Gioseppe Caimo

Last updated

Gioseppe Caimo (also Giuseppe) (c. 1545 – between September 6, 1584 and October 31, 1584) was an Italian composer and organist of the Renaissance, mainly active in Milan. He was a prolific composer of madrigals and other secular vocal music, and was one of the most prominent musicians in Milan in the 1570s and early 1580s.

Renaissance music

Renaissance music is vocal and instrumental music written and performed in Europe during the Renaissance era. Consensus among music historians has been to start the era around 1400, with the end of the medieval era, and to close it around 1600, with the beginning of the Baroque period, therefore commencing the musical Renaissance about a hundred years after the beginning of the Renaissance as it is understood in other disciplines. As in the other arts, the music of the period was significantly influenced by the developments which define the Early Modern period: the rise of humanistic thought; the recovery of the literary and artistic heritage of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome; increased innovation and discovery; the growth of commercial enterprises; the rise of a bourgeois class; and the Protestant Reformation. From this changing society emerged a common, unifying musical language, in particular, the polyphonic style of the Franco-Flemish school, whose greatest master was Josquin des Prez.

Milan Italian city

Milan is a city in northern Italy, capital of Lombardy, and the second-most populous city in Italy after Rome, with the city proper having a population of 1,372,810 while its metropolitan city has a population of 3,245,308. Its continuously built-up urban area has a population estimated to be about 5,270,000 over 1,891 square kilometres. The wider Milan metropolitan area, known as Greater Milan, is a polycentric metropolitan region that extends over central Lombardy and eastern Piedmont and which counts an estimated total population of 7.5 million, making it by far the largest metropolitan area in Italy and the 54th largest in the world. Milan served as capital of the Western Roman Empire from 286 to 402 and the Duchy of Milan during the medieval period and early modern age.

Contents

Life

The Duomo di Milano in 1856. Caimo was organist here between 1580 and 1584. Milano Duomo 1856.jpg
The Duomo di Milano in 1856. Caimo was organist here between 1580 and 1584.

He was born in Milan. No biographical details about his early life are known, but he was evidently a precocious composer, for his first publication was a book of four voice madrigals in 1564, written when he was probably in his late teens, and one of his compositions was probably performed for Emperor Maximilian when he was in Milan in 1563. This piece, Alli figliuoli del Sereniss. Re Massimigliano d'Austria Eccelsa e generosa prole degna, No. 5 in his 1564 publication, is taken by Alfred Einstein as evidence he was already renowned in his home city at this young age. Einstein called it "a fine, sonorous music to be played in the open." [1]

Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor King of the Romans, King of Hungary and Bohemia

Maximilian II, a member of the Austrian House of Habsburg, was Holy Roman Emperor from 1564 until his death. He was crowned King of Bohemia in Prague on 14 May 1562 and elected King of Germany on 24 November 1562. On 8 September 1563 he was crowned King of Hungary and Croatia in the Hungarian capital Pressburg. On 25 July 1564 he succeeded his father Ferdinand I as ruler of the Holy Roman Empire.

Alfred Einstein German-American musicologist and music editor

Alfred Einstein was a German-American musicologist and music editor. He is best known for being the editor of the first major revision of the Köchel catalogue, which was published in the year 1936. The Köchel catalogue is the extensive catalogue of the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Caimo was organist at the church of San Ambrogio Maggiore in Milan from 1564, as indicated on the title page of his madrigal book of that year, probably until 1580 when he became the organist at Milan Cathedral. During the 1570s he acquired a connection with Wilhelm V's ducal court in Bavaria, which had one of the most distinguished musical establishments north of the Alps, but they never succeeded in persuading Caimo to leave Milan. Caimo died young and evidently suddenly: Pietro Tini, the publisher of Caimo's second book of canzonettas (Venice, 1584) wrote that it was an "acerba et impensata morte" (bitter and unexpected death). [2]

Milan Cathedral Church in Milan, Italy

Milan Cathedral is the cathedral church of Milan, Lombardy, Italy. Dedicated to St Mary of the Nativity, it is the seat of the Archbishop of Milan, currently Archbishop Mario Delpini. The cathedral took nearly six centuries to complete. It is the largest church in Italy, the third largest in Europe and the fourth largest in the world.

William V, Duke of Bavaria

William V, called the Pious, was Duke of Bavaria from 1579 to 1597.

