Alessandro Grandi was a northern 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 early Baroque

Baroque music

Baroque music describes a style of Western Classical music approximately extending from 1600 to 1760. This era follows the Renaissance and was followed in turn by the Classical era...

 era, writing in the new concertato

Concertato

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 in alternation, and almost always over a basso continuo...

 style. He was one of the most inventive, influential and popular composers of the time, probably second only to Monteverdi

Claudio Monteverdi

Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi – 29 November 1643) was an Italian composer, gambist, and singer.Monteverdi's work, often regarded as revolutionary, marked the transition from the Renaissance style of music to that of the Baroque period. He developed two individual styles of composition – the...

 in northern Italy.

Life

He was probably born in Ferrara

Ferrara

Ferrara is a city and comune in Emilia-Romagna, northern Italy, capital city of the Province of Ferrara. It is situated 50 km north-northeast of Bologna, on the Po di Volano, a branch channel of the main stream of the Po River, located 5 km north...

 and spent the first part of his life there, likely studying with Giovanni Gabrieli

Giovanni Gabrieli

Giovanni Gabrieli was an Italian composer and organist. He was one of the most influential musicians of his time, and represents the culmination of the style of the Venetian School, at the time of the shift from Renaissance to Baroque idioms.-Biography:Gabrieli was born in Venice...

 at 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...

, which was nearby. He held several posts in Ferrara as maestro di cappella at different cathedrals and academies. In 1617 he won a post at St. Mark's in Venice, during the time Monteverdi was choirmaster there. Eventually he became Monteverdi's assistant, and during this time seems to have chosen to write works in some of the smaller forms which Monteverdi was neglecting. In 1627 he went to Bergamo

Bergamo

Bergamo is a town and comune in Lombardy, Italy, about 40 km northeast of Milan. The comune is home to over 120,000 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...

, probably because he had an opportunity to be maestro di cappella at a place where he could build up the music program from scratch. Most likely he met Heinrich Schütz

Heinrich Schütz

Heinrich Schütz was a German composer and organist, generally regarded as the most important German composer before Johann Sebastian Bach and often considered to be one of the most important composers of the 17th century along with Claudio Monteverdi...

 on that composer's second visit to Italy. Unfortunately, after only three years at Bergamo, Grandi died in 1630 during an outbreak of the plague

Bubonic plague

Plague is a deadly infectious disease that is caused by the enterobacteria Yersinia pestis, named after the French-Swiss bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin. Primarily carried by rodents and spread to humans via fleas, the disease is notorious throughout history, due to the unrivaled scale of death...

.

Works

Most of his music is vocal with instrumental accompaniment. Stylistically, his early music is similar to that of Giovanni Gabrieli

Giovanni Gabrieli

Giovanni Gabrieli was an Italian composer and organist. He was one of the most influential musicians of his time, and represents the culmination of the style of the Venetian School, at the time of the shift from Renaissance to Baroque idioms.-Biography:Gabrieli was born in Venice...

, with alternating short passages of greatly contrasting rhythm

Rhythm

Rhythm may be generally defined as a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time may be applied to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or...

s and texture

Texture (music)

In music, texture is the way the melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic materials are combined in a composition , thus determining the overall quality of sound of a piece...

; however he usually wrote for smaller forces. Most of his early compositions are motet

Motet

In classical music, motet is a word that is applied to a number of highly varied choral musical compositions.-Etymology: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...

s in the concertato

Concertato

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 in alternation, and almost always over a basso continuo...

 style: some are duets and trios, an innovation in motet writing, which usually involved larger groups. Grandi was one of the few composers who continued to write involved vocal polyphony

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 ....

 over the basso continuo

Figured bass

Figured bass, or thoroughbass, is a kind of integer musical notation used to indicate intervals, chords, and non-chord tones, in relation to a bass note...

 right after its introduction—most composers using the continuo in the first decades of the 17th century wrote monodies

Monody

In poetry, the term monody has become specialized to refer to a poem in which one person laments another's death....

, or preferred more homophonic textures.

Grandi experimented with extreme emotionalism with some of his music, with chromaticism

Chromaticism

Chromaticism is a compositional technique interspersing the primary diatonic pitches and chords with other pitches of the chromatic scale. Chromaticism is in contrast or addition to tonality or diatonicism...

, ornament

Ornament (music)

In music, ornaments or embellishments are musical flourishes that are not necessary to carry the overall line of the melody , but serve instead to decorate or "ornament" that line. Many ornaments are performed as "fast notes" around a central note...

 and affectation; while harmonically he was not as adventurous as Gesualdo

Carlo Gesualdo

Carlo Gesualdo, known as Gesualdo di Venosa or Gesualdo da Venosa , Prince of Venosa and Count of Conza, was an Italian nobleman, lutenist, composer, and murderer....

, he was connected to the larger tradition, and thus his works were almost as influential as Monteverdi's. He ceaselessly innovated, writing monodies with instruments such as violin

Violin

The violin is a string instrument, usually with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is the smallest, highest-pitched member of the violin family of string instruments, which includes the viola and cello....

s, and in a sectional form with repeating parts for instruments only—an idea which would develop into the ritornello

Ritornello

A ritornello is a recurring passage in Baroque music for orchestra or chorus. The first or final movement of a solo concerto or aria may be in "ritornello form", in which the ritornello is the opening theme, always played by tutti, which returns in whole or in part and in different keys throughout...

. The music of Grandi shows a link between the concertato style which began the Baroque era, and the form of the cantata

Cantata

A cantata is a vocal composition with an instrumental accompaniment, typically in several movements, often involving a choir....

 which culminated in the work of J.S. Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer, organist, harpsichordist, violist, and violinist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity...

.

Grandi was one of the most popular composers of his day; his works were published throughout Italy, Germany and the Low Countries

Low Countries

The Low Countries are the historical lands around the low-lying delta of the Rhine, Scheldt, and Meuse rivers, including the modern countries of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and parts of northern France and western Germany....

, and continued to be reprinted long after his death. He wrote motets, psalm settings, madrigals

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....

, as well as some of the earliest compositions to be called "cantata

Cantata

A cantata is a vocal composition with an instrumental accompaniment, typically in several movements, often involving a choir....

."

External links

• Free scores at the Mutopia Project
  Mutopia project
  The Mutopia Project is a volunteer-run effort to create a library of free content sheet music, in a way similar to Project Gutenberg's library of public domain books.The music is reproduced from old scores that are out of copyright...