Spain and Portugal

The “golden age” of Iberian keyboard music extended from the middle of the sixteenth century to the turn of the eighteenth century, its major figures beginning with Antonio de Cabezón and ending with Juan Cabanilles. Music in Spain and Portugal was by no means untouched by outside influences, but it remained somewhat insular and remarkably conservative, especially in the seventeenth century, and never completely escaped the ethos of the Renaissance. Even performance practices did not seem to change radically, some still following the guidelines of a sixteenth-century aesthetic in the early 1700s. ¹