Claudio Veggio
Encyclopedia
Claudio Maria Veggio 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 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...

, principally of secular music
Secular music
Secular music is non-religious music. "Secular" means being separate from religion.In the West, secular music developed in the Medieval period and was used in the Renaissance. Swaying authority from the Church that focused more on Common Law influenced all aspects of Medieval life, including music...

.

He was born in Piacenza
Piacenza
Piacenza is a city and comune in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy. It is the capital of the province of Piacenza...

, and must have spent most of his life there. Little is known about his life except for a brief period during the 1540s, when he was employed as a composer and harpsichord
Harpsichord
A harpsichord is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It produces sound by plucking a string when a key is pressed.In the narrow sense, "harpsichord" designates only the large wing-shaped instruments in which the strings are perpendicular to the keyboard...

ist for Count Federico Anguissola of Piacenza, at the Castell'Arquato
Castell'Arquato
Castell'Arquato is an Italian town located on the first hills of Val D’Arda in the province of Piacenza, in Emilia-Romagna, approximately 30 km from Piacenza and 35 km from Parma...

. After this period of activity he vanishes from history; nothing further is known about him.

Veggio was an early composer of madrigal
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....

s, of which two books have survived, published in Venice
Venice
Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...

 in 1540 (the first to formally feature note nere
Note nere
Note nere was a style of madrigal composition, which used shorter note values than usual and had more black note-heads.The style was introduced around 1540, and had a short vogue among composers publishing in Venice including Costanzo Festa, Giaches de Wert, Cipriano di Rore and many minor...

 under the name misura breve) and 1544, for four and eight voices respectively. He was also a prolific keyboard
Keyboard instrument
A keyboard instrument is a musical instrument which is played using a musical keyboard. The most common of these is the piano. Other widely used keyboard instruments include organs of various types as well as other mechanical, electromechanical and electronic instruments...

 composer of ricercar
Ricercar
A ricercar is a type of late Renaissance and mostly early Baroque instrumental composition. The term means to search out, and many ricercars serve a preludial function to "search out" the key or mode of a following piece...

s
which alternate contrapuntal
Counterpoint
In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more voices that are independent in contour and rhythm and are harmonically interdependent . It has been most commonly identified in classical music, developing strongly during the Renaissance and in much of the common practice period,...

 and highly ornamented passages. Stylistically they represent an intermediate stage between the early keyboard style of Marco Antonio Cavazzoni
Marco Antonio Cavazzoni
Marco Antonio Cavazzoni was an Italian organist and composer. All of his extant music is contained in the print Recerchari, motetti, canzoni [...] libro primo, which was published in Venice in 1523...

 and the style of his son Girolamo Cavazzoni
Girolamo Cavazzoni
Girolamo Cavazzoni was an Italian organist and composer, son of Marco Antonio Cavazzoni. Little is known about his life except that he worked at Venice and Mantua, and published two collections of organ music...

, who composed ricercars in the more modern sense of the word — i.e., as a series of imitative
Imitation (music)
In music, imitation is when a melody in a polyphonic texture is repeated shortly after its first appearance in a different voice, usually at a different pitch. The melody may vary through transposition, inversion, or otherwise, but retain its original character...

 sections.

Of greatest significance to musicologist
Musicology
Musicology is the scholarly study of music. The word is used in narrow, broad and intermediate senses. In the narrow sense, musicology is confined to the music history of Western culture...

s is a manuscript by Veggio which survived in the archives of Castell'Arquato. It appears to be a rough copy of his draft compositions, containing numerous sketches, strikeouts and revisions; it is one of the earliest such music manuscripts to survive, and provides a rare window into compositional procedures of the time. Many of the compositions are transcriptions for keyboard of vocal compositions, now lost, probably by other composers.
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