2026.01

The organ of Cabanilles

Joan Baptista Cabanilles (1644-1712) is the most important keyboard musician in the Hispanic area of the second half of the s. XVII and early XVIII. On the other hand, he is the great unknown, both from a biographical and interpretative point of view. His production for keyboard is the most extensive in all of Europe of his time and nowadays it is hardly performed. Paradoxically, two of the composer's most performed works are wrongly attributed, the Batalla “imperial” and the Corrente italiana.

The aim of this text is to expose the organs that Cabanilles had in Valencia, both in the Cathedral and some he was related to in the rest of the city, in order to get closer to the type of instrument this composer knew, in a period of aesthetic changes in the Valencian organ building. To get closer to the interpretation and understanding of his music, it is essential to know the type of organ and organ building that Cabanilles knew and for which he thought his music, a different instrumental model from the later one that, especially after his death, homogenized the Iberian Peninsula.

The present article takes in account the most recent texts published by researchers of the music of Cabanilles and the context of the Valencian organ building of the 17th and 18th centuries. The purpose of this text is not to provide new information, but to bring it together and try to provide some tools for the interpretation and understanding of his work.