Music

From the beginning, music has been afundamental and irreplaceable component of Christian worship. And it is natural that where this worship has been distinguished by its solemnity and splendor, music has reached artistic levels of true privilege.

The historian Alonso Morgado had said in the 16th century that the music and chapel of this Cathedral “can compete with the best in all of Christendom….and so it is a thing of Heaven, in this Holy Church the softness of its music….”

In order to value the level of music in the Cathedral of Seville in its just terms, we only have to look at the national and even international relevance of the majority of those in charge (chapel masters, organists, etc.); at the deployment and quality of the means (instruments, scores) that the Chapter has always placed at the disposal of its musicians; at the ambitious planning and professional preparation of the different actors (choirboys, chapel musicians, copyists, etc.), and the significant remuneration they received to guarantee their most painstaking and demanding services; at the extraordinary wealth of its musical archives, despite the neglect and numerous despoilments that it has suffered in its long history.), and endowed them with important remunerations with which they guaranteed their most careful and demanding services; in the extraordinary richness of its musical Archive, in spite of the abandonment and numerous despoilments that it has suffered in its long history; and in the manifest admiration and unanimous opinion of all musicologists and scholars who have looked at our musical collections.

While it is true that the vicissitudes of time have not always allowed cathedral music to maintain the level reached in the centuries of the Renaissance, it is also true that the concern of the Chapter for the solemnization of cathedral worship to reach the highest possible level has been an invariable constant, to the point of writing a beautiful musical history woven of effort and generosity.