Martín de Montesdoca

Martín de Montesdoca (Utrera, near Seville, c. 1525-1526; Yçalco, present-day Izalco in El Salvador, after 1583) was a Spanish music printer active in Seville in the second half of the sixteenth century. His importance lies in having been one of the first printers of polyphonic music and of vihuela music on the Iberian Peninsula, and in having ended his life as a priest in American lands.

After the death of his father in 1547 he returned to his native town and, within a few months, married a well-to-do woman, a distant relative of his residing in Seville, with whom he had two children. In 1551 he signed a contract with the type-founder and printer Antonio de Espinosa, who was setting out for Mexico City, and that same year he rented a workshop from Francisco Gutiérrez, a bookseller who, in 1559, bought the press from him and began printing music in 1560.

His early output included commissions of great reach. In 1554 he agreed with Juan de Salazar, a Seville physician and father-in-law of Miguel de Fuenllana, to print one thousand copies of the Orphenica lyra, a tablature for vihuela of notable significance. The edition suffered clandestine copying by an unfaithful employee, which obliged Fuenllana to search for the pirated copies throughout Spain. He also published the five partbooks of Francisco Guerrero's Sacrae cantiones and, in 1556, printed the first book of polyphonic choral music published in Spain, Juan Vásquez's Agenda defunctorum.

Following the death of his wife in 1557 he was ordained a priest and, in January 1561, resolved to move to Honduras together with at least one of his sons, Pedro. He was first posted to Tuxtla, in Chiapas, and by 1572 he already held the post of precentor (chantre) at the cathedral of Guatemala City, where he overlapped with Hernando Franco, who was maestro de capilla around 1570. In 1584 he resigned the post and settled as a parish priest in Yçalco.

His legacy is twofold: as a printer, his workshop made known essential works of the Spanish Renaissance repertoire; as a churchman, his career illustrates the link between printed music in Seville and the musical life of colonial America.