Marco Antonio Centorio

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Marco Antonio Centorio (c. 1600, Vercelli – 1638, Vercelli) was a northern Italian composer and organist associated throughout his life with the cathedral of Vercelli in Piedmont. Born there around 1600 into a family that local historians describe as former aristocracy fallen to gentry status, he entered the Collegio degli Innocenti as a treble and received a thorough education in both music and the humanities while serving as one of six pueri cantus attached to the cathedral. When his voice broke he moved to Milan to study organ and theory, absorbing the late-Renaissance and early baroque idioms of the Lombard milieu. By about eighteen he had returned to Vercelli as titular organist of the cathedral, and roughly a decade later he was appointed maestro di cappella, a position he retained until his premature death in 1638. Most of Centorio’s surviving music is preserved in the Vercelli Chapter Archive and was largely unknown until rediscovered and edited in the 21st century. The works reveal a composer adept at both strict counterpoint and the emergent concertato style: there are instrumental canzoni francese for brass and organ, double-organ pieces, motets with strings and voices, and mottetti con sinfonia that combine vocal lines with violins and basso continuo in a manner clearly indebted to Monteverdi and the Milanese canzona tradition. Recent recordings by the Cappella Musicale della Cattedrale di Vercelli have positioned him, alongside Pietro Heredia, as a significant

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