Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da (1525–1594)

Italian composer born in the town of Palestrina, east of Rome. He began his musical career as a choirboy and organist, and in 1551 was appointed by Pope Julius II as director of the Julian Chapel at Saint Peter's in Rome. His reputation as a composer grew with Masses that he wrote for performance in Rome, where Dutch and French composers had once dominated the scene. He became musical director of the Roman Church of Santa Maria Maggiore from 1561 until 1566, and then served as a court musician for the d'Este family at their palace in Tivoli, in the hills north of Rome. He returned to Saint Peter's in 1571, and remained in the service of the popes for the rest of his life. Palestrina was commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII to return church music to the traditional style of plainchant, in which different voices sung melodies in unison. But he found himself poorly suited to this antique form of music and instead became one of the most skilled composers of polyphonic (multi part) music of the Renaissance. He wrote exclusively vocal music: Masses, motets, hymns, madrigals, and other sacred music that exhibited a complete mastery of the difficult craft of counterpoint (the balanced setting of two or more lines of music under very strict rules of harmony). He provided a model for Italian composers of sacred music for a century after his death and was also an important influence on the works of Johann Sebastian Bach. Palestrina remains a widely studied model for students of composition into the twenty-first century.

See Also: Byrd, William; Dowland, John; music