The musical establishment of Felipe II's royal court in Madrid performed in the most current style. The court imported the best Flemish singers for its choir and recruited Flemish organ builders to construct the most modern instrument possible to sit under the fingers of its celebrated master organist, Antonio de Cabezón. The instrument apparently boasted of two manuals replete with separable stops and a complete pedalwork, as well; both from his travels and at home, Cabezón thus knew the "modern" sixteenth century potential for what would later be called the "king of instruments." Perhaps his intimate knowledge of the sonic capabilities of the instrument helped fuel his invention when crafting contrapuntal variations upon well-known melodies, both liturgical and secular tunes. His particularly elegant blend of ornamental fluency and lyric flow influenced a generation of European keyboard composers and continues to delight our ears today.

In the case of this set of "diferencias" (variations), Cabezón chose an Italian Pavana, a popular dance—as well as a subject for independent instrumental compositions—which he may have picked up while traveling with Felipe's court. In its original form, this pavana had three regular and quite danceable phrases, repeating the second for an ABB structure. Already in his first iteration of the melody, Cabezón coats the melody and some of the subsidiary accompanimental voices with ornamental runs, some a bit awkward but most reasonably straightforward. An abrupt cross-relation announces the beginning of the first of the set's four further variations. It features an incessant motion, principally encrusting and disguising the upper-voice melody. In the following variation, the lowest voice takes on the bulk of the challenging ornamental motion, and as a natural outgrowth to the technique, Cabezón next assigns the very melody to the lowest voice (in this case, the pedal). Two florid voices offer counterpoints to it. The pedal retreats once again, and the melody migrates to, of all places, the tenor voice, allowing the composer to recast the entire piece's harmonic context in often surprising ways. The pedal returns beneath the polyphonic structure for the length of the final phrase, putting an excellent cap on the overall form.

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