Assistant Professor Drew Edward Davies is one of only a handful of musicologists worldwide that specializes in the music of colonial Mexico. His recently published critical edition of works by eighteenth-century composer Santiago Billoni now confirms his status as one of the world’s most illustrious scholars of Mexican music.

“Quite frankly, I regard Drew Davies as the greatest Hispano-American music scholar of his generation,” Professor Craig H. Russell, a music professor at California Polytechnic State University. “Nobody is more rigorous than Drew Davies when it comes to research methodology and his fruitful publications, [and] few have matched his efforts to make his findings available to the ‘common person.’”

Davies’ new publication, Complete Works, is the first complete edition of any composer from eighteenth-century New Spain (colonial Mexico). The 340-page volume contains thirty-one works by Billoni, the first Italian-born musician to be named chapel master of a cathedral in New Spain. There are villancicos, cantatas, masses, vespers, psalms, and other liturgical pieces, dating from the 1740s and 50s, representing Billoni’s complete known works. A-R Editions has published the edition in its Recent Researches of Music of the Baroque Era series. A-R is the premier United States publisher of music editions that can be used by both scholars and performers.

“Billoni was the one of the most significant composers in Mexico in any period,” says Davies. “His music is of exceptionally high quality and has been compared to Bach. There’s no question that Billoni’s work is far more musically complex, adventurous, and emotional than any other music written in Mexico at the time or before.”

Davies’ new edition is fruit of his extensive and singular research in the manuscript music collection at the archive of Durango Cathedral in northern Mexico. After gaining unprecedented access to the collection, he endeavored to unscramble a jumble of 20,000 manuscript pages into 848 compositions, among which Billoni’s were the most notable. Many of these have already found their way into recent concerts presented by Northwestern’s Early Music Ensemble, Early Music New York, the Chicago Arts Orchestra, and the Dallas-based Orchestra of New Spain.

Davies’ work is rapidly changing the scholarly perception that Mexico produced little music of note. He is the Mexico City coordinator of an international project dedicated not only to cataloging the collections of several major Mexican cathedrals, but also to making the music available online and building a body of interdisciplinary scholarship around it. “New Spain, or colonial Mexico, was an important part of the baroque world,” Davies observed, “and it is time that we seriously consider Mexican arts of the period right alongside those of Europe.”