Francisco Côrrea de Arauxo

A Spanish composer and theorist whose extant music survives in the "Facultad organica". There are 69 organ works in this collection by Correa and 62 of them are in the form of the Spanish fantasia (tientos). He often placed the cantus firmus in the soprano and left it, for the most part, undecorated. Correa's developmental use of ornaments in this collection betray a decorated complexity in the melodic line foresaking complex contrapunctus development. Regardless of this quality, Correa's work reveals him to have been one of the most important figures in Baroque organ music in Spain. The tientos begin in simple fashion building to a degree of rhythmic complexification quite difficult to perform. Dissonances involved the contemporaneous playing of a note with its immediate accident. ~ Keith Johnson