Music in the New World

Music in the New World traces the rich, surprising soundworld of the colonial Americas, where European sacred traditions met Indigenous, African, and local influences to create something entirely new. Led by Guest Musical Director Billy Traylor, Artistic Director of the Austin Baroque Orchestra, this program draws from archives in Mexico City, Oaxaca, Durango, Lima, Santiago de Cuba, and Brazil, bringing rarely heard works to life—many in modern performance for the first time.

At the heart of the program are villancicos, responsories, antiphons, and instrumental sinfonias by composers such as Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla, Antonio de Salazar, Manuel de Sumaya, and their contemporaries. These pieces reveal a musical culture that is both devout and theatrical, intimate and exuberant, blending sacred texts with rhythmic vitality and vivid storytelling.

Performed on period instruments and shaped by current scholarship, Music in the New World invites listeners to hear colonial Latin American music not as a historical…