Jan Nasco

Jan Nasco (also Giovanni, Jhan) (c. 1510 – 1561) was a Franco-Flemish composer and writer on music, mainly active in Italy. He was the first director of the Veronese Accademia Filarmonica, and his writings, particularly a group of letters he wrote to the Academy in the 1550s, are important sources of information on performance practice regarding use of instruments in madrigals as well as motets.

No documentation has yet turned up covering Nasco's early life, but he is presumed to have come from the Netherlands or adjacent areas, the home of most of the Franco-Flemish composers. Only the portion of his life he spent in Italy has been documented. He was in the service of Paolo Naldi, a nobleman in Vicenza, in the 1540s, and in 1547 he became the music director of the newly formed Accademia Filarmonica in Verona. While this may have been a prestigious and intellectually engaging post, it paid little, and in 1551 he took a job as maestro di cappella at the cathedral of San Pietro in Treviso, with some reluctance. He retained ties with the Accademia, as well as his post at Treviso, until his death.

Nasco was a progressive composer in most of the genres current in mid-century Italy, including masses, passion settings, Lamentations, motets, and especially madrigals; however he did not publish much of his sacred music, especially his mass settings, and a lot of this music, which existed only in manuscript, was destroyed on April 7, 1944 during the Second World War when the Allies destroyed the ancient city center of Treviso in a bombing raid.

One of his sacred compositions which did survive is an early setting of the St. Matthew Passion, for two to six voices. It is almost entirely homophonic in texture, using a style akin to falsobordone. This composition was not published; it survives in a manuscript which has the RISM sigla I-Bc Q24 (Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale, in Bologna). Also surviving among his sacred music is a book of settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, which he published in Venice in 1561.

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