Bernardo Pisano
Encyclopedia
Bernardo Pisano (October 12, 1490 – January 23, 1548) was an Italian
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 composer, priest, singer, and scholar of the Renaissance
Renaissance music
Renaissance music is European music written during the Renaissance. Defining the beginning of the musical era is difficult, given that its defining characteristics were adopted only gradually; musicologists have placed its beginnings from as early as 1300 to as late as the 1470s.Literally meaning...

. He was one of the first madrigalists
Madrigal (music)
A madrigal is a secular vocal music composition, usually a partsong, 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....

, and the first composer anywhere to have a printed collection of secular music devoted entirely to himself.

Life

He was born in Florence
Florence
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

, and may have spent some time in Pisa
Pisa
Pisa is a city in Tuscany, Central Italy, on the right bank of the mouth of the River Arno on the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is the capital city of the Province of Pisa...

 (hence his name). As a young man he sang and studied music at the church of Annunziata
Basilica della Santissima Annunziata di Firenze
The Basilica della Santissima Annunziata is a Roman Catholic minor basilica in Florence, Italy, the mother church of the Servite order. It is located at the northeastern side of the Piazza Santissima Annunziata....

 in Florence. In 1512 he became maestro di cappella there, a job which held in addition to supervising the choristers and singing in its various chapels. Evidently he was favored of the Medici
Medici
The House of Medici or Famiglia de' Medici was a political dynasty, banking family and later royal house that first began to gather prominence under Cosimo de' Medici in the Republic of Florence during the late 14th century. The family originated in the Mugello region of the Tuscan countryside,...

, for they not only hired him for his church job but gave him a post as a singer in the papal chapel in Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

 in 1514, immediately after Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici became Pope Leo X
Pope Leo X
Pope Leo X , born Giovanni di Lorenzo de' Medici, was the Pope from 1513 to his death in 1521. He was the last non-priest to be elected Pope. He is known for granting indulgences for those who donated to reconstruct St. Peter's Basilica and his challenging of Martin Luther's 95 Theses...

. Sometime during the period 1512 to 1520 he was the teacher of Francesco Corteccia
Francesco Corteccia
Francesco Corteccia was an Italian composer, organist, and teacher of the Renaissance. Not only was he one of the best known of the early composers of madrigals, and an important native Italian composer during a period of domination by composers from the Low Countries, but he was the most...

, organist and composer to Cosimo I de' Medici.

Pisano remained based in Rome for the rest of his life. In addition to singing in the papal chapel choir, he acquired ecclesiastical benefice
Benefice
A benefice is a reward received in exchange for services rendered and as a retainer for future services. The term is now almost obsolete.-Church of England:...

s from the Pope, including one each at the cathedrals of Seville
Seville
Seville is the artistic, historic, cultural, and financial capital of southern Spain. It is the capital of the autonomous community of Andalusia and of the province of Seville. It is situated on the plain of the River Guadalquivir, with an average elevation of above sea level...

 and Lerida. Between 1515 and 1519 he traveled between Florence and Rome, holding musical positions in both cities, but in 1520 he returned to Rome, except for occasional visits to Florence.

Pisano made the mistake of returning to Florence in 1529, during the three-year period of republican government, the result of a successful coup d'état against the Medici. Since he had obviously close connections to the Medici, he was accused of being a spy for the papacy, seized, imprisoned, and put to torture. In September 1529 the famous siege of Florence
Siege of Florence (1529)
The Siege of Florence took place from October 24, 1529 to August 10, 1530, at the end of the War of the League of Cognac. A large Imperial and Spanish army under Philibert of Châlon, Prince of Orange and Pier Maria III de' Rossi surrounded the city, and, after a siege of nearly ten months,...

 began, and he was released. In 1530 Florence was captured by papal troops and the Medici returned to power. After escaping alive from his former home, he returned to Rome to stay.

