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Artist
Girolamo Valmarana
16th centuryitalian
about
Virtually nothing is known about Girolamo Valmarana, other than the fact that he was a member of the Accademia Olimpica of Vicenza in the mid-1580s, and that, according to one source, he composed music, now lost, for a “torneo a piedi” (a staged tourney on foot, as opposed to one on horseback) that was held at Carnival time in 1612. (Another version of the same source indicates that the composer was Leone Leoni.) It seems that Valmarana also published a book of five-voice madrigals, probably in the first decade of the 17th century. All trace of the print has disappeared, but the Englishman Francis Tregian, while cooling his heels in prison, happened to copy seven of its pieces into a voluminous manuscript known as British Library MS Egerton 3665 (the “Tregian MS”; in that source, the composer’s surname is consistently rendered as “Valmarano”). Overall the pieces reveal Valmarana to be an accomplished exponent of late Renaissance style. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.