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| Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina |
Sunday, June 15, 2025 at 1 P. M.
St. Thérèse of Lisieux parish
1100 E Alhambra Road
Alhambra, CA 91801
The Year 2025 marks 500 years since the birth of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, who is arguably the single most influential composer of all time. Palestrina worked closely with the popes in Rome, and almost single-handedly determined the sound of Catholicism. The implementation of his musical reforms changed the course of music history forever.
Humanists during the Renaissance perceived several flaws in the way that music was composed during the sixteenth century (for instance, long melismatic passages on weak syllables, as well musical phrases that failed to adequately emphasize the rhetorical imagery of the words), which were corrected by Palestrina and his contemporaries, laying the foundation for the Baroque. Palestrina’s style would reach legendary status during the baroque era, and it has been performed continuously over the past 450 years, inspiring countless revival movements ever since.
To reflect the timelessness of Palestrina’s music, we have included 17th-century arrangements of Palestrina’s works for solo voice in a baroque idiom, as well as later compositions from the 18th and 19th centuries directly inspired by Palestrina’s style: all this in addition to featuring Palestrina’s immortal compositions performed in the manner that they would have been encountered during the 16th century.
For more information, visit: https://musicatransalpina.org/2025/05/31/palestrina/
