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Latin American Music Review 26.1 (2005) 1-22


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The Oaxaca Cathedral Examen de oposición:

The Quest for a Modern Style

Mark Brill

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]

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circle mensuration. (4) Same, hemiola. (5) Add a counterpoint below a florid treble in and in mensurations. (6) Same, circle mensuration. (7) Add a third voice to a duo, then sing the third voice while simultaneously pointing to the notes in the [Guidonian] hand that will make a suitable fourth voice. (8) Add a fourth voice to a given trio. (9) While the candidate conducts at the choir book stand two or three voice parts that increase to four or five—one of the said parts being sung in proportion, some of the singers are to miss their designated moment of entry to see whether he immediately catches and rectifies the mistake. (10) All but two voices are to stop singing for an interval to see whether he can follow the silent parts mentally and bring in anew the interrupted voices. (11) He is to make up a four-note canon that will work above a given cantus firmus, singing the dux, pointing to the comes with his hand; he is next to make up a cantus of minims and a cantus of semibreves that will fit a given florid melody. (12) One singer is to skip a staff, whereupon he is to show the other singers how to cover the first singer's mistakes by making compensating skips without stopping the performance. (13) One singer in the ensemble is to bring the other singers down to the first singer's lower pitch level without changing the mode. (14) To given texts, he is to compose within twenty-four hours a motet based on a particular musical passage and also a chanzoneta.6

Lozano Gonzáles described a similar process of the examen for the chapelmastership at the Zaragoza Cathedral, which lasted six days.7 After studying the various examination processes in...

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