De Beldemandis, Prosdocimo

DE BELDEMANDIS, PROSDOCIMO. - Music theorist, b. in Padua between 1370 and 1380. He studied in Padua and Bologna, becoming "magister artium" and "medicinae magister" in 1409 and 1411 respectively. He held the chair of astrology and perhaps also of music at the University of Padua from 1422 to 1428, the year of his death.

His theoretical work is not only a compendium of the theory of the entire Italian musical fourteenth century, which had opened with Marchetto da Padova, but also a glance toward the new horizons of music and especially of counterpoint, which was then arising from the primitive polyphonic forms of "diaphonia," "organum" and descant. He theorizes on rhythm and on musical notation in use throughout the preceding century, amply illustrating and strenuously defending that typically Italian tradition which was about to give way before the spreading wave of French polyphonic art of the fifteenth century.

His treatises are in part published by C. H. de Coussemaker in the 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 Riv. mus. it., 20 (1913), pp. 707-62, and by C. Sartori, La notazione italiana del Trecento in una redazione inedita del « Tractatus practice cantus mensurabilis ad modum Italicorum » di P. de B. (Florence 1938), and in part unpublished in the libraries of Bologna, Lucca, etc.

Luisa Cervelli