Iacobus Leodiensis [Iacobus de Montibus, Iacobus de Oudenaerde]

Illinois, University of, School of Music.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was founded in 1867; the school of music was established in 1895 and made a unit of the college of fine and applied arts in 1931. In the 1990s the school enrolled about 700 students per year and had more than 80 faculty instructors. Degrees are offered in performance, composition, musicology, music education and theory.

The library, founded in 1943, houses over 750,000 items, including several instrumental collections and personal archives (including Harry Partch’s), large quantities of American sheet music, the Musicological Archive for Renaissance Manuscript Studies (with more than 90% of known polyphonic sources from 1400 to 1550 on film), the Hymn Tune Index and an Archive of Ethnomusicology. The school’s experimental music studios, founded by Lejaren Hiller in 1958, were the first of their kind in the western hemisphere and have led many of the major developments in electro-acoustic and computer music.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Hamm and H. Kellman: Census-Catalogue of Manuscript Sources of Polyphonic Music 1400–1550 (Stuttgart, 1979–88)

A.L. Silverberg: A Sympathy with Sounds: a Brief History of the University of Illinois (Urbana, IL, 1995)

N. Temperley: The Hymn Tune Index: a Census of English-Language Hymn Tunes in Printed Sources from 1535 to 1820 (Oxford, 1997)

BRUCE CARR

Illouz, Betsy.

See Jolas, Betsy.

Il Verso [Lo Verso; Versus], Antonio

(b Piazza Armerina, Sicily, ?c1560; d Palermo, c23 Aug 1621). Italian composer, poet and historian. He was the central figure of the Sicilian polyphonic school; his long and prolific career forms the bridge between his teacher Pietro Vinci and the generation of his own pupils. His parents, Clementia and Matteo de lo Verso, were landowners; his name first appears in a notarial document of 19 January 1569 at Piazza Armerina. With the exception of one possible sojourn in northern Italy, he spent most of his life in Sicily. Il Verso studied with Vinci, probably in Piazza, between 1582 and 1584, and in 1588 began to publish Vinci’s posthumous works together with his own early compositions. He moved to Palermo before this date, and spent most of his life there; all but three of his extant works were dedicated from Palermo, and Il Verso’s presence may have been an impetus to the rise of music printing there. According to a passage in his own Historia, he was in Piazza in 1600, and between the end of March and the end of July of the same year he was still in Palermo, where he took part in the debate between Achille Falcone and Sebastián Raval as a supporter of Raval. Three books of his madrigals were dedicated from Venice between 1 October 1600 and 10 September 1603. During this period he probably lived in Venice, or at least in northern Italy. He apparently returned to Palermo from Venice before 1 April 1605, since it was left to the Venetian printer Amadino to dedicate the Secondo libro de madrigali a tre voci to Il Verso’s 11-year-old pupil Francesco del Pomo. It was during Il Verso’s absence from Sicily that his death was mistakenly reported; an elegy was then written by his friend Sebastiano Bagolino who died in 1604.

Although Il Verso’s compositions are dedicated to princes, prelates and rich citizens, he does not appear to have held an official appointment; he made his living as a freelance music teacher and composer. As an editor he was responsible for Arcadelt’s Primo libro de madrigali a quattro voci con una gionta di diversi autori (RISM 1592¹⁷), while as a writer and poet he produced the Historia della città di Piazza (now lost) and was evidently acquainted with many literary figures in Palermo. Matteo Donia and Filippo Paruta praised him in Latin epigrams, and the latter wrote for him the dedication of his Duodecimo libro de madrigali a cinque voci. Among his many pupils were Giovanni Battista Calì, Francesco del Pomo, Domenico Campisi, Antonio Formica and, most important, Giuseppe Palazzotto e Tagliavia. A passage in the Historia records events of 1620, and in that year or perhaps in 1621 his last motets were published. On 23 August 1621 the Congregazione dell’Oratorio of Palermo granted him a free burial place in the church of S Ignazio all’Olivella.

Of Il Verso’s 39 music publications, 23 are madrigal books; only Philippe de Monte was more prolific in this area. The starting-point of his secular music is often his teacher Vinci, and at least 20 pieces are setting of texts that Vinci had used. In these instances Il Verso’s compositions are parodies of Vinci’s; the melodic subjects are the same, but the style is very different. Vinci was a classicist, Il Verso a mannerist: his parodies are elaborations full of artifice, every effect is varied and enhanced, the textures are denser, the repetitions more numerous and varied, the harmony full bodied and the music more prolonged (e.g. Passa la nave mia: Vinci, Primo libro, 6vv; Il Verso, Primo libro, 6vv). He turned homophony into contrapuntal displacement (e.g. Lasciatemi morire: Vinci, Primo libro, 6vv; Il Verso, Decimoquinto libro, 5vv) and inserted single notes in the borrowed material to produce suspended dissonances (e.g. Apre le porte il riso: Vinci, Settimo libro, 5vv; Il Verso, Primo libro, 5vv). He applied similar principles in the seven Ricercari a tre of his own that he included in his edition of Vinci’s Secondo libro de’ motetti e ricercari a tre voci (1591^2a), where he remodelled ricercares by his teacher, preserving their structure, key and the distance between the entries, and using the same subjects.

