Biography
Santiago Billoni (ca. 1700–ca. 1763) was a Roman composer and violinist active in New Spain (viceregal Mexico) between the 1730s and 1750s. One of the most significant composers to work in the Americas during the viceregal period, Billoni was the first Italian-born musician to be named chapel master of a cathedral in New Spain. His thirty-one concise works, which include villancicos, cantadas, masses, vespers psalms, and other liturgical pieces, stand as unique in New Spain for their use of chromatic harmony, virtuosic yet unmechanical violin technique, and emotive musical rhetoric grounded in the contemporaneous preference for interior devotion. They witness the diffusion of Italianate music in a variety of styles to Spanish America’s northern frontier and survive exclusively at the cathedral of Durango, where Billoni served as chapel master from 1749 until 1756.
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