To call any historical period a ‘Golden Age’ is an extravagant claim to make. And yet, when the huge outpouring of cathedral music by the vast number of composers active in Spain during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is examined, the sheer quality of it can make such a term justified. Even if not all the music of this epoch has the quality of gold, a significant amount earned the admiration of contemporary musicians, and it continues to evoke admiration today. No student of Renaissance music can afford to ignore this rich body of evidence for a once-thriving living tradition, and no general historian can ignore the fact that the music of the Church in Spain in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was a powerful expression of Spanish Counter-Reformation culture.

A complete history of the Golden Age of Spanish Church music has yet to be written, but a significant inroad was made almost fifty years ago when the American author Robert Stevenson produced his ground-breaking publication Spanish Cathedral Music in the Golden Age. It was Stevenson who set out the chronological limits of this Golden Age as he saw it (1530–1611, the year 1611 marking the death of one of the supreme masters of the age, Tomás Luis de Victoria), although, of course, such a period cannot have a precise beginning and end. Since the publication of that pioneering work in 1961, much further work has been done in the English-speaking world and in Spain on this fascinating and – until recently – much neglected area of musicological and historical research. Stevenson himself has since published revisions to some of the information found in his original study and other writers have added extensively to the field. Hitherto undocumented archival sources have revealed much information about individual musicians and their position in the Church hierarchy. Much more is known about performance practice than was known in 1961 and, of course, much more of the music has been transcribed and made available in modern performing editions; one has only to consult the catalogues of specialist music publishers to see the advances that have been made in this respect.