Pietro Aron
Encyclopedia
Pietro Aron, also known as Pietro Aaron (1489 – after 1545), 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...

 music theorist
Music theory
Music theory is the study of how music works. It examines the language and notation of music. It seeks to identify patterns and structures in composers' techniques across or within genres, styles, or historical periods...

 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...

. He was born 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....

 and probably died in 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...

 (other sources state Florence or 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...

).

Biography

Little is documented of Aron's early life, but it is known that he was of Jewish origin, and was educated in Italy. Musically he seems to have been largely self-taught. He makes the claim in his writings that he was personally familiar with Obrecht
Jacob Obrecht
Jacob Obrecht was a Flemish composer of the Renaissance. He was the most famous composer of masses in Europe in the late 15th century, being eclipsed by only Josquin des Prez after his death.-Life:...

, Josquin, Heinrich Isaac
Heinrich Isaac
Heinrich Isaac was a Franco-Flemish Renaissance composer of south Netherlandish origin. He wrote masses, motets, songs , and instrumental music. A significant contemporary of Josquin des Prez, Isaac influenced the development of music in Germany...

, and others while he was 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....

; if true, this would have had to have been in the late 1480s to mid 1490s. Between 1515 and 1522 he was cantor
Cantor (church)
A cantor is the chief singer employed in a church with responsibilities for the ecclesiastical choir; also called the precentor....

 at the cathedral
Cathedral
A cathedral is a Christian church that contains the seat of a bishop...

 of Imola
Imola
thumb|250px|The Cathedral of Imola.Imola is a town and comune in the province of Bologna, located on the Santerno river, in the Emilia-Romagna region of north-central Italy...

, and in 1516 he became a priest
Priest
A priest is a person authorized to perform the sacred rites of a religion, especially as a mediatory agent between humans and deities. They also have the authority or power to administer religious rites; in particular, rites of sacrifice to, and propitiation of, a deity or deities...

 there. By February 1523 he had gone to 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...

, was cantor of Rimini
Rimini
Rimini is a medium-sized city of 142,579 inhabitants in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, and capital city of the Province of Rimini. It is located on the Adriatic Sea, on the coast between the rivers Marecchia and Ausa...

 Cathedral and worked for Sebastiano Michiel, who was Grand Prior of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem. In 1525 he was "maestro di casa" in a Venetian
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...

 house. In 1536, after the death of Michiel, he joined a monastery
Monastery
Monastery denotes the building, or complex of buildings, that houses a room reserved for prayer as well as the domestic quarters and workplace of monastics, whether monks or nuns, and whether living in community or alone .Monasteries may vary greatly in size – a small dwelling accommodating only...

 in Bergamo where he remained until the end of his life; at least one publication dates from this time.

Aron's significance mainly derives from his treatises on the 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,...

 practice of the period. His earliest treatise, De institutione harmonica, is on counterpoint, and is written in Italian: most scholarly writings of the time are in Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

, but Aron preferred the vernacular. In Thoscanello de la musica (later Toscanello in musica) he was the first to observe the change from linear writing to vertical: this was the first period in music history where composers began to become conscious of chords
Chord (music)
A chord in music is any harmonic set of two–three or more notes that is heard as if sounding simultaneously. These need not actually be played together: arpeggios and broken chords may for many practical and theoretical purposes be understood as chords...

 and the flow of harmony
Harmony
In music, harmony is the use of simultaneous pitches , or chords. The study of harmony involves chords and their construction and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them. Harmony is often said to refer to the "vertical" aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic...

, and Aron includes tables of four-voice chords, the beginning of the trend which was to result in functional tonality in the early 17th century. He also discusses tuning
Musical tuning
In music, there are two common meanings for tuning:* Tuning practice, the act of tuning an instrument or voice.* Tuning systems, the various systems of pitches used to tune an instrument, and their theoretical bases.-Tuning practice:...

, and the book is the first to describe quarter-comma meantone
Quarter-comma meantone
Quarter-comma meantone, or 1/4-comma meantone, was the most common meantone temperament in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and was sometimes used later. This method is a variant of Pythagorean tuning...

. Other topics covered by Aron include the use of the eight modes, four-voice cadence
Cadence (music)
In Western musical theory, a cadence is, "a melodic or harmonic configuration that creates a sense of repose or resolution [finality or pause]." A harmonic cadence is a progression of two chords that concludes a phrase, section, or piece of music...

s, notation of accidentals
Accidental (music)
In music, an accidental is a note whose pitch is not a member of a scale or mode indicated by the most recently applied key signature. In musical notation, the symbols used to mark such notes, sharps , flats , and naturals , may also be called accidentals...

.

Aron was a friend and frequent correspondent of music theorist Giovanni Spataro. Only Spataro's letters to Aron have survived. Topics discussed by the two include contemporary composers and composition, notation, and especially the use of accidentals
Accidental (music)
In music, an accidental is a note whose pitch is not a member of a scale or mode indicated by the most recently applied key signature. In musical notation, the symbols used to mark such notes, sharps , flats , and naturals , may also be called accidentals...

.

While Aron was known as a composer and frequently refers to his own works in his writings, only one composition of his survives.

Published works

  • Libri tres de institutione harmonica (Bologna, 1516 ; this edition on Vicifons
    Wikisource
    Wikisource is an online digital library of free content textual sources on a wiki, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its aims are to host all forms of free text, in many languages, and translations. Originally conceived as an archive to store useful or important historical texts, it has...

    )
  • Thoscanello de la musica (Venice, 1523; four reprints as Toscanello in musica 1525-1562)
  • Trattato della natura et cognitione di tutti gli tuoni di canto figurato (Venice, 1525; partially reproduced and retranslated into English
    English language
    English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

    in 1950 in O. Strunk's Source Readings in Music History, N.Y.)
  • Lucidario in musica di alcune opinione antiche e moderne (Venice, 1545)
  • Compendiolo di molti dubbi, segreti, et sentenze intorno al canto fermo et figurato (Milan, posthumous - title page bears the inscription: "In memoria eterna erit Aron")
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