Tommaso Baj (d. 1714), a Bolognese singer in the Papal Choir from the latter part of the 17th century, is almost exclusively known by the beautiful Miserere which shares with those of G. Allegri and of Baini the honor of annual rendering on Good Friday. A few other works remain in MS.
Pompeo Cannicciari (d. 1744), choirmaster at Sta. Maria Maggiore in Rome from 1709) wrote many masses, psalms and motets in strict style (from c. 1690).
Francesco Antonio Vallotti (d. 1780), best known as a learned theorist (see sec. 165), made his first reputation as an organist at Padua from 1722, being considered the most able of his time in Italy, and was also a masterly writer of contrapuntal church music (mostly unpublished).
Giambattista Martini (d. 1784), still better known as the most important theorist of the age and the first of the great musical historians (see sec. 165), became choirmaster at Bologna in 1725 and produced from that time a vast amount of church music of every description, largely in the pure Roman style, but including several oratorios and cantatas also. He further wrote nobly for the organ.
To these may be added the names of Domenico Zipoli, a Neapolitan, who was organist at the Jesuit Church in Rome from 1696 and the author of a collection of organ-pieces (1716); Emanuele d'Astorga (d. 1736), a native of Palermo, who lived a roving life, including short residences in Spain, in England, at Parma, at Vienna, and finally in Bohemia, and who wrote over 100 solo cantatas of much beauty, with a fine Stabat Mater (1713); Benedetto Marcello (d. 1739), a well-born Venetian lawyer and official, thoroughly trained in music (though he called himself a dilettante), who wrote a large number of solo cantatas, a famous set of Psalms (1724-7) for from one to four voices, together with chamber music and part-songs; and Bartolomeo Cordans (d. 1757), from 1729 an opera-writer, but from 1735 choirmaster at Udine, where he composed an incredible amount of masses, motets and psalms in a rather eccentric style (many said to have been purposely destroyed, but many still preserved).
Most prolific and characteristic in the field of church music
were several masters of the Neapolitan school, all of them renowned
in opera (see sec. 125). While they tended always to
depart widely from the patterns of the earlier time, they are to
be ranked with the great Germans for successfully effecting a
compromise between the needs of the form of church worship
with which they were connected and the new styles of composition,
without altogether throwing away the dignity and ideality
of the older styles. It was in the hands of this group of writers
especially that gradually a new conception of melody began to
emerge—one not dependent upon either a contrapuntal or a
strenuous and restless harmonic sequence, but evolved more
flowingly and simply from a plain chord-series. Melodies of
this type, though apparently devoid of learning, were more and
