PROSDICIMO DE BELDEMANDIS. - Music theorist, born in Padua between 1370 and 1380. He studied in Padua and Bologna, becoming “magister artium” in 1409 and “medicinae magister” in 1411. He held the chair of astrology and perhaps also of music at the University of Padua from 1422 until his death in 1428.
His theoretical work is not only a compendium of the entire fourteenth-century Italian musical theory that had opened with Marchetto da Padova, but also a glance toward the new horizons of music and especially of counterpoint, which was then emerging from the early polyphonic forms of diaphonia, organum, and discant. He theorized on rhythm and on the musical notation in use throughout the preceding century, illustrating and strenuously defending that typically Italian tradition which was about to give way before the spreading wave of Franco-Burgundian polyphonic art in the fifteenth century.
His treatises have been partly published by C. H. de Coussemaker in Scriptores, III (1864–76), pp. 193–261; by L. Baralli and L. Torri, “Il ‘trattato’ di P. De B. contro il ‘Lucidario’ di Marchetto da Padova” in Rivista musicale italiana, 20 (1913), pp. 707–62; and by C. Sartori, La notazione italiana del Trecento in una redazione inedita del «Trattato» tradotto da Marchetto (Florence 1938). Other parts remain unpublished in the libraries of Bologna, Lucca, etc.