Antonio de Cabaezon Kyries de nuestra Señora Ronald McKean organist

Kyries de nuestra Señora


Antonio de Cabezon
(1510 – 1566)
Quarto Kyries de cada tono
H.C. f.40v
Transcribed and Edited by
William R. Shannon

Performed by Ronald McKean on the Op. 14 Rosales Organ of Mission San Jose, Fremont, California.
The organ is tuned 1/4 meantone and is built in the Mexican/Spanish style.

Many thanks to William R Shannon for transcribing Cabezon’s work from the original tableture.

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Antonio de Cabezón’s organ oeuvre stands at the fulcrum of the Iberian Renaissance, embodying an aesthetic that is at once devoutly contrapuntal and richly ornamental. As organist to Charles V and Philip II, Cabezón absorbed the cosmopolitan musical currents coursing through Habsburg Europe, yet he synthesized them into a resolutely Castilian idiom marked by modal austerity, imitative rigor, and a penchant for elevated artifice. His surviving corpus—preserved principally through the posthumous Obras de música para tecla, arpa y vihuela (1578), edited by his son Hernando—reveals a composer whose apprehension of polyphonic craft rivals that of his contemporaries in the Franco-Flemish sphere while simultaneously anticipating the more idiomatic keyboard virtuosity of the early Baroque.

The tientos, the backbone of his output, demonstrate Cabezón’s ability to transmute vocal polyphony into an intrinsically instrumental discourse. These works typically unfold through an incremental intensification of motivic cells, deploying close imitation, invertible counterpoint, and a refined control of dissonance that evokes a quasi-speculative, even metaphysical, ambience. His meticulous voice-leading is enriched by the frequent employment of glosas—embellished diminutions that navigate between structural sobriety and efflorescent brilliance. In these pieces, Cabezón cultivates a texture that is sober yet sumptuous, often revealing subtle manipulations of mode that heighten affect while preserving architectural symmetry.

Equally significant are his diferencias—sets of variations on popular tunes, dances, or ostinato frameworks—which reveal a more extroverted, improvisatory dimension of his artistry. Here Cabezón juxtaposes melodic clarity with increasingly complex figuration, demonstrating both a profound command of variation technique and a flair for transforming vernacular material into elevated courtly art. His treatment of canciones and liturgical hymns further illustrates his capacity to infuse borrowed melodies with contrapuntal gravitas while maintaining textual intelligibility. Collectively, the organ works of Antonio de Cabezón constitute one of the most monumental achievements of Renaissance keyboard literature, serving as a bridge between the vocal polyphonic legacy of the fifteenth century and the idiomatic instrumental innovations that would flourish in the seventeenth century.