Pedro Rabassa

Spanish composer. He was trained at Barcelona Cathedral, later becoming maestro de capilla at the cathedrals in Vich ( 1713 – 14 ), Valencia ( 1714 – 24 ), and Seville ( 1724 – 57 ). The enormous influence he exerted in the last-named post, one of the most important in Spain, led to his works being disseminated throughout the Iberian peninsula and Latin America. More than 400 of his compositions have so far been located; except for a few important secular cantatas they are mainly sacred. Like his teacher francisco Valls , Rabassa made an outstanding contribution to music theory with his manuscript treatise Guía para principiantes ( c. 1720 ) and other writings. He belongs to the first generation of Spanish composers to have adopted the new Italian stylistic conventions of the early 18th century.