Domenico Alaleona

Domenico Alaleona (Ottavio Felice Gaspare Maria Alaleona) was born in Montegiorgio, in the province of Ascoli Piceno, on 16 November 1881, and died in his native town on 28 December 1928. He was a prominent figure in early twentieth-century Italian musicology, to which he devoted much of his activity, although he also worked as a choral conductor and composer.

He trained in Rome, where he studied piano, organ and composition at the Liceo Musicale of Santa Cecilia, graduating in 1906. From 1912 he taught aesthetics and the history of music at the same institution. In 1907 he also took a degree at the University of Rome with a thesis on the Italian oratorio, which he later expanded into a standard reference work. His studies of the Italian laudi spirituali and of Carissimi helped lay the foundations of modern Italian musicology. As a conductor he specialised in choral music and, in 1926, founded the Madrigalisti Romani. He also argued firmly for the improvement of music education in Italy.

As a composer, his most ambitious work was the opera Mirra, an eclectic and uneven piece, but notable for its technical ambition. In it he briefly employed a specially built "pentaphonic" harmonium, in which the octave was divided into five equal parts, an implicit nod to the Indonesian slendro. His two theoretical articles of 1911 in the Rivista musicale italiana, much cited, examined equal divisions of the octave and chords of twelve sounds. According to sources, these speculations only rarely produced fully successful music, although some of his harmonic innovations are poetic, and his musicological research gave several of his vocal works a pleasing archaising flavour.