Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. By Marco Della Sciucca

If there is a fundamental musical subject of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a compositional problem the work explores, it is the tension between two styles cultivated in church music of Bach’s time. One style was modern and drew on up-to-date music such as the instrumental concerto and the opera aria. The other was old-fashioned and fundamentally vocal, borrowing and adapting the style of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, his sixteenth-century contemporaries, and his seventeenth-century imitators. The movements that make up Bach’s Mass can be read as exploring the entire spectrum of possibilities offered by these two styles (the modern and the antique), ranging from movements purely in one or the other to a dazzling variety of ways of combining the two. The work illustrates a fundamental opposition in early-eighteenth-century sacred music that Bach confronts and explores in the Mass.

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Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, nuovi documenti biografici

Bulletin de la Société française de musicologie ◽

10.2307/924830 ◽

1921 ◽

Vol 2 (8) ◽

pp. 144

Author(s):

Julien Tiersot ◽

Raffaele Casimiri

Keyword(s):

Giovanni Pierluigi Da Palestrina

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The New Roman Style and Giovanni Maria Nanino

Journal of Musicology ◽

10.1525/jm.2019.36.2.167 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 36 (2) ◽

pp. 167-194

Author(s):

Anthony Newcomb

Keyword(s):

Sixteenth Century ◽

Future Research ◽

Giovanni Pierluigi Da Palestrina ◽

Musical Characteristics

As a composer of secular music, Giovanni Maria Nanino seems to have published only three books of madrigals and one of canzonettas, yet he contributed numerous pieces to anthologies, and his madrigals were often reprinted. Scarcely an important anthology appeared in these years without a contribution by him. Indeed in the fifteen years before the death of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina in 1594, Nanino rivaled him as the most esteemed of Roman composers; in the decade after Palestrina’s death, Nanino was the undisputed head of the large and important Roman school. By certain measures Nanino was the most often represented composer in anthologies printed between 1570 and 1620. In this area he surpasses not only Palestrina, but also Luca Marenzio, Philippe de Monte, and Alessandro Striggio. Despite Nanino’s immense prestige among his contemporaries, in modern histories his secular music is scarcely discussed, with just a passing mention in Alfred Einstein’s voluminous The Italian Madrigal. This article establishes Nanino’s leadership in defining the new Roman style of madrigal in the late sixteenth century, outlines its musical characteristics, and suggests paths for future research into this as yet little studied school.

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