During his lifetime, Morales composed a huge volume of music, the vast majority Latin liturgical compositions, that issued from music presses in Lyons, Wittenberg, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Antwerp, Milan, Rome and Venice. And for at least fifty years after his death demand for his music was so strong that publishers in Alcalá de Henares, Paris, and Seville joined this impressive roll call of international publishing centres. Such publications, as well as manuscript copies of his works, ensured the widest possible international distribution of Morales considerable oeuvre. When in distant Mexico City music was being selected for the 1559 commemoration (honras) of the death of Charles V, it was the music of Morales that was chosen. Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Mexico, begins his splendidly detailed description of the honras thus:

All this having been performed with pomp and circumstance, and after all the dignitaries had seated themselves, the vigil began in the following manner: the chapelmaster directed two choirs in the invitatory, one of them singing Circumdederunt me and the other the psalm Exultemus, all in polyphony and all composed by Cristóbal de Morales. The vigil began with such devotion and such fine voices that the spirits of all present were uplifted.

Unknown Morales

Although the international fame that Morales enjoyed throughout his lifetime resonated for centuries after his death, it is remarkable how little of his music is known today. Even the edition of his complete works remains incomplete, making the task of bringing his extraordinary works before the public a difficult undertaking for all but the most enterprising of performers. Similarly, our knowledge of Morales’s life remains disconcertingly incomplete. Nearly all the information we have concerning Morales’s biography stems from research carried out in the 1940s and 1950s by two remarkable musicologists: José María Llorens Cisteró and Robert Stevenson. Until very recent research by another North American, Alison Sanders McFarland, our knowledge of Morales’s life relied almost entirely on data that was extracted from archives over half a century ago.