Everything about Agostino Agazzari totally explained
Agostino Agazzari (
December 2,
1578 -
April 10,
1640) was an
Italian composer and
music theorist.
Biography
Agazzari was born in
Siena to an aristocratic family. After working in
Rome, as a teacher at the Germanic College, he returned to Siena in
1607, becoming first
organist and later choirmaster of the cathedral there. He was a close friend of
Lodovico Grossi da Viadana, the early innovator of the
basso continuo.
Agazzari wrote several books of sacred music,
madrigals and the pastoral drama
Eumelio (
1606). Stylistically,
Eumelio is similar to the famous composition by
Cavalieri Rappresentatione di Anima, e di Corpo of
1600, a work of singular significance in the development of the
oratorio. In the preface to the drama he mentions that he was asked to set the text to music only one month before the performance; he composed the music in two weeks, and copied the parts and rehearsed it in the remaining two weeks, a feat which would be impressive even in the modern age. Agazzari is best known, however, for
Del sonare sopra il basso (1607), one of the earliest and most important works on basso continuo. This treatise was immensely important in the diffusion of the technique throughout Europe: for example,
Michael Praetorius used large portions of it in his
Syntagma musicum in Germany in
1618-
1619. As was true with many late Renaissance and early
Baroque theoretical treatises, it described a practice which was already occurring. In large part it was based on a study of his friend Viadana's
Cento concerti ecclesiastici (published in
Venice in
1602), the first collection of sacred music to use the basso continuo.
Most of his compositions are sacred music, and motets of the early
Baroque variety (for two or three voices with instruments) make up the majority of them. All of the motets are accompanied by basso continuo, with organ providing the sustaining line. His madrigals, on the other hand, are
a cappella, in the late
Renaissance style, so Agazzari simultaneously showed extreme progressive tendencies as well as some more conservative: unusually, his progressive music was sacred, and his conservative was secular, a situation almost unique among composers of the early Baroque.
He died in Siena.
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