jacob Jahiel
Published June 2, 2025
Alternen las Avicellas: Villancicos y otras obras musicales de la Catedral de Bogotá, s. XVII–XVIII (Villancicos and other musical works of the Bogotá Cathedral, c. XVII–XVIII). Música Ficta. Lindoro NL 3073
Musicologists may look askance at broad generalizations, but I’ll make one nonetheless: There are few genres in the history of early music more alluring, varied, and just plain fun than the villancico.
Emerging from the vestiges of medieval dance music in the 15th century, the form — which English speakers can think of as a carol, and which is generally associated with Advent and Nativity — traversed secular and sacred contexts across its four-century-long history, traveling from its birthplace in Iberia to the New World. There, used as a tool for religious instruction and conversion, it was inflicted upon, but also absorbed and mastered by, local peoples, resulting in a distinct yet still under-examined Latin American villancio tradition.
With superb musicianship and keen scholarship honed by decades-long mastery of music from the Spanish-speaking world, Colombia-based ensemble Música Ficta has captured the villancico’s strange alchemy — and confronted its complex history — in a new recording on the Lindoro label, Alternen las Avicellas: Villancicos and other musical works of the Bogotá Cathedral, c. XVII–XVIII.
The album features music by composers on both sides of this trans-Atlantic exchange, among them Santiago de Murcia (1673–1739), the Spanish-born composer and guitar virtuoso who later settled in Mexico; Juan de Herrera (c.1665–1738), the Bogota Cathedral’s chapel master; Juan Cabanilles (1644–1712), the organist and composer known as “the Spanish Bach”; as well as history’s oldest and most prolific composer, Anonymous.
The tunes themselves are delightful and often surprising. “Carol” might be the villancico’s best Anglophone analog, but its connotation of naive devotion doesn’t quite capture the earthly ebullience of this music. As the ensemble’s Sebastián León writes in his informative liner notes, the attention of the audience was captured by the classical Horatian method of “teaching through delight (prodesse et delectare).”
Villancicos are as much a poetic form as they are musical — as such, storytelling occupies the focus here. Ever sensitive to the poetry, tenors Andrés Silva and Jairo Serrano (also percussion), sopranos Camila Parias and María Andrea Parias, and baritone Sebastián León take a refreshingly conversational, spontaneous approach to tunes like “Animo a la batalla” and “Citaras de cristal las fuentecillas,” with compelling interplay between voices and moods. (The style works slightly less well for the more densely polyphonic works, such as “Mudo atienda el risco sordo,” which at times feels disjunct.) The singers are delicately supported by the instrumentalists Elizabeth Wright, harpsichord; Carlos Serrano, recorder, pipe, and tabor; Julian Navarro, Baroque guitar; and Edwin Garciá, Baroque guitar and theorbo.
A number of intriguing instrumental-only works also pepper the album. Serrano confronts the Tarantela and variations on “La Folia” with lithe and lively recorder playing. Harpsichordist Wright’s galliard by Juan Cabanilles offers her usual impeccable timing and clear sense of line. Plucked numbers like the Zarambeques and “Preludio y obra por la E” by Santiago De Murcia unfold earnestly in rhapsodic musings.
With Alternen las Avicellas, Música Ficta points up a rich body of work from a lively albeit underappreciated hub of early modern music-making: Bogotá. It’s a welcome reminder to consider early music — as these musicians have so expertly done — outside a strictly European context. How nice that the reminder could come in such a pleasurable form.
Jacob Jahiel is a viol player, writer, and arts administrator living in Baltimore.
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