Antonio Cifra (1584 – October 2, 1629) was an Italian composer of the Roman School of the Renaissance and early Baroque eras. Events 1187 - Siege of Jerusalem: Saladin captures Jerusalem after 88 years of Crusader rule Italy (Italia officially the Italian Republic, (Repubblica Italiana is located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe, and on the two largest The Roman school is the education system of the Ancient Rome. Renaissance music is European music written during the Renaissance, approximately 1400 - 1600 Baroque music describes an era and a set of styles of European classical music which were in widespread use between approximately 1600 and 1750. He was one of the significant transitional figures between the Renaissance and Baroque styles, and produced music in both idioms.
Cifra was born in Terracina. Terracina is a town and Comune of the Province of Latina - (until 1934 of the Province of Rome) Italy, 76 km SE of Rome by He studied with Giovanni Bernardino Nanino in the 1590s. Giovanni Bernardino Nanino (c 1560 &ndash 1623 was an Italian Composer, teacher and singing master of the late Renaissance and early Baroque From 1605 to 1607 he was music director at the Roman Seminary, and from 1608 to 1609 he held the same position at the German College in Rome. In 1609 he was hired as maestro di cappella at Santa Casa in Loreto, and he held that position for the rest of his life. Cultural connections between Loreto and Rome were close (since Loreto was a pilgrimage destination), and he maintained contact with the composers in Rome during this period. Near the end of his life he took part in several large musical events in Rome, including a large Vespers at St. Peter's for which he directed one of the choirs. Vespers is the evening Prayer service in the Roman Catholic, Eastern (Byzantine Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox, liturgies of the The Basilica of Saint Peter (Basilica Sancti Petri officially known in Italian as the Basilica di San Pietro in Vaticano and commonly known as St
Cifra was a prolific composer, with 45 separate publications to his credit: they included psalms, motets, litanies, "Scherzi sacri," masses, polychoral motets, and sacred songs, as well as secular music including madrigals in both the Renaissance a cappella and Baroque concertato forms. Psalms ( Hebrew: Tehilim, תהילים, or "praises" is a book of the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) included In Western music, motet is a word that is applied to a number of highly varied choral musical compositions A litany, in Christian worship, is a form of Prayer used in Church services and Processions and consisting of a number of petitions For other uses see Mass (disambiguation The Mass, a form of sacred musical composition, is a choral composition that This article is about the musical term See Antiphon (person the orator of ancient Greece A madrigal is a type of Secular vocal music composition written during the Renaissance and early Baroque eras Concertato is a term in early Baroque music referring to either a genre or a style of music in which groups of instruments or voices share a melody usually
Stylistically, Cifra's music varies between masses in the Palestrina style, with much use of homophony (as desired by the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent, which had required that polyphonic elaboration be minimized so as to allow for clear expression of the text), and more progressive works in the Venetian style. Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (between 3 February 1525 and 2 February 1526 - 2 February 1594 was an Italian Composer of the Renaissance. The Counter-Reformation (also Catholic Reformation denotes the period of Catholic revival from the pontificate of Pope Pius IV in 1560 to the close of the The Council of Trent was the 19th Ecumenical Council of the Roman Catholic Church. In Music, polyphony is a texture consisting of two or more independent Melodic voices, as opposed to music with just one voice ( Monophony In music history the Venetian School is a term used to describe the Composers working in Venice from about 1550 to around 1610; it also describes He also used the technique of monody, as pioneered in northern Italy, for some of his solo madrigals. In Poetry, the term monody has become specialized to refer to a poem in which one person laments another's death Some of his concertato madrigals are like small cantatas, and can be seen as foreshadowing this development, which began to occur around the time he died. A cantata (derived from the Italian word 'cantare' meaning 'to sing' is a vocal composition with an instrumental Accompaniment and often
Cifra was also one of the very few composers to be influenced by the extreme chromaticism of Carlo Gesualdo. In Music, chromaticism is a Compositional technique interspersing the primary Diatonic pitches and chords with other pitches of the Chromatic This article is about the composer for the Italian town see Gesualdo (town. While Cifra did not adopt the technique for many works, or for long, he did publish one book of madrigals which appear to be deliberate copies of Gesualdo's style (the Madrigali concertati libro quinto, 1621). For these madrigals he used 18 of Gesualdo's own texts.
Source
- Articles "Antonio Cifra", "Carlo Gesualdo" in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd. , 1980. ISBN 1-56159-174-2
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