The path from his first book of five-voice madrigals (1590) to his 15th (1619) is a long one, but all his works belong to the ‘first phase’ of the seconda pratica; the melodies articulate the meaning of the text but the harmonic fabric balances polyphonic structure and melodic flow. In his last book of five-part madrigals Il Verso pursued the ideal put forward by Zacconi in Prattica di musica (1592), turning the ‘gracefulness of accent … achieved by the fragmentation and multiplication of the notes’ into an essential feature of his part-writing; each voice proceeds with ease and with rhythmic and melodic flexibility, each has accents and graceful ornaments, and none is given preferential treatment. This reinstatement of the equilibrium of classical five-part polyphony is all the more significant in view of Il Verso’s far-sighted treatment of three-part madrigals, where he adopted the typical 17th-century texture of two high voices and a bass.

Among his preferred texts those by Tasso predominate: in addition to individual items, the missing five-part Libro settimo was entitled I soavissimi ardori after Tasso’s poem, the likewise missing five-part Libro decimoterzo was based on Aminta, and he set six cycles from Gerusalemme liberata in the second and fourth three-part books and the eighth and 15th five-part books. He was also often drawn to Marino (some of whose verses he was the first to set), Petrarch, Vittoria Colonna, Luigi d’Heredia, Livio Celiano, Scipione de Castro and Guido Casoni (the last four being followers of Tasso). The verse of Guarini, on the other hand, he reserved almost exclusively for madrigals in a lighter vein and for villanellas.

Particular to Il Verso is his stylistic variety; he reconciled the most advanced seconda pratica with recovery of the roots of the prima pratica: for example, Il bianco e dolce cigno (Secondo libro, 3vv, 1604) is a parody of Arcadelt’s setting in the modern structure of the Baroque trio. But many of his five- and six-part madrigals too are in the modern style, with limpid texture and articulation and the most audacious harmonic writing. In his sacred works, all published after his stay in Venice, he appears to have been a skilful follower of Giovanni Gabrieli whom he praised in the acknowledgment (‘ai signori organisti musici’) in the organ scoring of the Brevi concerti (1606).

WORKS

Edition:Antonio Il Verso: Opera omnia, ed. P.E. Carapezza and others, MRS, ii–iii, vi–viii (1971–91) [C]

madrigals

Il primo libro de’ madrigali, 5vv (Palermo, 1590); C vii

Il primo libro de’ madrigali, 6vv (Venice, 1594^17); ed. in Grammatico; 1 ed. Carapezza, Studi musicali (1974)

Il terzo libro de madrigali, 5vv (Palermo, 1595), inc.

Madrigali … libro quarto, 5vv (Venice, 1600), inc.

Madrigali … libro secondo, 6vv (Venice, 1601^14), inc.

L’ottavo libro de madrigali, 5vv (Venice, 1603), inc.

Il secondo libro de madrigali, 3vv (Venice, 1605); C viii

Il terzo libro de’ madrigali, 6vv (Palermo, 1607^24), inc.

Il primo libro delle villanelle, 3vv (Venice, 1612), inc.

Il quarto libro de madrigali, 3vv, op.35 (Palermo, 1617), inc.

Il decimoquinto libro de’ madrigali, 5vv, op.36 (Palermo, 1619); C viii

11 madrigals, 4, 5, 6vv, 1592^17, 1613^10, 1616^10; 7 in C vi

motets

Mottecta … liber primus, 3–6vv, bc (Palermo, 1606), inc.

