Pietro Aaron

Pietro Aron (Piero Aaron) was an Italian music theorist and composer, born in Florence around 1480, and he is known to have still been alive after 1545. His career falls within the first third of the sixteenth century, at the transition between medieval music theory and the first Renaissance systematisations, and his interest lies in having documented in considerable detail the polyphonic practice of his time.

Very little is known of his early training. He claimed to have enjoyed a close friendship with Josquin, Obrecht, Isaac and Agricola in Florence, probably between 1487 and 1495, although these contacts did not necessarily coincide in time. By around 1516 he was a priest in Imola, where he published his first treatise, the Libri tres de institutione harmonica, which was translated into Latin by the humanist Giovanni Antonio Flaminio. By 1520 he was already serving as a cantor at Imola cathedral, and the town council paid him to teach music to anyone who wished to learn; he resigned in June 1522. By February 1523 he was in Venice, in the service of Sebastiano Michiel, Grand Prior of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem, to whom he dedicated the Toscanello. After his patron's death in 1536 he entered the Crosier order as a friar in a monastery near Bergamo.

Apart from his brief stay in Imola, he never held a formal post as cantor or choirmaster, a rare situation that some researchers have linked to his Jewish origin, a hypothesis presented as such and not as a proven fact. He is largely considered self-taught, which accounts both for certain imprecisions in his early works and for the richness of his observations on actual practice.

His most original work was the Trattato of 1525, in which he attempted to apply the modal theory of Marchetto of Padua to contemporary polyphonic repertoire, citing compositions published by Petrucci. His Toscanello, one of the first music treatises in the vernacular, enjoyed considerable success and reached four editions. The Lucidario of 1545 gathers theoretical debates of wide scope. Aron was not a theoretical innovator, but his insistence on applying the rules of mode, counterpoint and musica ficta to a music increasingly difficult to fit within them makes his writings a valuable source. His influence extended throughout the sixteenth century, especially through his pupil Illuminato Aiguino.