Music and influence

Caimo published four books of music which have survived, and six which are lost. The four surviving collections are two books of madrigals, for four and five voices respectively (Milan, 1564 and Venice, 1584), a book of Neapolitan canzoni (villanelle) for three voices (Milan, 1566), and a second book of canzonette, this one for four voices (Venice, 1584). The lost publications include madrigals, canzonette and motets, published in Brescia and Venice. [3]

Naples Comune in Campania, Italy

Naples is the regional capital of Campania and the third-largest municipality in Italy after Rome and Milan. In 2017, around 967,069 people lived within the city's administrative limits while its province-level municipality has a population of 3,115,320 residents. Its continuously built-up metropolitan area is the second or third largest metropolitan area in Italy and one of the most densely populated cities in Europe.

Villanelle fixed verse form; nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain

A villanelle, also known as villanesque is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first tercet repeated alternately until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines. The villanelle is an example of a fixed verse form. The word derives from Latin, then Italian, and is related to the initial subject of the form being the pastoral.

His style represents the shift from the popular villanella for three voices to the later canzonetta which was much like a madrigal. His early music shows the influence of the French chanson, as well as the native tradition of popular song. Musically, his canzonettas are light, graceful, and unpretentious; Einstein said that he is "fresher and more naive than the poets whose texts he uses." [4] Other music of his is more adventurous, such as three chromatic madrigals in terza rima, referred to by musicologist Iain Fenlon as "gloomy ... [and] entirely appropriate texts for a city suffering from exorbitant taxation, economic depression and violence caused by Spanish oppression." [5]

Chromaticism is a compositional technique interspersing the primary diatonic pitches and chords with other pitches of the chromatic scale. Chromaticism is in contrast or addition to tonality or diatonicism. Chromatic elements are considered "elaborations of or substitutions for diatonic scale members".

Chromaticism is almost by definition an alteration of, an interpolation in or deviation from this basic diatonic organization.

Iain Alexander Fenlon is a British musicologist who specializes in music from 1450–1650; particularly Renaissance and early Baroque music from Italy.

Caimo's chromaticism is most extreme in his fourth book of madrigals, which was for five voices and published the year of his death (1584). He includes passages with chromatic mediants  – chords with roots a third apart – as well as circle-of-fifths passages that reach harmonically remote regions, such as G-flat, something done rarely even during this experimental time, the decades prior to the development of functional tonality. [5]

Mediant the third scale degree of a diatonic scale, between the supertonic and the subdominant

In music, the mediant is the third scale degree of a diatonic scale, being the note halfway between the tonic and the dominant. It is sung as mi in solfege. Similarly, the submediant is halfway between the tonic and subdominant. The fifth note is almost always a perfect fifth, while the third note can equally be a minor or major third.

Tonality arranges pitches or chords to induce a hierarchy of perceived relations, stabilities, and attractions

Tonality is the arrangement of pitches and/or chords of a musical work in a hierarchy of perceived relations, stabilities, attractions and directionality. In this hierarchy, the single pitch or triadic chord with the greatest stability is called the tonic. The root of the tonic chord forms the name given to the key; so in the key of C major, the note C is both the tonic of the scale and the root of the tonic chord. Simple folk music songs often start and end with the tonic note. The most common use of the term "is to designate the arrangement of musical phenomena around a referential tonic in European music from about 1600 to about 1910". Contemporary classical music from 1910 to the 2000s may practice or avoid any sort of tonality—but harmony in almost all Western popular music remains tonal. Harmony in jazz includes many but not all tonal characteristics of the European common practice period, sometimes known as "classical music".

Other composers who influenced Caimo included Vincenzo Ruffo and Nicola Vicentino. Ruffo was one of the most prominent of the northern Italian musicians who followed the suggested reforms of the Council of Trent, and Nicola Vicentino was one of the most experimental musicians and music theorists of mid-century. Caimo himself seems to have had little influence outside of Milan, with his name only appearing a handful of times in literature of the era. Milan, under Spanish rule during Caimo's time, was not the musical center it had been under the Sforza dynasty a century earlier, having lost its place to Venice as the musical center of northern Italy. [5] [6]

Notes

  1. ↑ Einstein, vol.2 p. 600
  2. ↑ Einstein, vol.2 p. 599
  3. ↑ Fenlon, "Gioseppe Caimo", Grove online
  4. ↑ Einstein, vol. 2 p. 601
  5. 1 2 3 Fenlon, Grove online
  6. ↑ Donà, "Milan", Grove online

Related Research Articles

Adrian Willaert French-Flemish composer

Adrian Willaert was a Netherlandish composer of the Renaissance and founder of the Venetian School. He was one of the most representative members of the generation of northern composers who moved to Italy and transplanted the polyphonic Franco-Flemish style there.