Brevi concerti … libro secondo, 1–6, 10, 12vv, bc (Palermo, 1606) [also incl. canzon francese]; 4 ed. in Ignoti

Sacrarum cantionum, 2–4vv, bc, cum dialogo, 6vv, bc, liber quartus (Venice, 1611), inc.

instrumental

Il primo libro della musica, a 2 (Palermo, 1596); C ii

9 ricercares, a 2, 3, 1591^2a, 1605^17; C ii–iii

editions

P. Vinci: Il secondo libro de’ motetti e ricercari, con alcuni ricercari di Antonio Il Verso suo discepolo, 3vv (Venice, 1591^2a); C iii

Di Archadelt il primo libro de madrigali … con una gionta di diversi autori, 4vv (Palermo, 1592^17), inc.

lost works

for complete details see Bianconi (1972) and Carapezza (1978)

[Il secondo libro de madrigali], 5vv (?repr. Venice, 1605)

[Il quinto libro de madrigali], 5vv (printed)

[Il sesto libro de madrigali], 5vv (Venice)

[Il primo libro de madrigali], 3vv (printed)

I soavissimi ardori, settimo libro de madrigali, 5vv (Venice, 1603)

Il nono libro de madrigali, 5vv (Venice, 1605)

[Il decimo libro de madrigali], 5vv (Venice)

L’undecimo libro de madrigali con alcuni romanzi alla spagnola, 5vv (Palermo, 1608)

[Il duodecimo libro de madrigali], 5vv (printed)

Libro decimoterzo de madrigali sopra l’Aminta del Tasso, 5vv (Palermo, 1612)

Il decimoquarto libro de madrigali, 5vv (Palermo, 1612)

[Il terzo libro de madrigali], 3vv (Venice)

[Il quinto libro de madrigali], 3vv (Venice, after 1619)

2 madrigals in Infidi lumi, madrigali di don Luigi d’Heredia, posti in musica da diversi autori ciciliani, 5vv (Palermo, 1603), lost, listed in VogelB

Mottetti, con i responsori di Natale, libro terzo, 2–5, 7, 8vv, bc (Venice)

Mottetti, 2–5vv, bc, con una messa, 4vv, bc, libro quinto (Venice, 1620)

Mottetti, libro sesto, 1–4vv, bc (Venice)

Motets in P. Vinci: Il terzo libro de’ mottetti con alcuni altri di Antonio Il Verso suo discepolo, 5, 6vv, ed. Il Verso (Palermo, 1588)

Il secondo libro della musica, a 2 (Venice)

Intavolatura di leuto e chitarra (Venice, before 1619)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MischiatiI

PitoniN

F. Paruta: Carmina (MS, I-PLcom 2QqC21, cc.78–9, insertion after c.104)

Antonio Falcone: ‘Relatione del successo seguito in Palermo tra Achille Falcone musico cosentino e Sebastian Ravalle musico spagnolo’, in Achille Falcone: Madrigali a cinque voci (Venice, 1603¹¹)

MS del Fondo S Domenico (I-PLa 570, f.278)

Memorie della Congregazione dell’Oratorio di Palermo (MS, I-PLcom 3QqD2)

G.P. Chiarandà: Piazza, città della Sicilia, antica, nuova, sacra e nobile (Messina, 1654) [incl. extracts from Il Verso’s lost Historia]

A. Mongitore: Bibliotheca Sicula, i (Palermo, 1708/R), 74–5

G.B. Caruso, ed.: Rime degli accademici accesi di Palermo (Palermo, 1726), 177ff

S. Bagolino: Carmina (Palermo, 1782), i, n.291, 338; ii, n.116f, 157, 276 [incl. Il Verso’s Lat. poems]

O. Tiby: I polifonisti siciliani del XVI e XVII secolo (Palermo, 1969)

C. Ignoti: Antonio Il Verso nel tardo rinascimento siciliano: contributo bio-bibliografico con uno studio particolare sui Brevi concerti del 1606 (diss., U. of Palermo, 1971)

L. Bianconi: ‘ Sussidi bibliografici per i musicisti siciliani del Cinque e Seicento’, RIM, vii (1972), 3–38

L. Bianconi: ‘ “Ah, dolente partita”: espressione e artificio’, Studi musicali, iii (1974), 105–30

P.E. Carapezza: Le costituzioni della musica (Palermo, 1974), 38, 80

P.E. Carapezza: ‘“O soave armonia”, classicità, maniera e barocco nella scuola polifonica siciliana’, Studi musicali, iii (1974), 347–90

P.E. Carapezza: ‘The Madrigal in Venice around the year 1600’, Heinrich Schütz und die Musik in Dänemark: Copenhagen 1985, 197–204

P.E. Carapezza: ‘“Quel frutto stramaturo e succoso”: il madrigale napoletano del primo seicento’, La musica a Napoli durante il Seicento: Naples 1985, 17–27

N. Maccavino: ‘ Musica a Caltagirone nel tardo Rinascimento, 1569–1619’, Musica sacra in Sicilia tra Rinascimento e Barocco: Caltagirone 1985, 91–110

P.E. Carapezza: ‘Madrigalisti siciliani’, Nuove effemeridi, no.11 (1990), 97–106

A. Grammatico: Il primo libro dei madrigalia sei voci Antonio Il Verso (diss., U. of Palermo, 1998)

PAOLO EMILIO CARAPEZZA