CASIMIRI, RAFFAELE. - Musician and musicologist, b. at Gualdo Tadino (Perugia) on 3 Nov. 1880, d. at Rome on 15 Apr. 1943, canon of S. Giovanni in Laterano. A pupil of L. Bottazzo at Padua, he began his Cecilian activity as teacher and chapel master at Nocera Umbra; subsequently moving 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, assiduous researcher and expositor of early music and of documents concerning the history of ecclesiastical music, a brilliant propagandist by word and pen, 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 musical criticism. In 1922 he founded and directed the « Società Polifonica Romana », through which, in memorable concerts in Europe and America, he brought appreciation of the treasures of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century music. Profoundly knowledgeable in palaeography and ancient musical theory, he collected and disseminated in modern editions spiritual laude, 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 all the others are ready for the press.