Colonial Spanish American music consists of several different strands: European music of the Renaissance and baroque periods; autochthonous music persisting from the pre-conquest period; African music transported chiefly from the sub-Saharan Atlantic coastal regions; and, of course, mixtures of all three – European, Indian and African.

As early as the 1550s, only half a century after the arrival of the Europeans, Latin America displayed the musical diversity which was to be characteristic of the entire colonial period. Juan Pérez Materano, the dean of Cartagena cathedral and resident in Cartagena since 1537, was putting the final touches to a treatise on music that discussed both polyphony and plain song. His royal printing licence, issued at Valladolid on 19 December 1559, permitted him to publish it anywhere in the Americas with copyright privilege lasting ten years.

In Mexico City the 1550s witnessed a dramatic revival of Aztec cult songs (Xochicuicatl). The 91 ‘flower songs’ in a contemporary Nahuatl manuscript now known as Cantares en idioma mexicano (first published in facsimile by Antonio Peñafiel in 1904) contain evocations of slain warrior ancestors dated 1551, 1553 and later. Although lacking melodies in five-line European notation, the cantares nonetheless include musical rubrics ranging from the seventeen-syllable drum-beat pattern for strophes 49–54 to the 22-syllable pattern for strophes 55–60 of Song XLV. To show the variety of the drum-beat patterns required in these cantares, Karl A. Nowotny tabulated 758 different patterns, the most complex belonging to the latest songs.