madrigal summary

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Below is the article summary. For the full article, see madrigal.

madrigal, Form of vocal chamber music, usually polyphonic and unaccompanied, of the 16th–17th centuries. It originated and developed in Italy, under the influence of the French chanson and the Italian frottola. Usually written for three to six voices, madrigals came to be sung widely as a social activity by cultivated amateurs, male and female. The texts were almost always about love; most prominent among the poets whose works were set to music are Petrarch, Torquato Tasso, and Battista Guarini. In Italy, Orlande de Lassus, Luca Marenzio, Don Carlo Gesualdo, and Claudio Monteverdi were among the greatest of the madrigalists; Thomas Morley, Thomas Weelkes, and John Wilbye created a distinguished body of English madrigals.

Carlo Gesualdo, principe di Venosa, conte di Conza Summary

Carlo Gesualdo, principe di Venosa, conte di Conza was an Italian composer and lutenist. Until the late 20th century his fame rested chiefly on his dramatic, unhappy, and often bizarre life. Since the late 20th century, however, his reputation as a musician has grown, based on his highly individual

William Byrd Summary

William Byrd was an English organist and composer of the Shakespearean age who is best known for his development of the English madrigal. He also wrote virginal and organ music that elevated the English keyboard style. Of Byrd’s origins and early life in London little is known. He was a pupil and

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina Summary

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was an Italian Renaissance composer of more than 105 masses and 250 motets, a master of contrapuntal composition. Palestrina lived during the period of the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation and was a primary representative of the 16th-century conservative approach

Strozzi, Bernardo: portrait of Claudio Monteverdi

Claudio Monteverdi Summary

Claudio Monteverdi was an Italian composer in the late Renaissance, the most important developer of the then new genre, the opera. He also did much to bring a “modern” secular spirit into church music. Monteverdi, the son of a barber-surgeon and chemist, studied with the director of music at