Adriano Banchieri was a man of considerable versatility, a composer, dramatist, organist and theorist. Born in Bologna in 1568, he studied the organ and composition as a pupil of Gioseffo Guami, who had himself studied with Adrian Willaert and Annibale Padovano as a member of the musical establishment at St Mark’s in Venice, where he was later second organist under Giovanni Gabrieli, before returning to his native Lucca as organist at the cathedral there. Banchieri entered the Olivetan monastic order in 1587, taking the name in religion of Adriano and in 1590 making his solemn profession. Thereafter he was employed at various houses of his order, serving as organist in Lucca in 1592, in Siena the following year and from 1596 at S Michele in Bosco near Bologna, where he had moved in 1594. His term of service there was interrupted from 1600 to 1604, when he was organist at S Maria in Regola at Imola, followed by employment at the monastery of S Pietro at Gubbio and subsequently at churches in Venice and in Verona. In 1607 he dedicated the new organ at the Siena mother-house of his order, Monte Oliveto Maggiore. In 1609 he returned to S Michele in Bosco. There, in 1615, he founded the Accademia dei Floridi, assuming the name of Il dissonante, following the usual practice of these enthusiastic groups of scholars, musicians and amateurs, the members of which took more or less appropriate pseudonyms. Monteverdi visited the Accademia in 1620 on the occasion of his eldest son Francesco’s entry into the order of Discalced Carmelites, where,
Banchieri occupied a position of importance among his contemporaries as an organist. As a theorist, he involved himself in the musical controversies of the time, in particular in attempts to reconcile the traditional modal practice of composers with the new tendency towards major and minor keys. Compositions of his were printed with an organ bass and with dynamic directions of piano or forte, a practice unusual at the time. He wrote a quantity of church music, but also added significantly to secular repertoire in a series of three-voice canzonettas, often reflecting dramatic situations or characters drawn from the traditional commedia dell’arte or from a particular place. Influenced by Orazio Vecchi’s L’Amfiparnasso, of which he made his own paraphrase, he carried the art of comedy in music a step further, making use of his own skill as a writer and an expert on local dialects in the North of Italy. His writings in other fields were often issued under the pseudonym of Camillo Scaliggeri dalla Fratta, or, in the case of his popular La nobilità dell’asino (‘The Nobility of the Ass’) the improbable Attabalippa dal Peru.