Giaches de Wert was a Franco-Flemish composer of the late Renaissance, active in Italy. Intimately connected with the progressive musical center of Ferrara, he was one of the leaders in developing the style of the late Renaissance madrigal. He was one of the most influential of late sixteenth-century madrigal composers, particularly on Claudio Monteverdi, and his later music was formative on the development of music of the early Baroque era.

Cipriano de Rore Italian composer

Cyprien «Cipriano» de Rore was a Franco-Flemish composer of the Renaissance, active in Italy. Not only was he a central representative of the generation of Franco-Flemish composers after Josquin des Prez who went to live and work in Italy, but he was one of the most prominent composers of madrigals in the middle of the 16th century. His experimental, chromatic, and highly expressive style had a decisive influence on the subsequent development of that secular music form.

A madrigal is a secular vocal music composition of the Renaissance and early Baroque eras. Traditionally, polyphonic madrigals are unaccompanied; the number of voices varies from two to eight, and most frequently from three to six. It is quite distinct from the Italian Trecento madrigal of the late 13th and 14th centuries, with which it shares only the name.

Hans Leo Hassler German composer and organist

Hans Leo Hassler was a German composer and organist of the late Renaissance and early Baroque eras, elder brother of composer Jakob Hassler. He was born in Nuremberg and died in Frankfurt am Main.

Marc'Antonio Ingegneri was an Italian composer of the late Renaissance. He was born in Verona and died in Cremona. Even though he spent most of his life working in northern Italy, because of his stylistic similarity to Palestrina he is often considered to be a member of the Roman School of polyphonic church music. He is also famous as the teacher of Claudio Monteverdi.

In music, a canzonetta is a popular Italian secular vocal composition that originated around 1560. Earlier versions were somewhat like a madrigal but lighter in style—but by the 18th century, especially as it moved outside of Italy, the term came to mean a song for voice and accompaniment, usually in a light secular style.

Nicola Vicentino Italian composer and music theoretician

Nicola Vicentino was an Italian music theorist and composer of the Renaissance. He was one of the most visionary musicians of the age, inventing, among other things, a microtonal keyboard.

Girolamo Belli was an Italian composer and music teacher of the late Renaissance. He was closely associated with the Ferrara School in the 1580s, having previously studied with Luzzasco Luzzaschi, and was noted for his composition of both madrigals and sacred music.

The decade of the 1540s in music involved some significant compositions.

Giovanni Ferretti was an Italian composer of the Renaissance, best known for his secular music. He was important in the development of the lighter kind of madrigal current in the 1570s related to the villanella, and was influential as far away as England.

Hoste da Reggio was an Italian composer of the Renaissance, active in Milan and elsewhere in northern Italy. He was well known for his madrigals, which were published in several collections in Venice.

Pietro Taglia was an Italian composer of the Renaissance, active in Milan, known for his madrigals. Stylistically he was a progressive, following the innovations of more famous composers such as Cipriano de Rore in Venice, and his music was well-known at the time.

Simon Boyleau was a French composer of the Renaissance, active in northern Italy. A prolific composer of madrigals as well as sacred music, he was closely connected with the court of Marguerite of Savoy. He was also the earliest documented choirmaster at the church of Santa Maria presso San Celso in Milan.

Giulio Fiesco was an Italian composer of the Renaissance, active in Ferrara, known for his madrigals. He was the first composer to set the poetry of Giovanni Battista Guarini, the most often-set poet by madrigalists of the late 16th century, and was an important court composer for the rich musical establishment of the Este family in Ferrara.

Benedetto Pallavicino was an Italian composer and organist of the late Renaissance. A prolific composer of madrigals, he was resident at the Gonzaga court of Mantua in the 1590s, where he was a close associate of Giaches de Wert, and a rival of his younger contemporary Claudio Monteverdi.

Francesco Rovigo was an Italian composer and organist of the late Renaissance, active in Mantua and Graz.

Alfonso dalla Viola was an Italian composer and instrumentalist of the Renaissance. He was the principal composer at the Este court in Ferrara for about four decades in the middle sixteenth century, and was renowned as a player of several instruments, including the viola d'arco. While much of his incidental music, composed for court entertainments, is lost, several books of his madrigals have survived. His position as court composer in Ferrara paralleled that of Francesco Corteccia in the competing city of Florence.

Lambert Courtois was a French composer, trombonist, and singer of the late Renaissance, active in Italy and Ragusa.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.