The Music Department announces the publication of a new book "Liber magnificarum (1607) Sebastián de Vivanco" edited by Michael Noone and Graeme Skinner

The Music Department announces the publication of a new book by Prof Michael Noone and Graeme Skinner. The 300-page volume is an edition of, and commentary about, a book of magnificats by Sebastián de Vivanco, a priest-composer of the High Renaissance.

Sebastián Vivanco (ca. 1550-1622) stands, without doubt, as one of the most neglected composers of the Spanish Golden Age. Ironically, the greatest contribution to this neglect is the accident of his having been born in Avila at about the same time as that other colossus of Spanish music from Avila, Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548-1611). Blinded, perhaps, by the stunning brilliance of Victoria, scholars and performers alike have been slow to discern an equally bright star sparkling in the same constellation. For two decades, from 1602 until his death in 1622, Vivanco occupied simultaneously the two most prestigious posts in Salamanca to which any musician could aspire: University Professor of Music and Cathedral Chapelmaster.

In 2002, Michael Noone conducted a series of concerts in the UK (London and Cambridge) and Spain that led to an award-winning CD recording of Vivanco’s sacred polyphony. Deeply impressed by the consistently high quality of Vivanco’s sacred music — in particular his magnificat settings — Noone embarked on a project to bring the composer’s music to a wider public by making editions of Vivanco’s music for both scholars and performers. In the process, Noone’s study of the sources of Vivanco’s music eventually led to an unsuspected discovery: that while all modern studies of Vivanco’s music had attributed the printing of his works to Tavernier, it was in fact Tavernier’s wife, Susana Muñoz, who was the ignored and unsung force behind the printing of sacred music by Vivanco and his contemporaries.

With his book of Magnificats (1607), Vivanco began a collaboration with the Flemish printer Artus Tavernier and his wife Susana Muñoz that would eventually see two further altas-sized luxury polyphonic choirbooks containing Latin liturgical music by Vivanco, together with volumes of music by polyphonists Juan Esquivel (c. 1563-after 1612) and Diego de Bruceña (1567-1623). Noone’s research into the printing of music in early 17th-century Salamanca reveals the hitherto unsuspected agency of a remarkable woman. Through successive strategic marriages to three key figures in Salamanca’s thriving printing trade, Susana Muñoz built a firm that in the period 1602 to 1625 issued more than 120 titles and that dominated the printing of Latin liturgical music in early modern Spain.