Pietro Cerone
Pietro Cerone (1566–1625) was an Italian music theorist, singer and priest of the late Renaissance. He is most famous for an enormous music treatise he wrote in 1613, which is useful in the studying compositional practices of the 16th century. Life Cerone was born in Bergamo. While Italian, he spent most of his life in Spanish-dominated Naples, Sardinia, and later in Spain: he did most of his writing in Spanish. He was unusual in being an Italian musician in Spain; far more often in the 16th century, Spanish musicians went to Italy, as in the case of Victoria. In 1603 he returned to Naples, where he was a priest and singer until his death. It was in Naples that he wrote his two most famous treatises. Writings The first of these, in Italian, was Le regole più necessarie per l'introduzione del canto fermo, which he published in 1609. It was a didactic and practical work on singing plainsong, which he probably used in his work at the Neapolitan church of Ss Annunziata. Four years later, however, he published a monumental volume on music theory, El melopeo y maestro: tractado de música theorica y pratica; en que se pone por extenso;