Marco Dall'Aquila

Marco Dall'Aquila , in prints also Marco da l'Aquila (* around 1480; † after 1538) was an Italian lutenist and composer of the Renaissance .

Live and act

Whether "Maestro Marco" comes from the city of L'Aquila in the area of ​​the then Kingdom of Naples or from the Illyrian town of Aquileja , which belonged to the Republic of Venice , has not been finally decided. However, after he was mainly active in Venice and was also a member of the Scuola di San Rocco there, the second option is seen as the more likely. In letters to the leadership and the council of the city-state of Venice ( Serenissimi Principi and Sapientissimi Consiglio ) Dall'Aquila asked for a ten-year privilege around the autumn of 1504 to publish his not yet in print lute pieces himself, which he “with the greatest difficulty and not just medium-sized costs ”. He received the privilege on March 11, 1505, but does not seem to have made use of it. Presumably he took the music publisher Ottaviano Petrucci (1466–1539) into consideration , who had already received the exclusive privilege to print and sell mensural music and lute and organ tablatures for 20 years in the area of ​​the Republic of Venice in May 1498 .

The contacts he had with outstanding personalities testify to the importance of Dall'Aquila in his cultural and musical environment at that time. For example, the music theorist Giovanni Spataro (1458–1541) wrote a letter to the composer Marco Antonio Cavazzoni (1480–1559 ) on November 10, 1524, expressing his astonishment that the music theorist Pietro Aron (~ 1480 − after 1545) with one "A mere lute player like Dall'Aquila" asked for advice on a music-theoretical problem. On the other hand, the poet and humanist Pietro Aretino wrote to the printer Paolo Manuzio on December 9, 1537, among other things, that Dall'Aquila had been his lute teacher; he calls him his “Magister” (whose works are often signed “Maestro Marco”). He is also mentioned in the preface to the lute book, which Francesco Marcolini published in 1536. The vast majority of the compositions by Marco Dall'Aquila are handwritten.

meaning

The lute art of Marco Dall'Aquila lies in the middle range between the earlier lute style of the Venetian school, as far as this is visible in the prints by Ottaviano dei Petrucci, and the later style of his successors Francesco Canova da Milano and Alberto da Mantova (= Alberto da Ripa ) with their ingenious imitation structure of their ricercare and fantasies based on the pattern of contemporary vocal polyphony. In Dall'Aquila's music, free elements of improvisation and dance style are combined with stricter contrapuntal parts. In his three to four-part pieces, sonorous chord passages alternate quickly and in various ways with flowing imitation sections. In a particularly noteworthy ricercare, he used chord breaks that were quite unusual at the time, as they did not belong to the style of French lute art until the 17th century. In addition to the usual genres Fantasia and Ricercare, Dall'Aquila has also written dance pieces and arrangements of French chansons .

Works

Complete edition in Monumenti di storia musicale abruzzese , Volume 1, edited by AJ Ness (Istituto abruzzese di storia musicale)

• 3 Fantasies (title Fantasia de M. Marco da Laquila ) in Antonio Casteliono (ed.): Intabolatura de leuto de diversi autori. Milan 1536 (= Répertoire international des sources musicales. No. 1536/10); also in Hortus musarum , Löwen 1552 (= Répertoire international des sources musicales. No. 1552/31) or in Ein newes Künstlichs Lautenbuch Nürnberg 1552 (= Répertoire international des sources musicales No. 1552/31), including 2 fantasies in La intabolatura de lauto de diversi autori , Venice 1563 (= Répertoire international des sources musicales. No. 1563/21)
• 25 pieces as manuscript

Literature (selection)

• A. Schmid: Ottaviani dei Petrucci da Fossombrone, the first inventor of printing music notes with movable metal types, and his successors in the sixteenth century , Vienna 1845, No. 12, page 120
• E. Engel: The instrumental forms in lute music of the 16th century , Berlin 1915
• R. Casimiri: Il Codice Vaticano 5318. Carteggio musicale autografo fra teorici e musici del seculo XVI dall'anno 1517 al 1543 , in: Note d'archivio per la storia musicale No. 16, 1939, page 109
• Knud Jeppesen: The Italian Organ Music at the Beginning of the Cinquecento , Copenhagen 1944, No. 84, Note 61
• G. Lefkoff: Five Sixteenth Century Venetian Lute Books , dissertation at Washington DC University 1960
• HM Brown: Instrumental Music Printed Before 1600: A Bibliography , Cambridge / Massachusetts 1965
• O. Körte: Lute and lute music up to the middle of the 16th century , Wiesbaden 1974
• R. Chiesa: Storia della letteratura del liuto e della chitarra No. 35. Il Cinquecento: Marco Dall'Aquila , in: Il Fronimo. Volume 9, No. 34, 1981, pp. 27-30.
• E. Pohlmann: Lute, Theorbo, Chitarrone: The instruments, their music and literature from 1500 to the present , Bremen 1982
• Arthur J. Ness: The Herwarth Lute Manuscripts at the Bavarian State Library, Munich: A Bibliographical Study with Emphasis on the Works of Marco Dall'Aquila and Melchior Newsidler , Dissertation at New York University 1984, chapter 6, page 7 (microfilm)
• G. Radole: Liuto, chitarra e vihuela. Storia e letteratura , Milan 1997
• F. Zimei (editor): Congress report L'Aquila 1998, Colledara (= Istituto abruzzese di storia musicale, studi e testi 2)

Web links

• Works by and about Marco Dall'Aquila in the catalog of the German National Library

Sources and individual references

1. ^ The Music in Past and Present (MGG), Person Part Volume 5, Bärenreiter Verlag Kassel and Basel 2001, ISBN 3-7618-1115-2
2. ^ Howard Mayer Brown: Instrumental Music Printed Before 1600: A Bibliography. Cambridge, Mass. 1965, p. 11 f.
3. ↑ Frances Mattingly and Reginald Smith Brindle: Antonio Casteliono : Intabolatura de Leuto de Diversi Autori. (1536). Trascrizione in notazione moderna di Reginald Smith Brindle. Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, Milan (1974) 1978, p. XII
4. ^ National Library of Australia