Sebastiano Festa - Music and Influence

Music and Influence

Only fourteen compositions have been securely attributed to Sebastiano Festa: four motets and ten madrigals. Another seven madrigals are considered doubtful. Similarities in style between Sebastiano's and Costanzo's work have made some of the identification difficult. All of his works are for four voices, and most of the madrigals he published in a single volume in 1526 in Rome, Libro primo de la croce: canzoni, frottole et capitoli, by printers Pasoti and Dorico at the publishing house of Giacopo Giunta.

Most of Festa's madrigals retain textural characteristics of the earlier Italian secular form, the frottola, particularly in their use of homophony and syllabic writing; however, what distinguishes them from the frottola and allows the label of "madrigal", is their patterning on the French chanson, then becoming influential in Italy; their refusal to repeat the same music for different lines of text, and their use of poetry such as that by Petrarch, an influence of Cardinal Pietro Bembo, the literary inspiration for the new madrigal form, who was working in Rome at the time.

These works, simple as they are, were influential on other early madrigalists such as Philippe Verdelot, who produced his first madrigals around the same time or shortly after Festa. One of Festa's madrigals, O passi sparsi, based on a sonnet by Petrarch, acquired some fame beyond Festa's limited circle. It was copied in many manuscripts up to mid-century, and appeared in instrumental arrangements as well. Claudin de Sermisy, the French chanson composer, even based a parody mass on it – a common fate for a "good tune" in the sixteenth century.