Keyboard Rich

Gonzalo de Baena’s Arte novamente inventada pera aprender a tãger (Newly devised method for learning to play) was the first book of keyboard music ever printed on the Iberian Peninsula. Lost for centuries, it was rediscovered in 1992, and early music keyboardist Bruno Forst has since painstakingly decoded its unique tablature system and edited a modern edition, published in 2012. Baena compiled mostly polyphonic vocal music by various composers, from the old Flemish Masters he himself studied, to contemporaries thriving alongside him in the rich musical environment of Spain under the Catholic Monarchs, along with pieces of his own and several by his son, Antonio.