Giovan Battista Ferrini

Giovan Battista Ferrini was Roman and his birthdate estimated around 1601; he worked well chiefly as an organist right now there, from 1619 at S. Luigi dei Francesi and, from 1623 to 1653, the “Chiesa Nuova” in Valicella. Ferrini after that retired and resided another 2 decades, dying in 1674; in these years he journeyed broadly throughout Italy, producing personal looks at numerous churches and taking part in civic music-making and unique events. non-e of his extant music is apparently sacred, and it seems his colleagues understood Ferrini primarily like a author of harpsichord music, judging from his nickname “della Spinetta.” Aside from brief examples released in theoretical functions, Ferrini’s music by no means appeared on the net during, and even soon after, his life time. Nevertheless, Ferrini’s music was broadly distributed in manuscript, with some dances arriving as a long way away as Britain; Ferrini was quite popular in his day time, and his music praised by Athanasius Kircher, amongst others. From Kircher we learn that Ferrini may possess created vocal music, aswell, but none of this seems to exist, and Pitoni shows that a few of Ferrini’s music was also instrumentally performed. The main resource for Ferrini’s compositions is definitely a manuscript in the Vatican Apostolic Collection which has 12 items with several concordances elsewhere. The current presence of many Ferrini items in another Vatican manuscript, Chigi Q.IV 25, shows that he may have already been of the institution of musicians clustered around Girolamo Frescobaldi, as Frescobaldi’s college students compiled this manuscript, although Ferrini may just have already been an outsider whose function was admired by them. Maybe his birthdate was relatively previous and he was even more of a modern of Frescobaldi. However, Ferrini was acquainted with the method of variation form that people associate with Frescobaldi, as noticed in his Partite sopra l’Aria di Fiorenza and Capriccio fatto sopra il Cucchù. This last-named function is an extremely complex group of polyphonic variants in which a two-note “cuckoo” amount both intersects, overlaps, and interrupts the structure at unpredictable factors in the piece; it really is one of the most startlingly experimental key pad pieces of the first seventeenth century.