Yesterday’s Music History Monday post celebrated the 495th anniversary of the birth of the great Italian composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, a birth presumed to have taken place on February 3, 1525. During the course of that post we observed that unlike virtually every other eminent composer of the so-called Renaissance (which in music is understood as running from roughly 1400 to 1600), Palestrina’s name, reputation, and music did not fade from view in the years, decades, and centuries after his death in 1593. We attributed Palestrina’s staying power to three factors: one, the staggering size and quality of his compositional output; two, the fact that his personal compositional style was (and still is) embraced as a paradigm of utopian perfection and has thus been employed in teaching counterpoint since the early seventeenth century; and three, in the years following his death Palestrina was personally credited as being the “savior” of Catholic church music during the austere artistic climate of the Counter-Reformation. Yesterday’s Music History Monday post dealt with factors one and two. It is time, now, to tackle factor three: whether or not Palestrina was indeed the “savior” of Catholic church music. Here’s the legend as it has come […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Archive for Palestrina
We mark the presumed birth on February 3, 1525 – 495 years ago today – of the Rome-based Italian composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Unlike virtually every other great composer of the Renaissance, a list of which includes such formidable names as Josquin des Prez, William Byrd, Giovanni Gabrieli, Guillaume Dufay, Orlande de Lassus, and Johannes Ockeghem, Palestrina’s name, reputation, and music have never faded from view since his death in 1593. The staying power of his name, reputation, and music can be attributed to three of factors, all of which will be explored in today’s Music History Monday post and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post (which can be accessed at Patreon.com/RobertGreenbergMusic). These factors are, one, Palestrina’s posthumous reputation as the ostensible “savior” of Catholic church music during the conservative, austere artistic climate of the Counter Reformation (which will be discussed in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes); two, his personal compositional style, which was (and still is) embraced as a paradigm of utopian perfection and has thus been employed in teaching counterpoint since the early seventeenth century; and three (and most importantly), the fact that he wrote a tremendous amount of first rate music, the great bulk of which is sacred. […]
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