Imagine you are asked in an academic meeting to name three or four prominent Spanish composers in the field of the string quartet. How many would you be able to cite? You might be tempted to answer that the quartet was in fact hardly cultivated in Spain, or you might perhaps wonder whether Boccherini could be taken to be a ‘Spanish’ composer. These potential responses to this fictional situation encapsulate well two of the historiographical preconceptions that have governed our view of this area, the first of which is, to put it in Friedhelm Krummacher's words, that Spanish composers ‘adopted a particularly abstinent attitude’ towards the genre (‘sich . . . besonders abstinent zum Streichquartett verhielten’; Geschichte des Streichquartetts, volume 2 (Laaber: Laaber, 2005), 400).