Luis Venegas de Henestrosa

Luis Venegas de Henestrosa was a Spanish priest and musician, born in Écija, in the province of Seville, around 1510, and died in Taracena, near Guadalajara, on 27 December 1570. His significance rests above all on his importance as the author of a major book of music for keyboard, harp and vihuela, and as a witness to musical life in the ecclesiastical circles of sixteenth-century Toledo.

He belonged to the clergy of the diocese of Toledo and, between 1535 and the death of Cardinal Juan Tavera in 1545, he served that prelate. He was later appointed administrator of the Hospital of San Juan Bautista in Toledo on 25 July 1570, although he resigned from the post on health grounds on 22 November of the same year. In his will he asked his heirs to arrange the publication of one of his works, Armonya de los tres mundos, which is now considered lost.

His most important surviving work is the Libro de cifra nueva, published in Alcalá de Henares in 1557 and dedicated to Diego de Tavera, Bishop of Jaén and nephew of the cardinal. Conceived as the first of seven volumes, it presents a variant of cifra notation in which the numbers 1 to 7 represent the diatonic degrees of a scale. This system was later used by Antonio de Cabezón in his Obras de música (Madrid, 1578). The book brings together 138 pieces, seventy of which are anonymous, preceded by a discourse on musical theory and instrumental practice. Fantasias, tientos, settings of hymns and plainchant melodies, and arrangements of works by Josquin, Crecquillon and Clemens non Papa, among others, predominate. Many pieces derive from contemporary collections for vihuela and lute, and more than thirty compositions by Cabezón appear.

The Libro de cifra nueva is today a key source for understanding Spanish instrumental music of the mid-sixteenth century and the transmission of polyphonic repertoire to the keyboard and the vihuela.