Antonio de Cabezón

• 1. Introduction

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  Antonio de Cabezón was born on the 30th of March 1510 in Castrillo Mota de Judíos, a small municipality near Burgos in the north of Spain. He lost his sight in early childhood. That single fact shaped nearly everything that followed: the way he learned music, the way he moved through court, and the way he heard the world. By the time he died in Madrid on the 26th of March 1566, he had served two of the most powerful monarchs Europe had ever produced. He had crossed the Alps, visited the court of England, and left behind a body of keyboard music that composers in London were still studying after his death. How does a blind boy from Castile become the most important keyboard composer the Iberian peninsula had yet produced? The answers lie in a royal marriage, a lifetime of travel, and a son determined not to let his father's music disappear.

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• 2. Into the Royal Household

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  Cabezón may have studied at Palencia Cathedral under the organist García de Baeza, though the record of his early training is thin. What is known is that by 1526 he had entered the service of Isabella of Portugal, wife of Charles V. Isabella organized a chapel soon after her wedding, and Cabezón became its organist. His duties also included playing the clavichord for the queen personally. The court brought him into contact with composers who were reshaping Iberian music. Luis de Narváez, a vihuelist whose polyphonic fantasias were among the most advanced of the age, was one such colleague. Another was Tomás de Santa María, who wrote an important treatise on instrumental music called Arte de tañer fantasía; Cabezón examined and approved the work. In 1538 Charles elevated him to the rank of músico de la cámara, chamber musician to the emperor himself. Charles, it is worth noting, had been educated in music as a child by the organist Henry Bredemers. When Isabella died in 1539, Cabezón did not leave the court. Instead he was appointed music teacher to her children: Prince Felipe and his sisters Maria and Joan. Maria would later become the foremost patron of composer Tomás Luis de Victoria.

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• 3. Europe With Felipe

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  In 1543 Felipe became Regent of Spain and named Cabezón his court organist. One of the more unusual aspects of the role was physical: Cabezón played a portative organ for Felipe during the prince's journeys, carrying the instrument across the continent. On the 19th of July 1546 his brother Juan, also an organist and composer, was appointed musician in the royal chapel of Prince Felipe. From the late 1540s onward the two brothers traveled together at Felipe's side. They visited Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany between 1548 and 1549. Between 1554 and 1556 the court was in England. It was during that English stay that Cabezón's variation technique may have passed into the hands of William Byrd and Thomas Tallis, both of whom later took up the form. Cabezón's personal life is nearly invisible in the historical record. He married Luisa Nuñez de Mocos from Ávila, and the couple had five children. One son, Agustín, died before 1564 after serving as a chorister of the royal chapel. Another son, Hernando, born in 1541, became a composer. Hernando's decision to collect and publish his father's music after Antonio's death in Madrid is the reason any substantial portion of it survived.

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• 4. The Tiento

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  Twenty-nine tientos by Cabezón survive, and they represent the most substantial body of work in his catalogue. The tiento was a polyphonic form native to the Iberian peninsula; scholars have linked it to two earlier genres: the tastar de corde, an improvisatory prelude for plucked strings, and the ricercar, which began as a similar improvisation before evolving into a strict imitative composition. Fourteen of Cabezón's tientos appeared in Luis Venegas de Henestrosa's compilation Libro de cifra nueva, published in Alcalá de Henares in 1557. These earlier tientos are written out in long note values, alternating between imitative counterpoint and sections that move more freely. Usually three or four themes appear, with the first receiving the most development. The non-imitative passages push beyond what the genre typically permitted: extended duets, and melodic motifs that harden into repeating ostinato patterns. The twelve tientos published after Cabezón's death in Obras de música tell a different story. The six early pieces in that volume resemble the Libro de cifra works closely. The six late tientos do not. They use smaller note values, their subjects are longer and more distinctive, and several of their features look forward to the music of the Baroque period rather than back toward the Renaissance.

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• 5. Variations and the Lost Canon

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  Nine sets of variations appear in Obras de música, where they are called diferencias or discantes or glosas depending on context. The subjects come from Spanish popular songs, dance forms, and standard melodic-harmonic frameworks: the Pavana italiana appears in two separate sets, and the bass pattern known as Las Vacas generates three distinct groups of variations. One set draws on Arbeau's Belle qui tiens ma vie. All of the variation sets share an unusual structural assumption: the first variation begins immediately, without stating the theme, on the premise that the listener already knows the melody. Individual variations are linked by free transitional passages, which makes parsing the form more complicated than it might appear. These pieces are among the earliest high-water marks of the variation genre anywhere in Europe, and they are the works that most directly touched English composers after the 1554-56 English visit. The bulk of Cabezón's music reached print only through the efforts of his son Hernando, who published Obras de música para tecla, arpa y vihuela in Madrid in 1578, twelve years after his father died. Together with the 1557 Libro de cifra nueva, the two collections contain around 275 pieces. Only one vocal work survives: Invocación a la letanía, preserved in the Cancionero de la Casa de Medinaceli. A 1611 inventory from Cuenca Cathedral mentions a mass by Cabezón, but the music itself is gone. Hernando described his own transcriptions of his father's improvisations as "mere crumbs from my father's table" - a phrase that hints at how much the written record fails to capture.

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