Though blind from birth, Antonio de Cabezón developed an extremely successful musical career as an organist (several of the most virtuosic historical players of that instrument have been blind). Barely past his fifteenth year, the Castillian Cabezón was employed by the Queen of Spain, and soon thereafter he was playing in the Imperial chamber of Charles V. He served as musical tutor, and later chamber musician, to the prince and next king, Felipe (Phillip II). His influence on Spanish keyboard music was seminal, and his music also apparently traveled well across Europe, perhaps during his own travels to Milan, Naples, Germany, England, and the Netherlands. Spanish organists before him had composed "diferencias," or sets of keyboard variations on popular tunes, but only after Cabezón's work did the genre spread to England and Italy.

The variation set Cabezón composed upon the popular song El Canto la Dama le Demanda (song of the demanding woman) typifies his work in the genre. He begins with a fairly straightforward four-voiced setting of the song, though one livened by passages of passing notes that bridge the cadences. The harmonic character and the four clear-cut phrases remain clearly audible, including some jarring dissonances: two successive strong beats contain the "devil's interval," the tritone, shortly before the end of the original song. Though Cabezón does clearly reach the song's concluding cadence, he frequently (as here) composes bridging material in an inner voice to carry the musical momentum into the first variation. Both the first and second variations remain largely content to elaborate the basic melodic and harmonic structure, both by more ornamental melodies and by adding inner voices that run in sweet parallel to the melody. For variety, in the third variation the lowest voice takes on a more ornamental character, with that function being triumphantly reclaimed by the top voice in the fourth. In the fifth and final variation, the composer spices the entire process up by introducing different rhythms, both jittery sequences in the bass, and triple figures that pass repeatedly between bass and upper voices. His royal master would at each new variation believe his blind servant could not outdo the last.

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