Francesco Cellavenia (fl. c. 1538 – 1563) was an Italian composer of the Renaissance, active in Casale Monferrato.
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.
Casale Monferrato is a town in the Piedmont region in Italy, in the province of Alessandria. It is situated about 60 km (37 mi) east of Turin on the right bank of the Po, where the river runs at the foot of the Montferrat hills. Beyond the river lies the vast plain of the Po valley.
Little is known about his life, and the few details once thought secure are contested. He may have been from Cilavegna, a town near Pavia, judging by his name, and he likely spent a large portion of his career in Casale Monferrato, a town in northwestern Italy. He may have been maestro di cappella at the cathedral there, or perhaps held a similar post at S Maria di Piazza. [1]
Cilavegna is a comune (municipality) in the Province of Pavia in the Italian region Lombardy, located about 35 km southwest of Milan and about 35 km northwest of Pavia. As of 31 December 2007, it had a population of 5,352 and an area of 18.0 km². There were 2,540 males and 2,812 females included in the population total.
Pavia is a town and comune of south-western Lombardy, northern Italy, 35 kilometres south of Milan on the lower Ticino river near its confluence with the Po. It has a population of c. 73,000. The city was the capital of the Kingdom of the Lombards from 572 to 774.
Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a country in Southern Europe. Located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, Italy shares open land borders with France, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia and the enclaved microstates San Marino and Vatican City. Italy covers an area of 301,340 km2 (116,350 sq mi) and has a largely temperate seasonal and Mediterranean climate. With around 61 million inhabitants, it is the fourth-most populous EU member state and the most populous country in Southern Europe.
The cathedral in Casale Monferrato possesses several important manuscripts which contain the surviving work by Cellavenia. One of the manuscripts, Casale Monferrato, Duomo, Archivio Capitolare, D (F), includes seven compositions by Cellavenia out of a total of sixty-six compositions, mostly motets (other composers with works in the collection include Jean Mouton, Jean Richafort, Jacquet of Mantua, Cristóbal de Morales, and others). Another manuscript, I-CMac (N)(H), has four motets by Cellavenia. Both were copied in the period from 1538 to 1545. [2]
In western music, a motet is a mainly vocal musical composition, of highly diverse form and style, from the late medieval era to the present. The motet was one of the pre-eminent polyphonic forms of Renaissance music. According to Margaret Bent, "a piece of music in several parts with words" is as precise a definition of the motet as will serve from the 13th to the late 16th century and beyond. The late 13th-century theorist Johannes de Grocheo believed that the motet was "not to be celebrated in the presence of common people, because they do not notice its subtlety, nor are they delighted in hearing it, but in the presence of the educated and of those who are seeking out subtleties in the arts".
Jean Mouton was a French composer of the Renaissance. He was famous both for his motets, which are among the most refined of the time, and for being the teacher of Adrian Willaert, one of the founders of the Venetian School.
Jean Richafort was a Netherlandish composer of the Renaissance.
Cellavenia's music shows a mixture of Italian elements and stylistic traits of the Franco-Flemish composers from the north. Many of his motets are based on pre-existing material: canti firmi are drawn from composers such as Richafort and Andreas da Silva, composers who are, not surprisingly, represented in the same manuscripts which contain his work – he was familiar with their music from his work at the cathedral. Others of his motets are based on Gregorian chants. [1]
In music, a cantus firmus is a pre-existing melody forming the basis of a polyphonic composition.
Gregorian chant is the central tradition of Western plainchant, a form of monophonic, unaccompanied sacred song of the Roman Catholic Church. Gregorian chant developed mainly in western and central Europe during the 9th and 10th centuries, with later additions and redactions. Although popular legend credits Pope Gregory I with inventing Gregorian chant, scholars believe that it arose from a later Carolingian synthesis of Roman chant and Gallican chant.
His complete works, edited by David Crawford, are in volume 80 of Corpus mensurabilis musicae (1978).
The Corpus mensurabilis musicae (CMM) is a collected print edition of most of the sacred and secular vocal music of the late medieval and Renaissance period in western music history, with an emphasis on the central Franco-Flemish and Italian repertories. CMM is a publication of the American Institute of Musicology, and consists of 109 series as of 2007. Renowned composers whose works have appeared in other collected editions, such as Josquin des Prez, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, and Orlande de Lassus, are generally excluded from the set.
