Costanzo Festa

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A collection of polyphonic hymns and Magnificats by Costanzo Festa; this is the earliest surviving such collection by a single composer in the Vatican archive

Costanzo Festa (c. 1485 to 1490 – April 10, 1545) was an Italian composer of the Renaissance. While he is best known for his madrigals, he also wrote sacred vocal music. He was the first native Italian polyphonist of international renown.

1 Life
2 Music and influence
3 References and further reading
4 External links
5 Media

[edit] Life

Not much is known about his early life. He was probably born in the Piedmont near Turin, but the evidence for this is not certain, being based mainly on later documents referring to him as a clericis secularibus, i.e. not a monk, from that region. His birth date has been given as early as 1480 and as late as 1495, but recent discoveries have tended to close in on dates in the late 1480s. In 1514 Festa visited Ferrara, bringing some motets with him; he seems to have been an established composer by this time, as indicated by the reception he received. Also sometime between 1510 and 1517 he lived on an island in the bay of Naples, where he served as a music teacher to the d'Avalos family. In 1517 he moved to Rome and began employment with Pope Leo X as a singer. A communication from 1543 indicates that he was too sick to travel with the Pope to Bologna, and he died in 1545. He evidently lived in Rome most of the second half of his life, serving in the Papal Choir much of the time.

[edit] Music and influence

Festa was one of the few Italians in the Papal Choir. He was a master of the Netherlands contrapuntal technique, however, and his importance to music history is as the one who first brought the two musical styles, the Italian and the Netherlandish, together. In addition, he was an obvious influence on Palestrina, who modeled many of his early works after his.

Most of Festa's madrigals are for three voices (in contrast to the other early madrigalist, Verdelot, who preferred five or six). He liked quick, rhythmically active passages in his madrigals; this may reflect an influence from the contemporary vocal form of the villanesca. In addition he wrote extended homophonic sections, showing somewhat less an influence from the contemporary motet, in contrast to the motet-like imitative passages found in Verdelot.

In addition to his madrigals, published mostly between 1543 and 1549, several collections of his sacred works were published during his lifetime, among them four masses, over forty motets, a set of Lamentations, and numerous Magnificats and Marian Litanies (for two choruses, each with four voices). The style of his sacred music matches that of his secular: he is less fond of imitation and complex counterpoint for its own sake, and often writes purely homophonic passages. Since Rome was musically conservative compared to the rest of Italy (and Europe) at the time, and there was a strong reaction against counterpoint within two decades after his death (expressly stated by the Council of Trent), his stylistic bent may represent a foreshadowing of that event; perhaps he was responding to the taste and needs of his papal employer.

[edit] References and further reading

Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1954. ISBN 0-393-09530-4
The Concise Edition of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, 8th ed. Revised by Nicolas Slonimsky. New York, Schirmer Books, 1993. ISBN 0-02-872416-X
James Haar: "Costanzo Festa", Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed July 1, 2005), (subscription access)
Crawford, David. "A Review of Costanzo Festa's Biography." Journal of the American Musicological Society. vol. XXVIII, No. 1. Page 102.