Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c. 1525 – 2 February 1594)[1] was an Italian Renaissance composer of sacred music and the best-known 16th-century representative of the Roman School of musical composition.[2] He has had a lasting influence on the development of church music, and his work has often been seen as the culmination of Renaissance polyphony.[2] Biography[edit] Palestrina was born in the town of Palestrina, near Rome, then part of the Papal States. Palestrina came of age as a musician under the influence of the northern European style of polyphony, which owed its dominance in Italy primarily to two influential Netherlandish composers, Guillaume Dufay and Josquin des Prez, who had spent significant portions of their careers there. He died in Rome of pleurisy in 1594. Music and reputation[edit] According to Fux, Palestrina had established and followed these basic guidelines: References[edit] Sources[edit] External links[edit]

Missa Papae Marcelli Style[edit] History[edit] The mass was composed in honor of Pope Marcellus II, who reigned for three weeks in 1555. Recent scholarship suggests the most likely date of composition is 1562, when it was copied into a manuscript at the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.[2] Starting in the late 16th century, a legend began that the second of these points, the threat that polyphony might have been banned by the Council because of the unintelligibility of the words, was the impetus behind Palestrina's composition of this mass. Jesuit musicians of the 17th century maintained this rumor, and it made its way into music history books into the 19th century, when historian Giuseppe Baini, in his 1828 biography of Palestrina, couched him as the "savior of polyphony" from a council wishing to wipe it out entirely: On Saturday, 28 April 1565, by order of Cardinal Vitellozzi, all the singers of the papal chapel were gathered together at his residence. Analysis[edit] References[edit]