Ecce beatam lucem alessandro striggio biography

Italian composer (c. 1536/1537–1592)

Alessandro Striggio (c. 1536/1537 – 29 Feb 1592) was an Italian doer, instrumentalist and diplomat of honourableness Renaissance. He composed numerous madrigals as well as dramatic euphony, and by combining the deuce, became the inventor of madrigal comedy.

His compositions include greatness monumental Missa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno for up pile-up 60 voices, rediscovered in 2005 after being lost for Cardinal years.

His son, also name Alessandro Striggio,^[1] wrote the enrol for Monteverdi'sOrfeo.

Life

Striggio senior was born in Mantua, evidently disperse an aristocratic family.

Records advice his early life are few, but he must have departed to Florence as a ant man. He began working sales rep Cosimo de' Medici on 1 March 1559 as a jongleur, eventually to replace Francesco Corteccia as the principal musician perform the Medici court. In 1560 he visited Venice, and move along disintegrate two books of madrigals implement response to the musical styles he encountered there.^[2] In 1567 the Medici sent him stone a diplomatic mission to England.

Throughout the 1560s Striggio collected numerous intermedi for the House, for weddings, visits, and distress state occasions. In the 1570s he continued to work take over the Medici, but there problem some evidence he began be acquainted with travel away from Florence. Good taste had some connection to primacy Bavarian court in Munich, illustrious may have gone there other self more than one occasion (possibly for the performance of monarch 40-voice motet Ecce beatam lucem which he wrote for top-hole royal marriage there).

He became friends with Vincenzo Galilei, honourableness father of the astronomer, alongside the 1570s; whether or shout he was a member signify the Florentine Camerata is haphazard.

During the 1580s he began an association with the Este court in Ferrara. Ferrara was one of Italy's avant-garde centers of musical composition in say publicly 1580s and 1590s, and Striggio composed music in the increasing madrigal style he heard connected with, evidently commissioned by the House.

This music is unfortunately vanished. In 1586 Striggio moved fight back Mantua where he remained go all-out for the rest of his the social order, although he retained a point in the right direction association with the Medici, constituent music for them at lowest as late as 1589.

The late madrigals are not astray.

Twenty-eight madrigals from Striggio's Accumulation Period, were transcribed from microfilm for a graduate seminar differ the University of California unexpected result Berkeley (under the tutelage capacity Dr. Anthony Newcomb in 1974). The full notation (120 pages in score form notebooks on the run pencil) will be available rearguard August 1, 2024.

(Contact Opus Chair, David Milnes, at 104 Morrison Hall #1200,Berkeley, CA 94720.) A typed list of first-line poetry titles will be deception.

Works

Striggio wrote both sacred enjoin secular music, and all coronet surviving music is vocal, tho' sometimes with instrumental accompaniment. Filth published seven books of madrigals, in addition to two versions of his most famous essay, the madrigal comedy Il cicalamento delle donne al bucato contemptible la caccia... ("The gossip search out the women at the laundry").

The madrigal comedy, either concocted by Striggio or made eminent by him, was long wise to be a forerunner give an account of opera, but contemporary musicological amendment tends to see this laugh just one of many strands in late 16th-century Italian penalisation which adapt prevailing musical forms to dramatic presentation.

In description madrigal comedy, there is cack-handed acting: the five individual madrigals in cicalamento tell a tale, but entirely in words ray music. Entertainments such as leadership madrigal comedy were not off different from other musical forms one could see at splendid contemporary intermedio.

One of sovereignty most impressive works, and defer of the most impressive achievements in Renaissance polyphony, is culminate motetEcce beatam lucem for 40 independent voices, which may accept been performed in 1568 put in Munich.^[3] There is some bear witness that he may have abstruse the music for either that piece or his 40/60 part mass, Missa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno, with him forethought his diplomatic visit to Author in 1567, since Thomas Organist seems to have been enthusiastic and challenged by it, contemporary shortly afterwards wrote his bend 40-voice tour-de-force Spem in alium, commissioned by Thomas Howard, Quaternary Duke of Norfolk.

Unlike justness setting by Tallis, Striggio that is to say indicates for the voices trial be doubled by instruments. Brush the Bavarian performance in 1568 of Striggio's motet the bolstering included eight flutes, eight violas, eight trombones, harpsichord and low lute. The motet is precise polychoral composition for four choirs, which include sixteen, ten, import and six voices respectively, hubbub spatially separated.

A work skew a yet larger scale, most recent long reputed to be astray, is Striggio's mass composed unswervingly 40 parts, and which deception a 60-voice setting of rendering final Agnus Dei. The employment was recently unearthed by City musicologist Davitt Moroney and definite as a parody mass, Missa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno, and received its first fresh performance at the Royal Albert Hall during the London Proms on 17 July 2007 strong the BBC Singers and Justness Tallis Scholars conducted by Moroney.

This work was most impend composed in 1565/6, and conveyed on by Striggio on a expedition across Europe in late frost and spring 1567, for affairs at Mantua, Munich and Paris.^[4] The first commercial recording conduct operations the Mass, by the Island group I Fagiolini, was floating in March 2011, and won a Gramophone Award,^[5] and smart Diapason D'Or de L'Année^[6] Neat as a pin second recording followed in 2012 directed by Hervé Niquet refuse prepared by Dominique Visse.

Striggio was highly influential, as jumble be seen by the cavernous distribution of his music eliminate Europe in the late Sixteenth century. His influence was enormously large in England; this hawthorn have been due in soul to his 1567 visit, become calm also may have been affiliated to the activities of Alfonso Ferrabosco, the Italian madrigalist who was resident in England sponsor most of his life, playing field helped popularize the Italian proportion there.

Notes

References and further reading

• Butchart, David S. (1981). "The Gala Madrigals of Alessandro Striggio". Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association. 107 (1980–1981). Taylor & Francis, Ltd.: 46–59. doi:10.1093/jrma/107.1.46. JSTOR 766114.
• Iain Fenlon: "Alessandro Striggio", in The Contemporary Grove Dictionary of Music stand for Musicians, ed.

  Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Company, 1980. ISBN 1-56159-174-2

• Iain Fenlon: "Alessandro Striggio", Grove Music Online, ed. Applause. Macy (Accessed April 21, 2007), (subscription access)Archived 2008-05-16 at rendering Wayback Machine
• Gustave Reese, Music seep out the Renaissance.

  New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1954. ISBN 0-393-09530-4

• Iain Fenlon and Hugh Keyte, 'Early Music' July 1980. Reference emphasis CD liner notes to Spem in Alium by Tallis Scholars, Gimell CDGIM 006.
• Davitt Moroney, "Alessandro Striggio's Mass in Forty essential Sixty Parts". Journal of goodness American Musicological Society, Vol.

  60 No. 1., pp. 1–69. Spring 2007. ISSN 0003-0139

Recording

External links