Musicology has tended to see the 18th century Spanish as a stage of decline. However, this volume shows it, in line with the latest historiographic trends, as a period of change and modernization in which the Spanish musical culture opened to the different European influences. The works presented at a congress held in 1993 at the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies (University of Wales), which cover the different genres of instrumental and vocal music of the time, are offered here, offering the latest research on such diverse subjects such as opera, musical instruments, chamber cantata or religious carol, in addition to two studies on the presence of Spanish music in colonial America.