Biography
Little is documented of Aron's early life, but it has been hypothesized that he may have been of Jewish origin (Blackburn 2001), and he was certainly educated in Italy. Musically he seems to have been largely self-taught. He claimed in his Toscanello in musica (1523) that he had been personally familiar with Obrecht, Josquin, and Heinrich Isaac in Florence; if true, and if he meant that he knew them all at the same time, this would have had to have been in the late 1480s to mid 1490s, most likely in 1487 (Bergquist 1964, 24). Between 1515 and 1522 he was cantor at the cathedral of Imola, and in 1516 he became a priest there. By February 1523 he had gone to Venice, was cantor of Rimini Cathedral and worked for Sebastiano Michiel, who was Grand Prior of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem. In 1525 he was "maestro di casa" in a Venetian house. In 1536, after the death of Michiel, he joined a monastery in Bergamo where he remained until the end of his life; at least one publication dates from this time.
Aron's significance mainly derives from his treatises on the contrapuntal practice of the period. His earliest treatise, De institutione harmonica, is on counterpoint, and is written in Italian: most scholarly writings of the time are in Latin, but Aron preferred the vernacular. In Thoscanello de la musica (later Toscanello in musica) he was the first to observe the change from linear writing to vertical: this was the first period in music history where composers began to become conscious of chords and the flow of harmony, and Aron includes tables of four-voice chords, the beginning of the trend which was to result in functional tonality in the early 17th century. He also discusses tuning, and the book is the first to describe quarter-comma meantone. Other topics covered by Aron include the use of the eight modes, four-voice cadences, notation of accidentals.
Aron was a friend and frequent correspondent of music theorist Giovanni Spataro. Only Spataro's letters to Aron have survived. Topics discussed by the two include contemporary composers and composition, notation, and especially the use of accidentals.
While Aron was known as a composer and frequently refers to his own works in his writings, only one composition of his survives.
Read more about this topic: Pietro Aron
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