Girolamo Montesardo 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...

 singer and composer

Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...

. Although his surname was actually Melcarne, he was called Montesardo for his home town, a small town in the Province of Lecce

Province of Lecce

The Province of Lecce is a province in the Apulia region of Italy. Its capital is the city of Lecce. Totally included in the Salento peninsula, it is the second most populous province in Apulia and the twenty-first most populous in Italy....

. He worked as a singer at the San Petronio Basilica

San Petronio Basilica

The Basilica of San Petronio is the main church of Bologna, Emilia Romagna, northern Italy. It dominates the Piazza Maggiore. It is the fifth largest church in the world, stretching for 132 meters in length and 60 meters in width, while the vault reaches 45 meters inside and 51 meters in the facade...

 in Bologna

Bologna

Bologna is the capital city of Emilia-Romagna, in the Po Valley of Northern Italy. The city lies between the Po River and the Apennine Mountains, more specifically, between the Reno River and the Savena River. Bologna is a lively and cosmopolitan Italian college city, with spectacular history,...

, as a maestro di capella at Fano

Fano

Fano is a town and comune of the province of Pesaro and Urbino in the Marche region of Italy. It is a beach resort 12 km southeast of Pesaro, located where the Via Flaminia reaches the Adriatic Sea...

 and at Ancona. His earliest extant work was published 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....

 in 1606.

He is famous for his description in Nuova inventione of using alphabet notation of chords for rasgueado

Rasgueado

Rasgueado is a guitar finger strumming technique commonly associated with flamenco guitar music. It is also used in classical and other fingerstyle guitar picking techniques...

 playing a five-course guitar, which he claimed to invent, but which was probably being used in practice in Spain for a period before this. This style of tablature

Tablature

Tablature is a form of musical notation indicating instrument fingering rather than musical pitches....

 became very popular in Italy during the 17th century. Nuova inventione gave tablature for some of the most popular songs and harmonic patterns of the time, including the Ruggiero, bergamasca, folia

Folia

La Folia is one of the oldest remembered European musical themes, or primary material, generally melodic, of a composition, on record. The theme exists in two versions, referred to as early and late folias, the earlier being faster.-History:The epithet 'Folia' has several meanings in music...

, and Ballo del gran duca, and was the first Italian publication to include the ciaccone

Chaconne

A chaconne ; is a type of musical composition popular in the baroque era when it was much used as a vehicle for variation on a repeated short harmonic progression, often involving a fairly short repetitive bass-line which offered a compositional outline for variation, decoration, figuration and...

and passacaglia

Passacaglia

The passacaglia is a musical form that originated in early seventeenth-century Spain and is still used by contemporary composers. It is usually of a serious character and is often, but not always, based on a bass-ostinato and written in triple metre....

s.

In terms of original music, Montesardo mainly composed polyphonic sacred music and 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....

. Montesardo also experimented with monody

Monody

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

 and published a collection of monody which included both his own experiments and works by Jacopo Peri

Jacopo Peri

Jacopo Peri was an Italian composer and singer of the transitional period between the Renaissance and Baroque styles, and is often called the inventor of opera...

 and Giulio Caccini

Giulio Caccini

Giulio Caccini , also known as Giulio Romano, was an Italian composer, teacher, singer, instrumentalist and writer of the very late Renaissance and early Baroque eras. He was one of the founders of the genre of opera, and one of the single most influential creators of the new Baroque style...

.