Musician to the royal court of Spain for several decades, Antonio de Cabezón followed the peripatetic court on its wide travels; he thus allowed himself to be exposed to the most current trends in European compositional practice, and he in turn exercised a strong influence upon generations of later keyboard composers. In the late 1540s and early 1550s, Cabezón first accompanied his pupil, Prince Felipe (son of Queen Isabella), to faraway lands including the Netherlands, Germany, and several Italian city-states, as well as to London when Felipe was marrying Mary Tudor. Thus it should come as no surprise to discover among Cabezón's works variations upon Italian dance tunes such as this Milanese Galliard, and no surprise to discover foreign musicians such as Thomas Tallis and William Byrd adopting some of his style of keyboard variations.

The Milanese Galliard upon which Cabezón composed his music stands in an already lengthy tradition of Italian instrumental music. Sprightly triple-meter dance tunes known as Galliards probably originated as courtly dances in northern Italy, but by the middle of the sixteenth century, intabulations for lute and arrangements of galliards for small instrumental ensembles were appearing throughout French and Dutch lands, as well as in England. Galliards, including this one, tend to follow quick triple meters, with frequent recourse to hemiola rhythms and regular phrase structure. Cabezón sets his "Milanese" galliard in three sections (ABA), playing it twice, but almost never playing a phrase the same way as before. His variation techniques (literally, the "differences") include a simple and direct chordal style, the same style bolstered by a running bass line, chromatic inflectionsof the basic harmony, added suspensions to the same, and all manner of virtuosic passagework, not only as ornaments to the melody, but also to inner voices and even the bass line for extended periods. In this piece, Cabezón earns his reputation both for mastery of keyboard variations, but also for elegant formal structure: after two times through the balanced ABA form of the dance, rising to blistering levels of figuration in the bass, he tacks on a final relaxed moment, returning one last time to the opening phrase, and its simple and direct chordal realization.

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