Scholarly record

INCURSION IN THE WORLD OF RENAISSANCE ORGANISTS

D. C. Ibanescu

Abstract

In the Renaissance era, the mastery of the organists is increasing, and they are the ambassadors of the increasingly pronounced orientation for instrumental music, supporting and consolidating the instrumentalism. Important organists, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, English, etc., offer and promote the solution of instrumental music in the European space. The new trend in the approach of instrumental music develops in parallel with the compositional professionalization. Among the Iberian organists, Pedro Alberto Villa, the famous organist of the Barcelona cathedral, stands out - as representative of the Catalan School. The Castilian School gives to Spanish and universal music a most important musician and composer, Tomas Luis de Victoria. The greatest Spanish Renaissance organist was the brilliant blind musician Antonio de Cabezon, at the same time harpsichordist and composer, also a representative of the Castilian School. The perfect way in which he mastered the instrument profoundly influenced all Iberian organists and would lay the foundations of a long tradition. Both Spanish and Portuguese musicians contributed to the development of the Iberian Organ School. Italy, the cradle of the Renaissance, is the country that gave to the music world some of the most brilliant European organists of the time. Venice is the most important musical centre in terms of keyboard instruments. Here we find Marco Antonio Cavazzoni and his son Girolamo, Adrian Willaert and, in the second half of the sixteenth century, Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, the most important representatives, bringing through their art an extra glow to the city of lagoons. But the greatest Italian organist of the time is undoubtedly Girolamo Frescobaldi. Innate virtuoso, he shone in the position of organist of St. Peter's Church in Rome for three decades. In Florence, for five years, he was chapel organist and chamber musician at the court of the great Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand II of Medicis. In the Romanian musical space of the XV-XVII centuries, the organ, a complex instrument, entered in both the Protestant and the Catholic churches, no longer being only the main liturgical instrument, but more and more, becoming a concerting instrument, mainly in different cities of Transylvania, but also, sporadic, in the other Romanian Principalities. The Iberian and Italian organists had a great fame in the Renaissance era, their influence, due to the prestige they enjoyed in the music world, being major in the development of European organ schools. This is observed fully in the development and evolution of the organ music and of the organists activating on the Romanian territory, the influence of the Italian school being, perhaps, the most substantial

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/SWS.ISCAH.2019.2/S19.062

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