Capital of Ecuador. Before the Spanish conquest (1533) Quito was the northernmost outpost of the Inca Empire. As the favourite retreat of Huayna Capac (reigned 1493–1525) it shared the best traditions of Inca court music, panpipes being then as now favourite native ensemble instruments.
The first teachers of European music at Quito, the Flemish Franciscans Josse de Rycke of Mechelen and Pierre Gosseal of Leuven, who arrived in 1534, taught the Indians to read music and play European instruments. At the Colegio de S Andrés (founded 1555) such difficult music as Guerrero’s 1570 collection of motets was sung before 1581. In the 17th century the Quito Franciscan church obtained a 600-pipe organ (completed 1638) and by 1651 boasted a musical culture equal to any in Europe, according to Diego de Córdova Salinas’s chronicle published that year at Lima.
The most important 16th-century mestizo musician trained by the Franciscans was Diego Lobato (c1538–c1610); the Quito Cathedral authorities paid him 110 pesos a year from 1562 to 1568 for singing ‘polyphonic music at the choirbook stand when appropriate’ and also asked him to double as organist from 1563. On 3 April 1574 the Quito chapter appointed him maestro de capilla, commissioning him to compose new ‘motetes y chanzonetas’ for all the principal annual feasts. The splendour of cathedral music was further enhanced by a deed of 29 July 1580 stipulating that the Salve regina be sung polyphonically with organ every Saturday. Lobato continued as maestro de capilla until his death, except for a two-year period (1588–90) when Gutierre Fernández Hidalgo, the greatest South American musician of the epoch, occupied the post.
In colonial Quito, as elsewhere in the Americas, royal commemorations were celebrated with great pomp. Francisco Coronel conducted the polyphony sung at Felipe III’s commemoration on 30 September 1621. For 70 years from 1653 Quito cathedral music was dominated by the Ortuño de Larrea family, except from 1682 to 1695 when the Hieronymite composer Manuel Blasco was imported from Bogotá to break the family monopoly. Blasco, the most eminent composer in Quito annals after Fernández Hidalgo, left a respectable body of music in the cathedral archive at Bogotá, including some notable versos for two shawms and organ and at least two villancicos at Quito, currently in private possession.
The declining interest in prima pratica polyphony from 1708 onwards can be traced in the inventories of polyphonic choirbooks; the number declined from 35 to 20 by 1754, and after the disastrous earthquakes of 1755 and 1757 apparently dwindled to none. Bright instrumental ensembles became the rule at cathedral festivals and in local churches. These ensembles, according to the Compendiosa Relación de la Cristiandad de Quito by the knowledgeable Bernardo Recio (1714–91), included ‘flutes, oboes, trumpets, vihuelas, guitars, harps, harpsichords, violins and other bowed strings’ supported by organs. According to Recio, Quito abounded in bell-casters, and rivalled ‘any similarly sized European capital in the number of harmonious bells rung at all hours’. Samuel Fritz (1656–1725), a Bohemian from Trautenau (now Trutnov), first popularized violin playing at Quito.
After independence (1822) the same taste for glitter (especially that of opera) that marked the rest of Latin America touched Quito. After seven years of construction the Teatro Sucre opened with a concert of operatic selections on 25 November 1886; this was followed by a zarzuela season given by the Ludgardo Gómez touring company and the Compañia Jarques. Although from this time until 1904 touring troupes visiting Quito en route to other South American capitals never presented entire operas, but only excerpts accompanied by a piano and four or five instruments, the Quito public heard such great stars as Tamberlik and Carlotta Patti. A programme by these and supporting performers, accompanied by a pianist and a chamber group, was announced in El Nacional on 25 May 1888 (xii/418, p.1786); it included excerpts from Die Zauberflöte, Rigoletto and Les contes d’Hoffmann. Such programmes generally had 20 numbers, half of them operatic selections, half lighter music such as solo songs in Spanish, comedy skits on the sainete pattern, and a few short pieces exhibiting the prowess of local virtuosos.
