Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (jan 1, 1525 – jan 1, 1594)

Description:

AKA "The Papal Staple"

Italian renaissance composer. Along with William Byrd, he "brought the ars perfecta to its final musical height". Palestrina spent his career working in Rome, the seat of Roman Catholic power. His "Missa Papae Marcelli (Pope Marcellus Mass) showed a new attention to the intelligibility of sacred words, a concern associated with the Church reforms instituted at the Council of Trent.

"Palestrina was teh quasi-official musical spokesman of Catholic power in Rome at a time when teh Church was being challenged by Reformation movements in Germany and elsewhere... Palestrina was the pope's composer, a veritable papal institution in his own right."

Wrote 104 Masses, almost 400 motets, Vesper hymans and Offertories, and two books of secular part songs (madrigals)

The technical regularity of Palestrina's music, along with its towering prestige, made him the basis of the most enduring academic style in the history of European music. At first this was a matter of turning the Sistine Chapel--the pope's own parish church in the Vatican--into a musical time capsule, sealing it off from history by decree and freezing the perfected polyphonic art of Palestrina into a timeless dogma. Long after the "concerted"style that mixed separate vocal and instrumental parts had become standard for Catholic church music, especially in Italy, the Sistine Chapel maintained a rule that forbade the use of instruments, permitting only voices, and mandated the retention of ars perfecta polyphony as its standard repertory. We still talk of vocal pieces being sung ä cappella Sistina"(in the style of the Sistine Chapel) when sung without instrumental accompaniment.

Palestrina remained the papal staple. He is the earliest composer whose works have an unbroken tradition in performance from his time to ours. Even more remarkable, composers continued to be trained long after his time to write in the a cappella, ars perfecta style (or what was taken as the "Palestrina" style). By the early seventeenth century, two styles were officially recognized by church composers: the stile moderno, or "modern style,"which kept up with the taste of the times; and the stile antico, or öld style,"which was the timelessly preserved Palestrina style, a style that had in effect stepped out of history and into eternity.

Added to timeline:

Date: