Luis Venegas de Henestrosa and composing keyboard music in sixteenth-century Spain

The Libro de cifra nueva para tecla, harpa y vihuela (Alcalá de Henares, 1558), compiled by the priest Luis Venegas de Henestrosa (d.1570), is recognised as an important source of organ music by Antonio de Cabezón and his Spanish contemporaries. Its title-page states that it was ‘compuesto por Luys Venegas de Henestrosa’, an expression found on several printed single-author collections of instrumental music from sixteenth-century Spain. There is, however, no evidence that Venegas was a composer and his collection appears to be devoted entirely to music by others.
In 1952, John Ward, following a lead from Emilio Pujol, drew attention a group of 19 fantasias headed ‘vihuela tientos in the eight tones’ that join together disparate sections of fantasias published in earlier tablatures for vihuela, mainly those of Luis de Narváez (1538) and Alonso Mudarra (1546). Dubbing the manner in which some of these pieces were created ‘scissors and paste’, he suggested that ‘Venegas may have taken frequent opportunity to recreate in his own fashion sections of borrowed music, substituting these for the original’ (‘The Editorial Methods of Venegas de Henestrosa’, Musica Disciplina, 6 (1952), 109, 111).
Subsequent research has shown that, until the beginning of the eighteenth century, similar methods were employed by a number of composer–compilers of organ music throughout the Iberian peninsula, including the anonymous compiler of P-Cug, MM 242 (1550s–60s). Focussing on the case of Venegas’s fantasias, I will suggest how such compilation procedures reflected the training of keyboard players, particularly as described in Tomás de Santa Maria’s Arte de tañer fantasia (1565), which devotes significant space to describing techniques for linking already-composed sections together.