After various earlier private conservatories had closed, President Gabriel García Moreno (1821–75) decreed the foundation of the Conservatorio Nacional de Música on 28 February 1870, with the Corsican-born Antonio Neumane (1818–71), composer of the Ecuadorian national anthem, as its first director. It has subsequently been directed by musicians of German, Italian and local origin. Pedro Pablo Traversari Salazar (1874–1956), who administered the conservatory for two periods between 1916 and 1941, left a superb collection of European and Andean instruments sold to the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana on 1 May 1951; this now forms the nucleus of the Quito Museo de Instrumentos Musicales. Among the conservatory's other directors, Humberto Salgado (1903–77) was a prolific composer. The leading theory texts published in the early years of the Quito Conservatory by its teachers were Juan Agustin Guerrero’s Nociones de Instrumentación and Teoría musical (both 1873), and Nicolás Abelardo Guerra’s Gramática Musical (1911, 3/1929). The leading Ecuadorian 20th-century music historian, Luis Segundo Moreno (b Cotacachi, Imbabura, 3 Aug 1882; d Quito, 18 Nov 1973), was associated with the conservatory in various capacities, first as copyist (1909), then as theory professor (1911–13).
The Sociedad Filarmónica de Quito, organized on 11 June 1952 with the critic Francisco Alexander (1910–88) as president, sponsored the founding of the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional on 2 May 1956. During the first eight years this orchestra gave 120 concerts under its titular conductors Ernesto Xancó (May 1956 – August 1958), Georges Gallandres (October 1958 – August 1959), Viktor Bürger (July 1960 – March 1963) and Paul Capolongo (September 1963 – April 1964), all of European extraction. Of the 70 composers represented at these concerts, six were native Ecuadorians – Néstor Cueva, Corsino Durán, Enrique Espín Yépez, Mercedes Silva Echanique, Carlos Bonilla and Claudio Aizaga. In the same eight years Radio Quito encouraged local talent with premières of the early compositions of Mesias Maiguashca (b 1938) and Gerardo Guevara Viteri (b 1930). After an absence in Paris (1969–71) financed by a UNESCO grant Guevara Viteri became conductor of the National SO in July 1972. While Maiguashca and Guevara Viteri have drawn on European styles, one local composer, the Franciscan organist and ethnomusicologist Carlos Alberto Coba (b 1937), writes colourful works inspired by South Amerindian music.
In the 20th century the chief concerts in Quito have usually been given at the Teatro Sucre (new building completed 1903, cap. 1500), including those of the pioneer Quinteto Beethoven (reviewed in El Comercio 2 and 6 August 1912) and the Cuarteto Teran (10 August 1925), the début of the Quito-born pianist Leslie Wright (16 July 1953), the concert of the Colombia SO (4 December 1953), celebrating the fourth centenary of the founding of Quito. Improved air travel has subsequently brought such international celebrities as Segovia, Rubinstein and Bernstein to the city.
J.A. Guerrero: La música ecuatoriana desde su origen hasta 1875 (Quito, 1876/R) [see also review, Inter-American Music Review, xiii/1 (1992), 109–11]
J. Kolberg: Nach Ecuador (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1876, 2/1881)
R. Stevenson: ‘Music in Quito: Four Centuries’, Hispanic American Historical Review, xliii (1963), 247–66
F. Alexander: Música y músicos: ensayos en miniatura (Quito, 1970)
R. Stevenson: Renaissance and Baroque Musical Sources in the Americas (Washington DC, 1970)
C.E. Ramírez Gómez: ‘Así comenzó la banda municipal de Quito’, Revista estrella, vii/27 (1975)
R. Rephann: A Catalogue of the Pedro Travesari Collection of Musical Instruments (Washington DC, 1978)
R. Stevenson: ‘Quito Cathedral: Four Centuries’, Inter-American Music Review, iii/1 (1980–81), 19–38 [incl. additional bibliography]
E. Bermúdez: ‘La vihuela de la iglesia de la Compañía de Jesús de Quito’, Revista musical chilena, no.179 (1993), 69–77
E. Cordero Torres: ‘Mujeres compositoras: un vacío incomprensible’, Revista memoria, iii/3 (1993), 110–13
M. Godoy Aguirre: ‘Las bandas de música en el Ecuador’, ibid., 9–23
P. Guerrero Gutiérrez and R. Garzón, eds.: Yaravíes quiteños: música ecuatoriana del siglo XIX (Quito, 1993)
ROBERT STEVENSON