Ignazio Donati (c. 1570 – 21 January 1638) was an Italian composer of the early

Baroque The Baroque (, ; ) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1750s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires including ...

era. He was one of the pioneers of the style of the

concertato Concertato is a term in early Baroque music referring to either a ''genre'' or a ''style'' of music in which groups of instruments or voices share a melody, usually in alternation, and almost always over a basso continuo. The term derives from It ...

motet In Western classical music, a motet is mainly a vocal musical composition, of highly diverse form and style, from high medieval music to the present. The motet was one of the pre-eminent polyphonic forms of Renaissance music. According to Ma ...

Biography

Ignazio Donati was born in

Casalmaggiore Casalmaggiore ( Casalasco-Viadanese: ) is a ''comune'' in the province of Cremona, Lombardy, Italy, located across the Po River. It was the birthplace of Italian composers Ignazio Donati and Andrea Zani. It became worldwide famous thanks to its ...

(now in the

Province of Cremona The Province of Cremona ( it, provincia di Cremona; Cremunés: ; Cremasco: ; Casalasco-Viadanese: ) is a province in the Lombardy region of Italy. Its capital city is Cremona. The province occupies the central section of Padana Plain, so the ...

). Little is known about his earliest years, but he must have had a thorough early musical training, and his succession of posts at various cathedrals in Italian towns is well documented: he served successively at

Urbino Urbino ( ; ; Romagnol: ''Urbìn'') is a walled city in the Marche region of Italy, south-west of Pesaro, a World Heritage Site notable for a remarkable historical legacy of independent Renaissance culture, especially under the patronage of F ...

Pesaro Pesaro () is a city and ''comune'' in the Italian region of Marche, capital of the Province of Pesaro e Urbino, on the Adriatic Sea. According to the 2011 census, its population was 95,011, making it the second most populous city in the Marche ...

Fano Fano is a town and '' comune'' of the province of Pesaro and Urbino in the Marche region of Italy. It is a beach resort southeast of Pesaro, located where the '' Via Flaminia'' reaches the Adriatic Sea. It is the third city in the region by ...

Ferrara Ferrara (, ; egl, Fràra ) is a city and ''comune'' in Emilia-Romagna, northern Italy, capital of the Province of Ferrara. it had 132,009 inhabitants. It is situated northeast of Bologna, on the Po di Volano, a branch channel of the main stream ...

, Casalmaggiore,

Novara Novara (, Novarese: ) is the capital city of the province of Novara in the Piedmont region in northwest Italy, to the west of Milan. With 101,916 inhabitants (on 1 January 2021), it is the second most populous city in Piedmont after Turin. It i ...

, and Lodi, eventually acquiring the prestigious post at

Milan Milan ( , , Lombard: ; it, Milano ) is a city in northern Italy, capital of Lombardy, and the second-most populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of about 1.4 million, while its metropolitan city ...

Cathedral in 1629, which he kept with one short break until his death. Donati wrote "sacred

concerto A concerto (; plural ''concertos'', or ''concerti'' from the Italian plural) is, from the late Baroque era, mostly understood as an instrumental composition, written for one or more soloists accompanied by an orchestra or other ensemble. The typ ...

s",

mass Mass is an intrinsic property of a body. It was traditionally believed to be related to the quantity of matter in a physical body, until the discovery of the atom and particle physics. It was found that different atoms and different ele ...

es and

psalm The Book of Psalms ( or ; he, תְּהִלִּים, , lit. "praises"), also known as the Psalms, or the Psalter, is the first book of the ("Writings"), the third section of the Tanakh, and a book of the Old Testament. The title is derived f ...

settings. Most of Donati's music is sacred, and his style tends towards the cheerful, the light, and the practical. He wrote motets using the new

style pioneered by the composers of the Venetian School, though he was not associated with

Venice Venice ( ; it, Venezia ; vec, Venesia or ) is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto Regions of Italy, region. It is built on a group of 118 small islands that are separated by canals and linked by over 400 ...

himself. Most of his music is for two to five voices with instrumental accompaniment including basso continuo, and some of his works—for example a book of psalm settings—exist in several settings for different types of performance, with different instrumental and vocal forces. Ignazio Donati wrote the ''Sacri concentus'' and published it in Venice in 1612; here he defined the " cantar lontano" vocal practice. In some of his music he went even farther, and suggested multiple performance ideas—from singing only a very few parts, to using multiple choruses with instrumental doubling, based on the resources of the performing ensemble and the type of effect required by the performance occasion. This kind of practical advice is rarely found in the writings accompanying the music of the Venetian school composers, who had massive, virtuoso, well-paid ensembles at their disposal, but it would have been essential to the musical establishments at the small provincial towns in which Donati worked. In addition to his concertato motets and other mixed instrumental-vocal music, he wrote some relatively conservative masses, which, however, are not in the

polyphonic Polyphony ( ) is a type of musical texture consisting of two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody, as opposed to a musical texture with just one voice, monophony, or a texture with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords, ...

Palestrina Palestrina (ancient ''Praeneste''; grc, Πραίνεστος, ''Prainestos'') is a modern Italian city and ''comune'' (municipality) with a population of about 22,000, in Lazio, about east of Rome. It is connected to the latter by the Via Pre ...

style but find a middle-ground between the ''

stile antico ''Stile antico'' (literally "ancient style", ), is a term describing a manner of musical composition from the sixteenth century onwards that was historically conscious, as opposed to '' stile moderno'', which adhered to more modern trends. ''Prim ...

'' and the more modern

harmonic A harmonic is a wave with a frequency that is a positive integer multiple of the ''fundamental frequency'', the frequency of the original periodic signal, such as a sinusoidal wave. The original signal is also called the ''1st harmonic'', t ...

practice.

References and further reading

*Articles "Ignazio Donati," "concertato," "Motet" from ''The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'', ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. * Eleanor Selfridge-Field, ''Venetian Instrumental Music, from Gabrieli to Vivaldi.'' New York, Dover Publications, 1994.

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Donati, Ignazio 1570s births 1638 deaths People from Casalmaggiore Italian male classical composers Italian Baroque composers Renaissance composers 17th-century Italian composers 17th-century male musicians