Biography
Banchieri belonged to the Olivetan order and carried out his duties as an Italian composer, organist, musicographer, and theorist within the church. Strict guidelines from the Council of Trent shaped his creative output, resulting in textures that emphasized vertical harmonies while avoiding horizontal development. Those traits appear throughout his twelve masses. He also produced both sacred and secular organ pieces as well as several commedia dell'arte works. In his writings on music, L'organo suonarino examined emerging approaches to performance. The theoretical treatise Cartella musicale outlined the expansion of the earlier six-step scale by introducing B-natural as a seventh degree. Banchieri further stood among the earliest composers to insert dynamic markings into scores, to discuss bar lines as markers of metre, and to employ tie marks in notation.
Albums