There is no documentation of the date, place of birth, or origin of José Joaquim Emerico Lobo de Mesquita. The information known today about the main Brazilian composer of the 18th century was revealed by the musicologist Francisco Curt Lange starting in the 1940s. His recorded professional activity begins in the city of Serro, in Minas Gerais, where a payment record appears in the books of the Senate Chamber in 1765. Around 1776 he moved to Diamantina, formerly Arraial do Tejuco, where he is believed to have composed the Mass for Ash Wednesday in 1778. For more than twenty years he worked as an organist and composer in various brotherhoods. In 1798 we find him in the city of Vila Rica (present-day Ouro Preto), as organist of the Brotherhood of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. There are records of his participation as conductor in the Holy Week Triduum at the Parish Church of Our Lady of the Pillar.…