Narváez was a Spanish composer active during the second quarter of the sixteenth century. The bulk of his music was written for the vihuela, a plucked stringed instrument that might be considered a cross between the guitar and the lute; it generally had the familiar guitar shape but was strung like a lute, with six or seven unison pairs of strings. The Seys Libros del Delphin de Música was a large collection of his works for vihuela solo, published in 1538. It contains a selection of the vihuela music types of the day, including quasi-improvisatory fantasias, vihuela versions of multipart vocal pieces (many from outside Spain), sets of variations, and more. The popularity of the pieces the book contained is evident both from their wide distribution (they were reprinted as far afield as northern Europe, in versions for the more common lute) and from the presence in Spain of arrangements of them for keyboard instruments.

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