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Anchieta was a singer, a churchman, and a composer. He died in 1523. He was born and died in the Basque country, part of a large, locally powerful. He worked for the royal chapel of Castile, in its various forms and places and through its many vicissitudes. He joined Isabel's court in 1489 and, over the years, would serve Prince Juan, Margaret of Austria (Juan's bride) for a brief period in 1497, his sister Juana, Ferdinand, and finally Charles V, from whose service he retired in 1519. It was a remarkable life that would take him ali over the Castilian and Aragonese realms, to the musical glories of Flanders and probably to England with Juana and her husband Philip the Fair of Burgundy, as well as into the quiet, dark melancholy of Juana's seclusion in Tordesillas. He was handsomely rewarded from the royal coffers and through presentation to ecclesiastical benefices, and eventually reached the position of abbot. His income was such that he could afford to build an impressive Moorish-style house in his home town of Azpeitia. The trajectory of his career was thus exceptional in its consistently h igh level of achievement and reward, although, in general terms, it followed a course that his colleagues in the royal chapels would have recognized and to which they would have aspired. His biography reveals much about patterns of royal patronage in the Spanish kingdoms around 1500 and about the social standing and opportunities for those in royal service. The extent to which members ofthe minor nobility, such as Anchieta or his colleague Francisco de Peñalosa, served in the royal chapels remains to be explored, but these musicians from relatively wealthy backgrounds were clearly quite well educated as well as being trained musically in the cathedral or collegiate church context. As a composer, Anchieta, being from a slightly earlier generation than Peñalosa, can be seen as a pioneer in the ever-expanding process of polyphonization in the sacred and secular musical repertory performed in court ; Peer reviewed |