Nino Pirrotta

Antonino Pirrotta, known as Nino Pirrotta, was one of the most influential Italian musicologists of the twentieth century. He was born in Palermo on 13 June 1908 and died in the same city on 23 January 1998. His work ranged from the music of the Trecento and the Ars Nova to seventeenth-century opera and the musical culture of the Renaissance, and his rigorous method shaped both his American students and the young Italian researchers who followed him.

His training began at the Palermo conservatoire and continued in Florence, where he obtained his diploma in organ and composition in 1930 and, shortly afterwards, a degree in the humanities with a thesis on art history at the university there. After a brief spell as a radio organist, he taught music history and ran the library of the Palermo conservatoire from 1936 to 1948. He then directed the main library of the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome and took part in founding the IAML in 1951, of which he became vice-president.

The 1950s took him into the Anglo-Saxon academic world. He was a visiting professor at Princeton, lectured at UCLA and Columbia, and between 1956 and 1972 held a chair at Harvard, where he eventually chaired the department from 1965 to 1968. In 1972 he returned to Italy to teach music history at the University of Rome. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Accademia di Santa Cecilia and the Accademia dei Lincei, and received honorary distinctions from several universities, among them Cambridge, Princeton and Urbino, as well as the Feltrinelli Prize in 1983.

His interest in medieval music arose from collaborating with Ettore Li Gotti, a professor of philology in Palermo, on a study of Sacchetti and the musical technique of the Trecento. For that work he had to teach himself the notation, theory and forms of Italian fourteenth-century music. With Li Gotti he examined the recently discovered Lucca codex, which led him to study Ciconia and Paolo da Firenze, and to undertake the edition The Music of Fourteenth-Century Italy, published between 1954 and 1964. His writings on the Ars Nova are distinguished by patient reasoning and great clarity and, although he never dismissed other interpretations, his intellectual honesty often led him to conservative and therefore very personal positions.

In his studies of humanism and early opera, Pirrotta combined a broad knowledge of Italian culture with close textual analysis. Works such as ‘Early Opera and Aria’, or his research on the commedia dell'arte and opera, demonstrated his ability to relate distinct traditions. His legacy endures in his pupils, in three volumes of tributes and in the influence of a method that united scholarship, prudence and breadth of vision.