Agostini, Paolo

AGOSTINI, PAOLO. - Musician b. at Vallerano ca. 1583, d. at Rome in September 1629. He was a pupil and later son-in-law of G. B. Nanino; choirmaster at the church of the Most Holy Trinity of the Pilgrims, at St. Mary in Trastevere, at St. Lawrence in Damaso and finally at St. Peter's. Of his numerous polyphonic works many still lie in manuscript in various Roman libraries; of those in print the most important are the Salmi della Madonna (1629), containing magnificat, antiphons and concerted motets, and 5 books of Masses (1627).

Like almost all the members of the post-Palestrinian Roman school, A. still awaits an exhaustive study that determines the importance and the value of his artistic personality, also in relation to the stylistic transformation under way in religious music at the beginning of the 17th century. His style appears oriented toward the great contrapuntal tradition of the Roman school, but already open to certain new expressive elements, which are chiefly to be discerned in a tendency to expand the sonority of the choral mass, as is characteristic of seventeenth-century polyphony, and to welcome new harmonic effects.

Luigi Ronga