La Libreria de Canto de Organo

Until remarkably recently, the main focus of Spanish musical historiography has been the cathedral: both as centre of musical activity and as repository of major musical sources from medieval times to the nineteenth century. Historically there are two main reasons why this has proved to be the case: first, the fact that musical and documentary material pertaining to the cathedrals in the Iberian world has, very largely, remained in situ; and, second, and not unrelated, the fact that until the 1980s Spanish musicology was largely the province of clerics, or men who at least had been trained in religious seminaries. Despite the process of desamortización, the sale of church property, as part of liberal attempts to redistribute wealth, which began at the end of the eighteenth century and continued through the nineteenth, the music manuscripts and printed books acquired by cathedrals for use in the celebration of the liturgy and kept as repositories of repertory were largely unaffected. Even the far-reaching reforms of Juan Álvarez Mendizábal (1790–1853) seem to have affected mainly the monasteries and convents, some of whose music collections were indeed transferred to centralized, national libraries in Madrid and Barcelona, while the cathedral libraries remained largely unscathed.

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