Juan Cabanilles: Iberian Organ Music vol. 7 Ronald McKean Organist

Juan Cabanilles: Iberian Organ Music vol. 7 Ronald McKean Organist
WSC 44 00:01 Tiento de Contras de 2 tono
WSC 74 15:49 Pedazo de Musica 5 tono
WSC 78 17:46 Gallardas de Quarto tono
WSC 174 31:35 Tiento de 6 tono de Clarines
WSC 135 41:28 Tiento 8 tono Partido de Mano Izquierda
WSC 99 56:39 Tiento 1 tono Lleno
WSC 94 1:04:30 Tiento de falsas primer tono

Ronald McKean performs the works of Juan Cabanilles on the Rosales opus 11 of Mission San Jose, Fremont, California. Many thanks to William R. Shannon for the tremendous work on his editions of Cabanilles. His editions can be found on IMSLP

Juan Bautista Cabanilles (1644–1712), often hailed as the apotheosis of the Spanish Baroque organ tradition, stands as a towering figure in the Iberian keyboard repertoire. As principal organist of Valencia Cathedral for over four decades, Cabanilles cultivated a compositional voice of remarkable breadth and depth, synthesizing the contrapuntal rigor of the Franco-Flemish school with the exuberant idioms of the Spanish tiento. His oeuvre encompasses an expansive array of genres—tientos de falsas, tientos de batalla, pasacalles, folías, and various liturgical versets—all exhibiting an extraordinary command of counterpoint, rhythmic vitality, and ornamental fluency.

Cabanilles’ tientos, arguably the zenith of his artistic output, display an astonishing contrapuntal dexterity and structural inventiveness. These multi-sectional works often oscillate between imitative polyphony and virtuosic figuration, evincing both scholastic discipline and improvisatory spontaneity. Particularly notable are his tientos de falsas, in which pungent dissonances and chromatic inflections convey an expressive gravitas that borders on the ecstatic. In contrast, his tientos de batalla embrace a martial ethos, replete with fanfare-like motifs and toccata textures evocative of the battlefield—a reflection of both Iberian bravado and liturgical exuberance.

Beyond the tiento, Cabanilles demonstrated a proclivity for variation forms, including diferencias on popular dance and folk themes such as the folía, which he transforms with kaleidoscopic invention. His liturgical versets, though often brief, are masterpieces of concision and timbral ingenuity, tailored to the richly coloristic palette of the Spanish baroque organ with its divided registers and horizontal reeds. In sum, Cabanilles’ corpus represents a fulcrum between Renaissance modality and emergent Baroque tonality, embodying the expressive extremes and ornamental opulence of the Spanish Golden Age