Ippolito Chamaterò

Ippolito Chamaterò, also cited as Hippolito, Chamatterò di Negri or Camaterò, was an Italian composer born in Rome around 1535–1540 and documented as still alive after 1592. His output belongs to the second half of the sixteenth century, at the point where the madrigal and sacred music were moving towards the demands of the Council of Trent, and it was developed almost entirely in northern Italy.

His career began in Padua, where he was based in 1560–1561, the years in which he signed the dedications of his first books for five and four voices. The second of these includes two works by the Padua-born composer Giulio Renaldi, published six years before his own. In January 1562 he was elected maestro di cappella of the Accademia Filarmonica in Verona, a post he held until December 1563. He then took on a succession of brief appointments, mostly of short duration, in institutions in Vicenza, Treviso, Udine, Padua and Bergamo, with Udine as his principal post, where he remained between 1567 and 1570 and again from 1574 until 1577.

In sacred music, which he composed chiefly in the decade following the Council of Trent, there is a clear intention to adhere to the new liturgical regulations. The title pages of his Introits of 1574 refer to the "new missal", probably the one published in 1570, and the title of his Salmi corista of 1573 points to the breviary of 1568. His writing is generally clear and attentive both to the sound and to the sense of the text. How far his musical style was truly shaped by the religious policy of the period, however, remains an open question.

Of his six books of madrigals, four appeared in 1569, during his first spell in Udine. It is unlikely that all these pieces were recent; the stability of that post may have allowed him to gather and publish works composed in the six or seven preceding years. His dedications maintain his links with patrons and with the Accademia in Verona. His preference for Petrarch and the Petrarchists, such as Bembo and Cassola, places him in the line of Willaert and Rore, but more striking is his fondness for extended cycles and, in particular, for the sestina: four of his six books open with a complete sestina by Petrarch.

His recognition during his lifetime is attested by the dedication Massimo Troiano made to him in 1567 and by his inclusion in Ludovico Balbi's Essercitio (1589), alongside the most celebrated madrigalists, from Arcadelt to Marenzio. Despite this, his music has never been published in a modern edition and has scarcely received attention in current scholarship. His legacy therefore remains little studied, and the study of his madrigal cycles could help to complete the still incomplete picture of the madrigal in the 1560s and 1570s.