Nicola Vicentino

Nicola Vicentino (Vicenza, 1511 – Milan, c. 1576) was an Italian composer and music theorist whose importance lies chiefly in his attempt to free music theory from the constraints of the ecclesiastical modes. His experiments with harmonies that anticipated later innovations make him a singular figure of the late Renaissance, poised between madrigal practice and speculation about ancient genera.

Little is known of his youth in Vicenza. He probably came under the influence of the humanist Giangiorgio Trissino, and the proximity of Venice gave him access to the ideas and teaching of Willaert, whom he proclaimed as his teacher on the title page of his first book of madrigals. He was ordained a priest at some point during this period, although his real interest seems to have lain in the theoretical examination of the diatonic, chromatic and enharmonic genera and in their practical application.

It is not known with certainty when he arrived in Ferrara. As his name does not appear in the court account books, he probably worked for Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este rather than for the ducal chapel, a view that later documents appear to support. According to his treatise, he taught music to several members of the family of Duke Ercole II. In 1546 his first book of five-voice madrigals appeared in Venice, and in 1551 the celebrated debate with the Portuguese musician Vicente Lusitano took place in Rome. Vicentino maintained that the use of any element of the tetrachord was sufficient to identify a genus; the judges, made up of the papal singers Bartolomeo Escobedo and Ghiselin Danckerts, ruled in favour of Lusitano. Even so, Vicentino did not abandon his undertaking and published in Rome, in 1555, his treatise L'antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica.

In 1561 he had built the archicembalo and an archiorgan capable of reproducing the three genera. Around 1563 he left the cardinal's service and became maestro di cappella of Vicenza Cathedral, a post that did not satisfy him and that he held only until the end of the following year. After this, his career becomes less clear. Around 1566 he settled in Milan as second rector of St Thomas in Terra Amara, a parish in a populous and humble district, and remained there for a decade, although his petitions for a better post came to nothing and in 1574 Borromeo raised the church to the status of a collegiate church.

His musical legacy is notable above all for two books of madrigals, to which are added some sacred and secular works and incomplete compositions. His fame, however, rests on the treatise, divided into a theoretical part and five practical books, the fifth of which describes the archicembalo, with two keyboards and six rows of keys that made it possible to perform any microtonal composition. His ideas are regarded as a testimony to the struggle for a new art in sixteenth-century Italy, and from them there eventually derived the free chromatic style of the seconda pratica and modern equal temperament.