The Recovering Choir Director

Yes, it exists!

From Jeffrey Tucker at NLM:

A Spanish scholar named Javier Marín, specialist in Mexican polyphony, has gone through newly discovered folios on [Hernando] Franco’s music and produced a draft of a motet [Circumdederunt me] on this text from original manuscripts. He submitted it to Sacred Music. We had it reset for publication in the Summer issue and it will be “debuted” at the colloquium.

The post reminded me of another partial setting of Circumdederunt me by the Spanish composer Cristóbal de Morales, heard and seen in the YouTube video below:

Update: A commenter shares the following thought on the NLM thread (my emphasis added in boldface):

I was just in a play where we used a lot of Latin American polyphony as incidental music (between scene changes and as underscoring). As a classical singer, I was aware that this music existed but I’d never heard any of it until I started working on this show. I was captivated from the first note. I am a Hispanic and I have traditional leanings when it comes to worshipping God. I would love to hear these pieces in their proper context. It is a shame that Hispanics are ignorant of the entirety of their heritage, as this is as much a part of it as mariachi bands and Andean music are. And it kills me that most Hispanics don’t care for it at all. Even a good number of it was written in the indigenous languages. How’s that for authentic inculturation?