Word: palestrina
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...greatest liturgical composer who ever lived and one of the musical wonders of the ages was Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, whose lacy counterpoint was the pride of the Vatican under Pope Sixtus V (1585-90). The best U.S. interpreter of Palestrina is an Irish-American named Father William J. Finn, former choirmaster of Manhattan's Church of St. Paul the Apostle, who has behind him nearly 50 years of high musical achievement...
Sirs: In my opinion the inclusion of Monteverdi, Palestrina and Chopin in the twelve best list of composers voted by the musicologists is almost as absurd as the inclusion of Tin Pan Alley Gershwin by the Stanford students. And where are the two greatest symphonists of our time-Sibelius and Shostakovich...
...Gershwin 5) Palestrina...
Practically all the music of Western civilization consists of consonances variously interspersed with dissonances. But throughout musical history the dissonances have shown a tendency to crowd the consonances out. In the 16th Century Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, who composed the greatest of all Catholic liturgical music, expressed himself almost entirely in consonances. But 18th-Century Johann Sebastian Bach, a product of the more individualistic Protestant Reformation, used dissonances liberally, especially in his impassioned, emotional moments. And 19th-Century Richard Wagner, whose individualism bordered on egomania, laid dissonances on with a trowel...
Playing variations on this theme, Dr. Hanson implied connections between dissonance and passion, sex, revolutionary ardor and crime. Thus when Wagner, in the Lohengrin Prelude, wished to evoke virginal purity, he used far fewer dissonances than in the Tannhduser Bacchanale. Palestrina's contemporary, Don Carlo Gesualdo, a 16th-Century rapscallion who ended by hacking his wife to pieces with a knife, used far more dissonances than pious Palestrina...