![]() His appointment to the chapel in Bergamo gives us a rather interesting slant on his character: Hawkins mentions that one of the reasons for his taking the position there was the realistic proportions of the stipend offered him. After a short visit to his former home near Lodi, he subsequently became maestro di cappella (head of the musical chapel) in Monticello and Bergamo. He did some of his most important writing in Naples, and possibly he could have remained there longer if it had not been for the terrible pestilence which threatened the city. ![]() In 1478 Gaffurio accompanied his patron to Naples, where he made the acquaintance of other prominent musicians of his time, including the theorist Tinctoris, whom he quoted later in some of his works. Unfortunately, the Genoese stay was cut short by his patron's causing such displeasure among the powers at that city that he was expelled to Naples. Hawkins, the English music historian, reports that as a result of his love for collecting material about his favorite subject, he wrote a tract known as Musicae institutionis collocutiones, which never appeared in print under that title but which might have been the original form of at least a part of a later treatise, the Angelicum. His great reputation as a lecturer prompted Prospero Adomo to invite him to take a position at his court in Genoa. A little later, when he moved to Verona, he became a public professor of music, lecturing on theory and counterpoint. In Mantua, where young Gaffurio went to be with his father who was then serving Ludovico Gonzaga, he studied music assiduously, preparing and writing his first tracts on theory. Later, when Gaffurio referred to his teacher's precepts in his own writings, he carefully Latinized the name to Bonadies! Johannes Goodendag (or Godendach), a Carmelite friar, was his first music teacher, giving him a working knowledge of musical theory and composition. His first churchly affiliation, therefore, was that of a choirboy he later became a priest. Although his father was a soldier in the service of nobility, Gaffurio himself seemed to care little for such a career but started rather early to be interested in singing and in collecting material about music. Gaffurio, was born in the town of Ospitaletto near Lodi, Italy, on January 14, 1451, the son of Betino and Catherina Fixaraga Gaffurio. In some quarters during his own lifetime and shortly after his death he was perhaps more notorious than famous, judging from some of the verbal beatings he took from other theorists who did not particularly care for his musical ideas. Some Theoretical Works by Franchino GaffurioĪmong the incunabula and the large collection of theoretical works from the Renaissance in the Sibley Music Library are five treatises by Franchino Gaffurio, one of the well-known Italian writers on music of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, His name has been variously spelled: Gaffurius, Gafurius, Gafforio, Gaforio, Gafori.
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