Giovanni da Firenze

Fourteenth century Florence was the town of Petrarch and Boccaccio, of Cimabue and Giotto. In music, aswell, a vibrant nationwide school was growing alongside those in books and artwork. The 1st generation of the Italian musicians, nevertheless, didn’t all hail from Florence; two from the 1st generation originated from Bologna (Jacopo da Bologna) as well as the north (Maestro Piero), as well as the 1st stirrings of their artwork seem to have already been codified in Padua, Verona, and Milan. Another person in the era, though he caused them in the north, was known by his hometown: Maestro Giovanni da Firenze. He’s also often called Giovanni da Cascia, which might small his birthplace even more to the community of Cascia, not really definately not Florence. With Jacopo and Piero, Giovanni da Cascia helped solidify the initial written-down indigenous Italian music, both madrigals (not the same as the sixteenth hundred years genre) and Cacce (“catches,” or canonic parts). Giovanni is certainly even acknowledged with doing one of the most to tell apart these nascent styles, both one from one another and in the vernacular unwritten customs that proceeded to go before. Unfortunately, records of details in Giovanni da Cascia’s lifestyle are pretty scant. He resided and proved helpful in Padua, after that Verona and Milan, most likely in the 1330s and 1340s. Two afterwards Giovannis within Florence itself may or may possibly not be this musician: you are a cutler who belonged to 1 of Florence’s effective performing confraternities, one a priest “from the organs” who worked well in Santa Trinitá in Florence in 1360. Neither research is particularly useful. Giovanni’s music will survive, nevertheless, in major resources from both Florence as well as the north (like the earliest way to obtain Italian music from Padua); one huge Florentine manuscript consists of his portrait. Furthermore, literary proof for Giovanni’s popularity abounds: chroniclers Villani and Franco Sacchetti both point out him, and Prudenzani shows his music was still in blood circulation some 70 years after his loss of life. Villani actually provides one interesting anecdote about his existence. Evidently when Jacopo da Bologna, Maestro Piero, and Giovanni da Cascia had been all working collectively for the della Scala courtroom in Verona, the trio competed inside a mini-cycle of madrigals that refes to a strange and praiseworthy “Anna”; she later on turns into a viperous menace to her admirers, but she gets the final word in Giovanni’s last contribution towards the madrigal group.