Works
His contributions to liturgical music in Rome were profound as composer, organist, maestro di capella, writer on music theory and history, and as esaminatori dei maestri for the Academy of St. Cecilia. He was extremely prolific, with some 325 masses, 800 Psalm settings and 235 motets among the 3500 compositions listed by his pupil and biographer, Girolamo Chiti. He prepared a complete year of music for St. Peter’s, with settings for the masses and offices of every Sunday and holy day.
Pitoni’s early works are brilliant examples of his genius in the Roman contrapuntal style of Palestrina. In later years he moved toward more homophonic textures with polychoral elements. His use of stile concertato also included solo sections and concertante instrumental parts. It is said that his immense facility allowed him to compose the parts of a 16-voice mass separately, without use of a score. To modern ears and eyes these compositions may seem dull and even repetitious. However, given typical performance practices in the early 18th century – vocal ornamentation (“divisions”), instrumental participation, antiphonal location for polychoral elements, just intonation, and varied vocal colors – even the homophonic works must have made a strong impression in the highly reverberative church interiors of Rome. At the end of his life he was preparing a mass for twelve choirs, left incomplete at his death. He was buried in the Pitoni family vault in the Basilica of San Marco, where he had served for some 66 years. His best known work is the Dixit Dominus a 16 in 4 choirs.
Read more about this topic: Giuseppe Ottavio Pitoni
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“... no one who has not been an integral part of a slaveholding community, can have any idea of its abominations.... even were slavery no curse to its victims, the exercise of arbitrary power works such fearful ruin upon the hearts of slaveholders, that I should feel impelled to labor and pray for its overthrow with my last energies and latest breath.”
—Angelina Grimké (1805–1879)
“You are always looking for already-felt emotions, just as you like to get an old pair of trousers back from the cleaners, which seem new when you don’t look too closely. Artists are cleaners, don’t let yourself be taken in by them. True modern works of art are made not by artists but quite simply by men.”
—Francis Picabia (1878–1953)
“They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters, these see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep.”
—Bible: Hebrew Psalms, 107:23-4.