Pietro Cerone (1566–1625) was an
ItalianItaly , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia. Italy shares its northern, Alpine boundary with France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia...
music theorist, singer and priest of the late
Renaissance Renaissance music is European music written during the Renaissance. Defining the beginning of the musical era is difficult, given the gradually adopted "Renaissance" characteristics: musicologists have placed its beginnings from as early as 1300 to as late as the 1470s.- Style and trends :The...
. He is most famous for an enormous music treatise he wrote in 1613, which is useful in the studying compositional practices of the 16th century.
Life
Cerone was born in
BergamoBergamo is a town in Lombardy, Italy, about 40 km northeast of Milan. The comune is home to approximately 117,000 inhabitants. It is served by the Orio al Serio Airport, which also serves the Province of Bergamo, and to a lesser extent the metropolitan area of Milan...
. While Italian, he spent most of his life in Spanish-dominated
NaplesNaples in Italy, is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples. The city is known for its rich history, art, culture, architecture, music and gastronomy, playing an important role throughout much of its existence; it is over 2,800 years old...
,
SardiniaSardinia is the second-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea . The area of Sardinia is . The nearest land masses to the island are the French island of Corsica, the Italian Peninsula, Tunisia, and the Spanish Balearic Islands...
, and later in
SpainSpain , officially the Kingdom of Spain , is a country located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula.
[The Spanish constitution does not establish any official denomination of the country, even though España , Estado español and Nación española are used interchangeably...]
: he did most of his writing in
SpanishSpanish or Castilian is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that originated in northern Spain and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile, evolving into the principal language of government and trade in the Iberian peninsula...
. He was unusual in being an Italian musician in Spain--far more often in the 16th century, Spanish musicians went to Italy, as in the case of Victoria. In 1603 he returned to Naples, where he was a priest and singer until his death. It was in Naples that he wrote his two most famous treatises.
Writings
The first of these, in Italian, was
Le regole più necessarie per l'introduzione del canto fermo, which he published in 1609. It was a didactic and practical work on singing
plainsongPlainsong is a body of traditional songs used in the liturgies of the Roman Catholic Church. The liturgies of the Eastern Orthodox Church, though similar in many ways and probably older than the Roman tradition, are generally not classified as plainsong...
, which he probably used in his work at the Neapolitan church of Ss Annunziata. Four years later, however, he published a monumental volume on music theory,
El melopeo y maestro: tractado de música theorica y pratica; en que se pone por extenso; lo que uno para hazerse perfecto musico ha menester saber, which consisted of 22 volumes, 849 chapters, and 1160 pages in the original Spanish.
El melopeo achieved considerable notoriety, and was sufficiently famous as late as 1803 to be lampooned by the Spanish novelist Antonio Eximeno, who compared it to the chivalric romances in
Don Quixote, fully titled The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha , is a novel written by Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes...
: an impossibly detailed and absurd compilation of nonsense. Other writers in the 18th and 19th centuries have called it "monstrous." However the treatise contains passages which give insight into the compositional practices of the time.
Cerone was musically conservative, and his conservatism in this influential treatise doubtless had some effect on the delay of the
BaroqueBaroque music describes a style of European classical music approximately extending from 1600 to 1750. This era is said to begin in music after the Renaissance and was followed by the Classical era...
style arriving in Iberian peninsula. In his writing he was generally contemptuous of Spanish composers, and lavish in his praise of Italians (which may partially account for the abuse heaped on him by Spanish critics). He discusses the previous theoretical treatises of
ZarlinoGioseffo Zarlino , was an Italian music theorist and composer of the Renaissance. He was possibly the most famous music theorist between Aristoxenus and Rameau, and made a large contribution to the theory of counterpoint as well as to musical tuning.-Life:Zarlino was born in Chioggia, near Venice...
,
VicentinoNicola Vicentino was an Italian music theorist and composer of the Renaissance. He was one of the most visionary musicians of the age, inventing, among other things, a microtonal keyboard, and devising a practical system of chromatic writing two hundred years before the rise of equal...
, Juan Bermudo and others; he describes in detail how a composer can achieve expressive intensity when writing
massIn physics, mass commonly refers to any of three properties of matter, which have been shown experimentally to be equivalent: inertial mass, active gravitational mass and passive gravitational mass...
es,
motetIn Western music, motet is a word that is applied to a number of highly varied choral musical compositions.The name comes either from the Latin movere, or a Latinized version of Old French mot, "word" or "verbal utterance." The Medieval Latin for "motet" is "motectum", and the Italian mottetto was...
s,
madrigalA madrigal is a type of secular vocal music composition, written during the Renaissance and early Baroque eras. Throughout most of its history it was polyphonic and unaccompanied by instruments, with the number of voices varying from two to eight, but most frequently three to six...
s,
frottolaThe frottola was the predominant type of Italian popular, secular song of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. It was the most important and widespread predecessor to the madrigal...
s,
canzonettaIn music, a canzonetta was a popular Italian secular vocal composition which originated around 1560...
s,
canticleA canticle is a hymn taken from the Bible. The term is often expanded to include ancient non-biblical hymns such as the Te Deum and certain psalms used liturgically.-Roman Catholic Church:From the Old Testament, the Roman Breviary takes seven canticles for use at Lauds, as follows:*...
s,
hymnA hymn is a type of song, usually religious, specifically written for the purpose of praise, adoration or prayer, and typically addressed to a deity or deities, or to a prominent figure or personification. The word hymn derives from Greek , "a song of praise"...
s, psalms, lamentations,
ricercarA 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...
es,
tientoTiento is a musical genre and flamenco palo originating in Spain in the mid-15th century. It is formally analogous to the fantasia , found in England, Germany, and the Low Countries, and also the ricercare, first found in Italy...
s, strambotti, and other forms of the time. The compositional ideal which he maintained was the style of
PalestrinaGiovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was an Italian composer of the Renaissance. He was the most famous sixteenth-century representative of the Roman School of musical composition...
, though curiously he maintained that the "rules" of
counterpointIn 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 Western music, developing strongly during the Renaissance and in much of the common practice period,...
were made to be broken, and should be abandoned as soon as a composer had learned his craft: paradoxically, even in the 21st century, no style of composition is taught in a more rigorous, rule-based way than the
polyphonicIn 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 ....
idiom of Palestrina.
While the treatise shows that he possessed considerable compositional skill, no music by Cerone has survived and he is not known to have published any. He died in Naples.
Sources and further reading
- Gustave Reese
Gustave Reese was an American musicologist and teacher. Reese is mainly known for his work on medieval and Renaissance music, particularly with his two publications Music in the Middle Ages and Music in the Renaissance ; these two books remain the standard reference works for these two eras,...
, Music in the Renaissance. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1954. ISBN 0-393-09530-4
- Article "Pietro Cerone", in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. ISBN 1-56159-174-2
- Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History. New York, W.W. Norton & Co, 1950. Contains a portion of El melopeo y maestro in English.
- Barton Hudson: "Pietro Cerone", Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed November 4, 2006), (subscription access)