Background
PhD, University of Chicago
Chair, Department of Music Studies. Drew Edward Davies is a specialist in 17th- and 18th-century music in Latin America, Iberia, and the wider European context, with complementary research interests in colonialism, contemporary architecture, and a diversity of musical genres and practices.
Professor Davies creates academic scholarship, editions and catalogs of primary sources, and frequently collaborates with performing groups such as the Chicago Arts Orchestra to revive and better understand repertoires of early modern music. His critical editions of music from 18th-century Mexico, Manuel de Sumaya: Villancicos from Mexico City and Santiago Billoni: Complete Works, are available from A-R Editions. His thematic catalog of the music archive at Durango Cathedral, Mexico, is published by the press of the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
His articles and reviews appear in journals such as Early Music, Eighteenth-Century Music, Sanctorum, Revista Portuguesa de Musicologia, Journal of the Society for American Music, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Heterofonía, and Boletín Música (Havana), as well as in numerous essay collections. In 2011, the journal Early Music awarded his article “Villancicos for the Virgin of Guadalupe from Mexico City” with the inaugural J. M. Thomson prize, and the Society for American Music recognized his PhD dissertation, “The Italianized Frontier: Music at Durango Cathedral, Español Culture, and the Aesthetics of Devotion in Eighteenth-Century New Spain,” with the 2006 Wiley Housewright Award. Formerly a bassoonist, his courses at Northwestern range from colonial Latin American topics to Beethoven, Romani music, and opera performance.
Professor Davies is also Academic Coordinator of the Mexico City-based “Musicat” project, the Seminario de Música en la Nueva España y el México Independiente (Seminar on the Music of New Spain and Independent Mexico). He is active in the American Musicological Society, Society for American Music, the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, and the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music and has presented at academic conferences and early music festivals throughout the USA, and in Mexico, Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Italy, Ukraine, Cuba, Poland, and Japan.
Selected Works/Publications
BOOKS
Catálogo de la Colección de Música del Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Durango. Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas – Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Apoyo al Desarrollo de Archivos y Bibliotecas de México, 2013.
Catálogo de obras de música del Archivo del Cabildo Catedral Metropolitano de México (co-authored with Lucero Enríquez and Analía Cherñavsky). 8 volumes. Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas – Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Apoyo al Desarrollo de Archivos y Bibliotecas de México, 2014-.
- Vol. 1: Villancicos y cantadas, 2014.
- Vol. 2: Vísperas, antífonas, salmos, cánticos y versos instrumentales, 2015.
- Vol. 3: Maitines, oficios de difuntos, invitatorios, lecciones y responsorios, 2019.
CRITICAL EDITIONS
Manuel de Sumaya, Villancicos from Mexico City. Recent Researches in Music of the Baroque Era, vol. 206. Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2019.
Santiago Billoni, Complete Works. Recent Researches in Music of the Baroque Era, vol. 170. Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2011.
Ignacio Jerusalem (1707-1769): Obras selectas – Selected Works (general editor, with Javier Marín-López). Madrid: Dairea Ediciones, 2019-
- Vol. 1: Cronología biográfica y lista de obras – Biographical Timeline and List of Works (co-authored with Javier Marín-López), 2019.
- Vol. 2: Al combate, 2019.
- Vol. 4: Arias para el Santísimo Sacramento a una y dos voces / Arias for the Blessed Sacrament for One and Two Voices, 2020.
ARTICLES
“Colonialism and Music in Habsburg New Spain.” In A Companion to Music at the Habsburg Courts in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, edited by Andrew H. Weaver, 439-464. Leiden: Brill, 2020.
“To Combat but not to Arms: Galant Music from Mexico City in Honor of Carlos III.” In The Routledge Companion to the Hispanic Enlightenment, edited by Elizabeth Franklin Lewis, Mónica Bolufer Peruga and Catherine M. Jaffe, 286-301. London: Routledge, 2019.
“Musical Cultures of the Ibero-American Borderlands” (co-authored with Kristin Dutcher Mann). In The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, edited by. Danna A. Levin-Rojo and Cynthia Radding, 525-543. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
“Arranging Music for the Liturgy: Contrafacts and Opera Sources from New Spain.” Early Music 47, no. 2 (2019): 147-160.
“Villancicos, performance y comunidades.” In El villancico en la encrucijada.nuevas perspectivas en torno a un género literario-musical (siglos XV-XIX), edited by Esther Borrego Gutiérrez and Javier Marín López, 176-90. Kassel: Reichenberger, 2019.
“The Digital Humanities and Teaching Iberian and Latin American Music History.” Journal of Music History Pedagogy 7, no. 2 (2017): 99-105.
“Villancicos for the Virgin of Guadalupe from Mexico City.” Early Music 39, no. 2 (2011): 229-44.
“Making Music, Writing Myth: Urban Guadalupan Ritual in Eighteenth-Century New Spain.” In Music and Urban Society in Colonial Latin America, edited by Tess Knighton and Geoffrey Baker, 64-82. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
“García Fajer y la segunda ola del estilo galante en la Nueva España.” In La ópera en el templo. Estudios sobre el compositor Francisco J. García Fajer, edited by Miguel Angel Marín, 401-21. Logroño: Instituto de Estudios Riojanos, 2010.
“St. Peter and the Triumph of the Church in Music from New Spain.” Sanctorum 6 (2009): 67-89.
“On Music Fit for a Courtesan: Representations of the Courtesan and Her Repertoire in Early Modern Italy.” In The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, edited by Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon, 144-58. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.