Frescobaldi's Early Inganni and Their Background

Abstract

It is forty years since Willi Apel published his important article which linked Frescobaldi's keyboard music with that of the contemporary Neapolitan composers, Mayone and Trabaci. By drawing attention to generic, formal and stylistic features common to the music of Frescobaldi and the Neapolitans he established a more balanced outlook on Italian keyboard music of the seventeenth century, and also pointed to Cabezon as an influence on Mayone and Trabaci. There is, however, a case for reconsidering this current view in the light of the artistic contacts between Naples and Ferrara in the last decade of the sixteenth century, and for examining the possible origins of some of the compositional processes that have appeared to link Frescobaldi to his southern counterparts. Professor Apel singled out features common to Frescobaldi, Mayone and Trabaci; and more recent work by Roland Jackson has established further musical evidence to support the specific influence of Trabaci on Frescobaldi's chromatic compositions and toccatas, and to suggest a more general pattern of musical practice in Naples, exemplified in the chromatic and other compositional procedures found both in Trabaci's music and in the works – vocal as well as instrumental – of Gesualdo and de Macque. Amongst these procedures is the device of inganno which Jackson has identified in some of Frescobaldi's mature chromatic music.