ABSTRACT
The Magnificat, sung every day at the end of Vespers, was, of course, a text frequently set to music in the Renaissance—though not so much in Segovia s.s., which has only three others. Improvised music is obviously impossible to capture fully afterward. Juan de Anchieta’s early service music is clearly a step and away from the tradition as outlined by Matheo de Aranda, for starters because he tends to paraphrase his chant model rather than put it into only breves, and because he prefers to put it in the superius, not the tenor. Anchieta’s Conditor alme siderum may be more a tidy piece of craftsmanship than a profound masterpiece. Anchieta gets no fewer than nine attributions, for what prove to be eight compositions; otherwise, there are only two others to Spaniards. Anchieta, in short, is somewhere near the center of the manuscript.
