Jannacconi, Janacconi, Janaconi, Gianacconi, Giuseppe Gaetano Gasparro, *11 January 1740 Rome, †16 March 1816 Rome, Italian composer. He was the son of goldsmith Stefano and his wife Antonia Anastasia. He spent his entire life in Rome. Between 1749 and 1760, he was a student at the seminary at St. Peter’s Basilica. He studied music with Don Soccorso Rinaldini (a singer of the papal chapel), then with G. Carpani (maestro di cappella at the Church of Il Gesù) and P. Pisari (papal musician), whose assistant he became. He was a tenor in the Cappella Giulia. In 1766, he passed the counterpoint examination at the Congregazione dei Musici di Santa Cecilia in Rome. In 1779, he applied for the position of maestro di cappella at the Milan Cathedral but was instead appointed music teacher at a Roman orphanage.
In 1811, he was appointed maestro di cappella at St. Peter’s Basilica. Jannacconi’s compositional oeuvre was collected by his pupil F. Santini and included cycles and individual parts of masses, psalm arrangements, motets, offertories, and antiphons, falsobordoni, fugues, many canons (4–64 voices), two string quintets and the Passion oratorio L’agonia di Gesù Cristo. Today, most of Jannacconi’s compositions are kept in the Diocesan Library in Münster; the remainder are dispersed among Austrian, German, English and Italian libraries. Jannacconi was one of the last representatives of the Roman school. His sacred works for 4, 8 and 16 voices, written in the stile osservato or stile concertato, are characterised by their elaborate polyphonic structure. Continuing the tradition of his master Pisari, Jannacconi studied Palestrina’s style; he passed on both his own notes and the works of Pisari, bequeathed to him in his will, to his own pupil G. Baini, who used this material in his work Memorie storico-critiche della vita e delle opere di G.P. da Palestrina (Rome 1828, reprinted 1966).
Literature: K. Kindler Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke Giuseppe Jannacconis (1740–1816) in der Santini-Sammlung in Munster (Westfalen), “Fontes Artis Musicae” 1981 no. 28; G. Rostirolla Musica e musicisti nella Basilica di San Pietro. Cinque secoli di storia della cappella Giulia, Città del Vaticano 2014.
