Nasco, Jan (EN)

Nasco Jan, Gian, Giovanni, *ca. 1510, †1561 Treviso, Dutch composer active in Italy; also referred to in sources as Metregian and Maistre Ihan. Around 1546, Nasco stayed in Vicenza in the service of the Venetian capitano delle milizie Paolo Naldi. In 1547, he became maestro di cappella at the Accademia Filarmonica in Verona (the first in the history of the association), where his duties included giving daily music lessons, setting to music texts presented to him by members of the Accademia, and supplying the ensemble with sheet music and instruments. In 1551, he took up the position of cathedral bandmaster in Treviso, which he held until the end of his life. His successor at the Accademia for a short time was V. Ruffo, with whom Nasco maintained friendly relations (in the second book of his madrigals from 1553, Ruffo included five compositions by Nasco). Nasco’s letters from Treviso to Verona are a valuable source of information about 16th-century performance practice. In them, he mentions, among other things, the use of specific musical instruments such as flutes, trombones, and violas in the performance of the madrigals and motets he indicated. 

Nasco’s duties as bandmaster at the Accademia and the cathedral are reflected in the wide range of secular and sacred music genres he cultivated. Madrigals, many of which were commissioned by academics, display expressive and formal diversity. Their texts are based on the poetry of F. Petrarch, T. Tasso, G. Boccaccio, and T. Folengo, among others. Evidence of his rivalry with Ruffo includes, among other things, settings of the same stanzas of L. Ariosto’s poetry. Nasco had a particular fondness for setting multi-stanza poems (canzona, sestina) to music, including sacred ones, such as the 13-part canzona spirituale in honor of the Blessed Sacrament. Nasco, like his contemporaries working near Venice, was influenced by the work of A. Willaert. In his madrigals, the declamatory style is combined with short, free imitations, and in works with a larger cast, the composer ingeniously uses groups of voices, combining them in various combinations. The text is usually set syllabically, but melismas appear on words expressing motion, strong emotions, etc. One of the composer’s most original works is Canzon di Rospi & Rossignuol, in which Nasco combined onomatopoeic text imitating the sounds of frogs, a nightingale, and a cuckoo with unconventional sound effects (e.g., tremolo on the letter “r”).

Of the three passions, particularly interesting is the manuscript-preserved Passio… according to St. Matthew, in which the parts of individual characters are distinguished by varied scoring (2–6 voices). The Lamentations – according to the composer’s widow, Nasco’s last work completed before his death — contain three sets of lessons for the three consecutive days of the Triduum, each composed in a different mode. The Hebrew letters are mostly treated sparingly, while melismatic passages occasionally appear in expressively harmonized verses.

Literature: G. Turrini Il maestro fiammingo G. N. Verona (1547–1551), “Note d’archivio per la storia musicale” XIV, 1937; A. Einstein The Italian Madrigal, vol. 1, Princeton 1949, repr. 1971; C.A. Elias Musical Performance in Sixteenth Century Italian Literature. Straparola’s „Le piacevoli notte,” “Early Music” XVII, 1989; H.M. Brown Madrigals for the Accademia Filarmonica of Verona. Nasco’s First Book of 1548, in: Akademie und Musik, celebratory publication for W. Braun, eds. W. Frobenius et al., Saarbrücken 1993; K. von Fischer, Zur mehrstimmigen Passions-Vertonung des 16. Jahrhunderts in Spanien und Böhmen, “Archiv für Musikwissenschaft” LII, 1, 1995; M. Di Pasquale Patterns of Musical Patronage at the Accademia Filarmonica of Verona in the Early Modern Age, “International Review of the Asethetics and Sociology of Music”, LII,2, 2021.