Giovanni Matteo Faà di Bruno (fl. c. 1570, also Horatio or Orazio di Faà) was an Italian

composer A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music. Etymology and def ...

and nobleman.

Biography

Giovanni Matteo Faà di Bruno was a member of the

Faà di Bruno The Faà di Bruno family is the name of an Italian nobility, Italian noble family based in the areas of Asti, Casale Monferrato, Casale, and Alessandria, which provided the Counts (later Marquises) of Bruno (AT), Bruno. In 1703 the family became a ...

family in the

Casale Monferrato Casale Monferrato () is a town in the Piedmont region of Northwest Italy, northwestern Italy, in the province of Alessandria. It is situated about east of Turin on the right bank of the Po River, Po, where the river runs at the foot of the Montfe ...

region. A musician of some importance in his lifetime, he composed a limited number of sacred and secular works, most notably two books of

madrigal A madrigal is a form of secular vocal music most typical of the Renaissance (15th–16th centuries) and early Baroque (1580–1650) periods, although revisited by some later European composers. The polyphonic madrigal is unaccompanied, and the ...

s and a set of

vespers Vespers /ˈvɛspərz/ () is a Christian liturgy, liturgy of evening prayer, one of the canonical hours in Catholic (both Latin liturgical rites, Latin and Eastern Catholic liturgy, Eastern Catholic liturgical rites), Eastern Orthodox, Oriental O ...

. His affiliation with the ducal family of the Gonzagas is evident in the dedicatory prefaces to his books of madrigals; the first dedicated to

Guglielmo Gonzaga Guglielmo Gonzaga (24 April 1538 – 14 August 1587) was Duke of Mantua from 1550 to 1587, and of Montferrat from 1574 to 1587. He was the second son of Federico II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua and Margaret Palaeologina of Montferrat. In 1574, Montfe ...

and the second to his son and heir to the ducal throne

Vincenzo Vincenzo is an Italian male given name, derived from the Latin name Vincentius (the verb ''vincere'' means to win or to conquer). Notable people with the name include: Art * Vincenzo Amato (born 1966), Italian actor and sculptor * Vincenzo Bel ...

. Andrea Botta, ''maestro di cappella'' of the cathedral at Casale, who compiled the second edition of the first book, mentions in its preface a publication of Faà's Vespers (now thought to be ''Salmi di David'' (1573)); besides a setting of the vespers, it contains several

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 preeminent polyphonic forms of Renaissance music. According to the Eng ...

s (for as many as eight voices), as well as a setting of the ''

Magnificat The Magnificat (Latin for "y soulmagnifies he Lord) is a canticle, also known as the Song of Mary or Canticle of Mary, and in the Byzantine Rite as the Ode of the Theotokos (). Its Western name derives from the incipit of its Latin text. This ...

''..

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Faa di Bruno, Giovanni Matteo Italian Renaissance composers 16th-century Italian composers