Giovanni Bassano

Giovanni Bassano (c. 1558 – summer 1617?) was an Italian Venetian School composer and cornettist of the late Renaissance and early Baroque eras. He was a key figure in the development of the instrumental ensemble at St. Mark's basilica, and left a detailed book on instrumental ornamentation, which is a rich resource for research in contemporary performance practice. It is not known if he was related to Antonio Bassano a member of a well-known Venetian family of musicians.

Life

Nothing is known of Bassano's life before his arrival as a young instrumental player at St. Mark's, probably in 1576 at the age of 18. He quickly acquired a reputation as one of the finest instrumentalists in Venice, and by 1585 had published his first book, Ricercate, passagi et cadentie, which details exactly how best to ornament passages when transcribing vocal music for instruments. In that same year he became a music teacher at the seminary associated with St. Mark's. In 1601 he took over the job as head of the instrumental ensemble from Girolamo Dalla Casa, and he remained at this post until his death in the summer of 1617. The exact date of his death is not known, but the approximate date is inferred from both of his posts becoming vacant simultaneously.

Music and influence

Bassano was the person most responsible for the performance of the music of the Gabrielis, both as a performer and a director. Most likely Giovanni Gabrieli had Bassano in mind for his elaborate cornett parts.

In addition to directing the music at St. Mark's, Bassano was busy elsewhere in Venice; he directed several groups of piffari, bands of wind players including bagpipes, recorders, shawms, flageolets, bassoons, and conceivably other instruments, which were used in other churches (such as San Rocco) or even street festivals.

Bassano was also a composer, though his accomplishment in this regard has been overshadowed by his renown as a performer and his associated performance treatise. He wrote motets and concerti ecclesiastici (sacred concertos) in the Venetian polychoral style; and he also wrote madrigals, canzonettas and some purely instrumental music. His canzonettas achieved some fame outside of Italy: Thomas Morley knew them, printing them in London in 1597 in English translation.

Some of Bassano's instrumental music is ingeniously contrapuntal, as though he were indulging a side of his personality he was unable to display in his more ceremonial, homophonic compositions. His fantasias and ricercars are densely imitative and contain retrograde and retrograde inversions of motivic ideas, a rarity in counterpoint before the 20th century.

The similarity of Bassano's motets to the early work of Heinrich Schütz, who studied in Venice with Gabrieli, suggests that the two may have known each other; certainly Schütz knew Bassano's music. At any rate Schütz carried the Venetian style back with him to Germany where it continued to develop into the Baroque era.

Selected publications

• Ricercate, passaggi et cadentie..., Originally published Venice 1585, Modern edition by Richard Erig, Zürich, Musikverlag zum Pelikan, 1976
• Concerti ecclesiastici : a cinque, sei, sette, otto, & dodeci voci, Originally published Venice 1599. Modern facsimile edition by Richard Charteris CMM 101-2 American Institute of Musicology 2003

References and further reading

• Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Venetian Instrumental Music, from Gabrieli to Vivaldi. New York, Dover Publications, 1994. ISBN 0-486-28151-5
• "Giovanni Bassano," in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. ISBN 1-56159-174-2
• Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1954. ISBN 0-393-09530-4

External links

• Overview of music at St. Mark's, including Bassano's role