Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi

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Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi (about 1550 - 1622?), an Italian musical composer of the Baroque period. In 1582, he succeeded Giache Wert and served as Sta. Barbara’s choirmaster until 1605 under the Dukes Gugliamo and Vincenzo Gonzaga. According to Filippo Lomazzo, Gastoldi became choirmaster at the Duomo, Milan afterwards, but other considerations seem to make this point doubtful.

Gastoldi has composed several madrigals, a variety of sacred vocal music, and few instrumental music. His two sets of balletti, strophic vocal dance, however, are the most prominent and instrumental. These were written for five chorus and were composed of passages of nonsense syllables which seemed to personify a type of lover and love-making. As a whole, Gastoldi’s baletti was a musical comedia del arte and included the following compositions: Contento (The Lucky One), Premiato (The Winner), L'Inamorato (The Suitor) Piacere (Pleasure), La Bellezza (Beauty), Gloria d'Amore (Praise of Love), L'Acceso (The Ardent), Caccia d'Amore (Love-Chase), Il Martellato (The Disdained), Il Bell’humore (The Good Fellow), Amor Vittorioso (Love Victorious),Speme Amorosa (Hope). Balleti music basically had a simple chordal texture, fast declamation and rhythmic accents at the expense of contrapuntal display as is to be expected from their close relationship to dance music.

Gastoldi’s Balleti a Cinque Voci was published in Venice in 1591 and immediately became a “best seller.” Within a short time, this was reprinted ten times not only by their original publisher but also in other countries as well. Composers like Vecchi, Banchieri, Hassler and Morley were greatly captivated by this musical creation.

It is certain that many frotolle, villancicos and chansons francaises were intimately related to dance, but it seems true that Gastoldi was the first scholarly author, presumably since the thirteenth century, to compose songs for dancing which were modeled on instrumental patterns, and were perfectly apt for instrumental performance alone.

The title page of baletti bestows the title “Maestro di Cappella del Serenissimo Signor Duca di Mantova” to Gastoldi. However, this has no slightest intention of masking sophistication behind the spontaneous naivete of Gastoldi's works because the entire content is a collection of simplicty, healthy playfulness, communicative carefreeness, and gaiety. The common trait is, of course, the Fa-la refrain, (which incidentally became “lirum-lirum “in Gloria d’amore) with skipping rhythms, clear lines, and frank tonality. Gastoldi sought to vary his compositions from ballet to ballet by sometimes writing in triple time, in double or by the alternate use of major and minor. Otherwise, it cannot be said that he at all attempted a psychological differentiation between the several “characters” depicted.