Giovanni Del Turco

Giovanni del Turco (Florence, 21 June 1577 – Florence, 20 September 1647) was an Italian composer who combined music with court service in Medici Florence. He came from the nobility and belonged to the Order of Saint Stephen, a religious institution based in Pisa. His figure belongs to the circle of poets and musicians that gathered around Jacopo Corsi, a patron active roughly between 1592 and 1604.

Del Turco received lessons from Marco da Gagliano, who dedicated to him his second book of madrigals (1604) and praised both his talent and his compositions. Del Turco published his first book of madrigals in 1602, and Gagliano included pieces by him in his first four books. In 1607 he was listed as secretary of the Accademia degli Elevati, founded by Gagliano, and in that same year Giulio Cesare Monteverdi mentioned him in the Scherzi musicali among the gentlemen of that heroic school whose practice his brother followed. In 1614 he published his second book of madrigals, dedicated to the Grand Duke Cosimo II, and was appointed director of court music. In this role he organised the music for the Carnival of 1616 and composed the music for a mascherata in the equestrian festival Guerra d'Amore, a work now lost. According to the RISM of 1617 he was still in the post that year, although Ferdinando Saracinelli seems to have succeeded him before 1625.

His known output amounts to around forty pieces, almost all five-voice madrigals. The second book deserves the most attention: its texts, often epigrammatic, have a amorous or pathetic character, and the writing rests on a parlando-style declamation that becomes unstable through compressed, rapid imitations. Although it generally resembles the later style of Gagliano, it shows an occasional clumsiness in melodic line and harmonic movement that does not appear in his teacher's work. His chromaticism, like that of most Florentine composers, is fairly moderate.