Cerone, Domenico Pietro

views updated

Cerone, Domenico Pietro

Cerone, Domenico Pietro, Italian tenor and music theorist; b. Bergamo, 1566; d. Naples, 1625. In 1592 he went to Spain and became a singer in the court choir. He later was appointed teacher of plainsong to the clergy of the church of the Annunciation at Naples. From 1610 until his death, he sang in the Royal Chapel Choir there. He publ. the manual Regole per il canto fermo (Naples, 1609) and El Melopeo y Maestro, tractado de musica teorica y practica (Naples, 1613). This treatise, written in Spanish and numbering 1, 160 pages, contains a compendium of early music theory. Its pedantic exposition and inordinate length were the main target of Eximeno’s satirical novel Don Lazarillo Vizcardi; Book XII is publ, in Eng. in O. Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History (N.Y., 1950).

Bibliography

F. Pedrell, P. Antonio Eximeno (1920); G. Pannain, L’oratorio dei Filippini (1934).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire