With Duarte Lobo and John IV of Portugal, he represented the "golden age" of Portuguese polyphony.
He attended the Colégio dos Moços do Coro, a choir school associated with the Évora cathedral, studying with Manuel Mendes and Cosme Delgado.
In the early 1620s he was resident at the ducal household of Vila Viçosa, where he was befriended by the Duke of Barcelos—later to become King John IV.
Cardoso's works are models of Palestrinian polyphony, and are written in a refined, precise style which completely ignores the development of the Baroque idiom elsewhere in Europe.
His style has much in common with Tomás Luis de Victoria, in its careful treatment of dissonance, occasional polychoral writing, and frequent cross-relations, which were curiously common among both Iberian and English composers of the time.