Casimiri, Raffaele

CASIMIRI, RAFFAELE. - Musician and musicologist, b. at Gualdo Tadino (Perugia) on 3 Nov. 1880, d. at Rome on 15 Apr. 1943, canon of St. John Lateran. A pupil of L. Bottazzo at Padua, he began his Cecilian activity as a teacher and choirmaster at Nocera Umbra; having then moved to Teano, Capua, Perugia, and Vercelli, in 1911 he was appointed master of the Lateran Chapel and teacher at the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music.

A prolific composer, an assiduous researcher and illustrator of early music and of documents concerning the history of church music, a brilliant propagandist with both the spoken and the written word, he founded the journal Psalterium in 1907 and, in 1924, Note d'archivio per la storia musicale, in which he published numerous biographical and historical-aesthetic studies of music criticism. In 1922 he founded and directed the "Società Polifonica Romana," with which he brought to appreciation, in memorable concerts in Europe and America, the treasures of the music of the 16th and 17th centuries. A profound connoisseur of paleography and of ancient music theory, he collected and disseminated in modern editions spiritual lauds, motets, masses, and psalms by classical authors. Death struck him while he was attending to the critical and complete publication of the works of Pierluigi da Palestrina, of which 18 volumes have appeared (Rome 1939 ff.), while the others are all ready for the press.

Paolo Guerrini