With the recent quadricentennial of his death, Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548–1611) has garnered much attention from musicologists both in Spain and abroad. Within the past three years numerous articles have been published about the composer as well as two important collections: Tomás Luis de Victoria y la cultura musical en la España de Felipe III, edited by Alfonso de Vicente and Pilar Tomás (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2012) and ‘Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548–1611): contextos y prácticas musicales’, a special edition of Revista de musicología (35/1 (2012)). Alfonso de Vicente's contribution Tomás Luis de Victoria en el siglo XVIII adopts a slightly different approach, comprising as it does a pair of chapters concerned with the reception and performance history of Victoria's sacred music in eighteenth-century Spain.

The book is designed more along the lines of a journal issue than a traditional monograph: the first chapter is essentially an article and the second was clearly fashioned as a conference paper. However, both chapters do include the copious footnotes and citations which are often lacking in both conference papers and Spanish-language publications in general. The author notes the unusual layout in the Introduction to the book, referring to the large number of eighteenth-century manuscript sources of Victoria's work surviving in Spanish cathedral archives: ‘In a way, the studies contained herein . . . are nothing other than the preliminary steps towards a critical edition of these scores’ (‘En cierta manera, los estudios aquí contenidos . . . no son otra cosa que los prolegómenos de una edición crítica de estas partituras’, 8). Indeed, this study would be only a small part of such an edition. Although Vicente makes clear the source limitations of his study, which is confined to manuscript copies of original Victoria prints in Spanish cathedrals, there is a surprising amount of material of importance to such a critical edition to be found in these sources. Aside from noting the presence or absence of ficta accidentals and the differing layouts because of page length and other issues, Vicente also identifies a number of outright changes to the original Victoria sources. It is this final topic that connects the two chapters.

The first chapter, entitled ‘La música de Tomás Luis de Victoria en la Real Capilla de Madrid’, begins by discussing the composer's relationship with the royal chapel: specifically, whether or not he was ever employed by the institution and whether his works were part of the chapel's music collection before the Christmas Eve fire of 1734, which destroyed its archive. Vicente then turns to the extant manuscript copies that preserve several specific Victoria works. He notes thirteen Spanish sources for the Missa quarti toni, ten of which date from the eighteenth century, commenting that the differences he found among them were surprising in number and scale when compared with the 1592 print of the mass authorized by Victoria. These differences Vicente divides into four categories: text, pitch, rhythm and accidentals. By far the greatest number of changes involved either the text (syllable breaks and underlay) or chromatic alteration. Vicente then examines the Ave maris stella mass in similar ways, finding changes in the Sanctus and Agnus Dei. Throughout, the text is rich with examples demonstrating some of the more drastic alterations, including a chart that allows for a direct comparison between the four versions of the newly composed tenor line for the Christe of the Missa quarti toni (38–40). As an appendix the author includes extensive tables detailing every chromatic variant between the sources for the two masses.

Vicente then examines two motets, Vere languores and Jesu dulcis memoria, in the former case noting how the sources differ, much as he did with the masses. He highlights the fact that the text differs substantially between, on the one hand, the royal chapel version from the eighteenth century and, on the other, the six authorized versions published between 1572 and 1603. Vicente lists both texts but, unfortunately, does not discuss the differences between them or what those differences might mean, thus stopping short of what I would have found to be the most interesting aspect of such a study.

In this chapter the author also briefly mentions what I believe to be a critically important issue concerning such textual differences: ‘en algunos casos pueden ser simples erratas’ (54). It is possible, in other words, that some of the changes that appear in the later manuscript versions are simply scribal errors; others, meanwhile, might represent specific choices made by eighteenth-century copyists in order to differentiate their version from other ones or simply to update the work. Without first having accounted thoroughly for the differences that exist between the sources, we will find it difficult, if not impossible, to guess why such changes might have been made.

The second chapter continues the theme of eighteenth-century reception of Victoria's music, although it deals with a very different subject: a late eighteenth-century version of Victoria's Responsories for Holy Week. In this chapter, originally presented as a conference paper at the 2011 Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference in Barcelona, Vicente discusses the wider importance of Victoria's Officium hebdomadae sanctae and the reasons why the printed collection was, surprisingly, not widely circulated in Spain. As a unique case study, he notes the presence in the Huesca Cathedral music archive of a set of pieces written in 1789 by Diego Llorente y Sola that was based on the Victoria Responsories – that is, Llorente y Sola took Victoria's Responsories as a starting-point, reworking and adding to them so they would better suit his needs. To the original work he added a vocal line where Victoria had reduced his forces from four to three singers; he also provided a basso seguente continuo line and composed new sections. The result is that sections of Victoria's work remain unchanged, while others were partly or completely new. In an interesting further illustration of the longevity of interest in Victoria's music, Vicente goes on to link the revised pieces to the nineteenth-century Cecilian movement through another source – a score of the Llorente y Sola versions of Victoria's Responsories that bears the date 1874 and was compiled by then-chapelmaster at Huesca, Celestino Vila de Forns.

Finding an example such as this is surprising and reveals much about the popularity of the Victoria pieces even long after his death, and in locations, like Huesca Cathedral, that apparently did not own a copy of the works in question. In my own work I have found a similar example of eighteenth-century adaptation of Victoria's music – the motet Duo seraphim (1585) – for use at Mexico City Cathedral, where in fact the motet was updated twice, first by Antonio de Salazar (1650–1715), then by Matheo Tollis de la Rocca (1714–1781). The changes made by the two Mexico City chapelmasters closely match the types of alterations described by Vicente that Diego Llorente y Sola made to Victoria's Holy Week Responsories for Huesca. (See my forthcoming article ‘Between stile antico and galant: An Authorship Complex of Eighteenth-Century Responsories for the Santísima Trinidad at Mexico City Cathedral’, in the proceedings of the 2012 conference of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music, ed. Kathryn Libin (Ann Arbor: Steglein, forthcoming).)

In terms of language, rhetoric and level of illustration the second chapter here still very much reads like a conference paper. The examples Vicente provides are too short to get a good sense of how Llorente's changes affect the texture of the piece. Given so detailed a discussion of alterations made by one composer to another's work, I think it would have been useful to see a full score of at least one of the Responsories in addition to the examples given throughout the chapter. Nevertheless, in the longer examples Vicente helpfully uses shaded boxes to distinguish the parts that Llorente y Sola added to Victoria's original.

The book shows the continuing importance of identifying and studying manuscript concordances in both choirbook and loose-leaf format: what looks identical at first glance may, in fact, be a local variant which can reveal much about the usage of that location. Similarly, such sources attest to the dissemination of the works. Although I wished Vicente had used his findings to arrive at more wide-ranging and fundamental conclusions regarding practices at the Spanish royal chapel and other locations that preserve eighteenth-century manuscript versions of Victoria's works, his observations are nevertheless interesting and important in their own right. They are a first step in the process of drawing broader conclusions and fitting this practice into the context of the eighteenth-century reception of Victoria's music in Rome, Spain, America and elsewhere, as well as the reception of liturgical music more generally.

Any reader approaching this book expecting a full-length monograph with full analyses of the examples provided and lengthy discussions of historical context might come away disappointed. However, while the book is laid out in an unusual manner, the information contained within it is important to the field and worthy of publication. Above all, Vicente draws renewed attention not only to the survival of Tomás Luis de Victoria's works in often ignored or overlooked eighteenth-century manuscript copies, but also to the continued importance of the meticulous examination of sources and the remarkable degree of insight that remains to be gained thereby.