CICONIA, Iohannes. - A musician and theorist, poet and singer, a canon of Padua but originally from Liège, he was more than a purely eclectic composer; he was the most valid representative of the transitional period between the Ars nova (q.v.) and the Italo-Burgundian current that dominated in the first half of the 15th century and which constituted the first period of 15th-century polyphony.
He lived in the early 1400s in Padua, where in 1411 he wrote his treatise *Nova musica* in five books (of the third, titled *De proportionibus*, there are several separate manuscripts). He left many sacred compositions, particularly masses, fragments of which are preserved in Modena and Warsaw as well as in Trent codices, marked by an elegant and sober style. While these works lack the passion that vibrates in his secular songs, they nonetheless represent a marvelous synthesis of the two national schools of which he was an exponent by birth and by choice.