In 1546 Pope Paul III
Pope Paul III
Pope Paul III , born Alessandro Farnese, was Pope of the Roman Catholic Church from 1534 to his death in 1549. He came to the papal throne in an era following the sack of Rome in 1527 and rife with uncertainties in the Catholic Church following the Protestant Reformation...

 appointed him maestro di cappella of his private chapel, a position which he only held for two years, for he died in 1548. Among the singers in this elite group was Jacques Arcadelt
Jacques Arcadelt
Jacques Arcadelt was a Franco-Flemish composer of the Renaissance, active in both Italy and France, and principally known as a composer of secular vocal music...

, who was to become even more famous than Pisano as a madrigal composer.

Music and influence

While Pisano wrote sacred music in a sober, homophonic style, probably intended to be used during his tenure as maestro di cappella at Ss. Annunziata, it was as a composer of secular music that he was most influential. Pisano is arguably the first madrigalist. In 1520, Venetian printer Ottaviano Petrucci
Ottaviano Petrucci
Ottaviano Petrucci was an Italian printer. His Harmonice Musices Odhecaton, a collection of chansons printed in 1501, is commonly misidentified as the first book of sheet music printed from movable type. Actually that distinction belongs to the Roman printer Ulrich Han's Missale Romanum of 1476...

 published his Musica di messer Bernardo Pisano sopra le canzone del Petrarcha, a collection of settings of Petrarch influenced by the literary theories of Pietro Bembo
Pietro Bembo
Pietro Bembo was an Italian scholar, poet, literary theorist, and cardinal. He was an influential figure in the development of the Italian language, specifically Tuscan, as a literary medium, and his writings assisted in the 16th-century revival of interest in the works of Petrarch...

; while the pieces in the collection were not yet called "madrigals", they contained several features recognized in retrospect as distinctive of the genre: the set serious texts, the placement of words and accents was done carefully, and they contained word-painting. This publication was also the first collection of secular music by a single composer ever to be printed; previous publications, in the brief two decades since moveable type had first been used for printing music, had been anthologies only.

The slightly later composers who became famous masters of the madrigal genre — Costanzo Festa
Costanzo Festa
Costanzo Festa was an Italian composer of the Renaissance. While he is best known for his madrigals, he also wrote sacred vocal music...

, Jacques Arcadelt, Philippe Verdelot
Philippe Verdelot
Philippe Verdelot was a French composer of the Renaissance, who spent most of his life in Italy. He is commonly considered to be the father of the Italian madrigal, and certainly was one of its earliest and most prolific composers; in addition he was prominent in the musical life of Florence...

 — were aware of his work and copied some of his stylistic traits.

Pisano's early secular music is typical of Italian music of the first two decades of the 16th century: light, rhythmically active, usually homophonic, containing frequent repetition, and generally for three voices. Most of these pieces are ballata
Ballata
The ballata is an Italian poetic and musical form, which was in use from the late 13th to the 15th century. It has the musical structure AbbaA, with the first and last stanzas having the same texts. It is thus most similar to the French musical 'forme fixe' virelai...

s or canzonetta
Canzonetta
In music, a canzonetta was a popular Italian secular vocal composition which originated around 1560...

s. His later secular music, including the important collection of 1520, the first printed book of secular music dedicated to the work of a single composer, contains music which is best defined as madrigalian (although he did not use the term). Poetry is sometimes serious, and sometimes humorous; seven poems by Petrarch
Petrarch
Francesco Petrarca , known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar, poet and one of the earliest humanists. Petrarch is often called the "Father of Humanism"...

 are represented. The music carefully attempts to convey the emotion expressed by the poem being set. Often the last line of the text is repeated for emphasis, a peculiarity which was to become a defining feature of the early madrigal. Texturally, the music varies between homophonic and polyphonic
Polyphony
In music, polyphony is a texture consisting of two or more independent melodic voices, as opposed to music with just one voice or music with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords ....

passages, as well as between passages for groups of two, three, and four singers together.
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