Pietro Aron

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Pietro Aaron, Lucidario in musica, 1545

Pietro Aron , also Pie (t) ro Aaron (* around 1480 in Florence , † after 1545 in Venice ), was an Italian music theorist and composer of the Renaissance .

Life

Aron was a priest in Imola in 1516 , was there himself a singer at the cathedral from 1520 to June 1522 and gave music lessons in the city. From 1523 he worked as maestro di casa in the service of the Knight of St. John and Prior of Venice Sebastiano Michiel in Venice. To this he dedicated his treatise Thoscanello de la musica 1523. In 1536 Aron became a monk in a monastery of the Cross near Bergamo . In 1545 he saw the publication of his Lucidario , but no longer that of the undated Compendiolo .

He wrote in the preface of Thoscanello about his simple origins and seems to have been self-taught .

Theoretical work

In his writings he mainly dealt with counterpoint and composition technique, the modal scale system (especially the possible application of the older church modes to contemporary practice) and the Musica ficta (the use of accidentals). He was one of the first theorists to describe the mean-tone tuning. He published not in Latin but in Italian, which was new for a music theorist of his time.

meaning

Aron tried to apply the old teachings about church modes, counterpoint and musica ficta to contemporary music when it had already changed massively, whereby his discussions are important as a contemporary document. Correspondence with his friend Giovanni Spataro shows him as a practical man who sometimes proceeded unsystematically. Spataro pointed out some mistakes and went so far in his criticism that he criticized the trattato as "senza ordine et verità".

His precise description of the mean-tone tuning became very important, which subsequently became the most common tuning for keyboard instruments and was only replaced by Andreas Werckmeister's well-tempered tuning .

Fonts

  • Libri tres de institutione harmonica , Bologna 1516
  • Thoscanello de la musica , Venice, 1523; three reprints as Toscanello in musica 1529, 1539, 1562, the occasional reprint in 1557 does not seem to have existed.
  • Trattato della natura et cognitione di tutti gli tuoni di canto figurato , Venice 1525; 1950 partly English translated in O. Strunk: Source Readings in Music History , New York
  • Lucidario in musica di alcune opinione antiche e modern , Venice 1545
  • Compendiolo di molti dubbi, segreti, et sentenze intorno al canto fermo et figurato , Milan posthumum, after 1545

Compositions

  • Io non posso più durare for four voices, in: Frottole libro quinto , Venice 1505
  • Credo for six voices, In illo tempore loquente Jesu , Letatus sum , mass for five voices, motet on the cantus firmus “Da pacem”, motets and madrigals. All the latter works are considered lost.

Web links

literature

  • JW Link, Jr .: Theory and Tuning: Aaron's Mean Tone Temperament , Boston, 1963
  • Peter Berquist: Mode and Polyphony around 1500; Theory and Practice , Music Forum I (1967).
  • Bonnie J. Blackburn: Aaron, Aron, Pietro . Music in the past and present (MGG) Vol. 1
  • Nicolas Slonimsky: Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians , 7th Edition, Schirmer Books, New York NY 1984, ISBN 0-02-870270-0 .
  • Libri tres de institutione harmonica , Bologna 1516, in: Vicifons (Latin-language Wikisource )
  • Cristle Collins Judd: Reading Renaissance Music Theory: Hearing with the Eyes. Volume 14 of Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis. Cambridge University Press, 2006, ISBN 0-52-102819-1

Individual evidence

  1. after New Grove 2001