Danckerts, Ghiselin

(b Tholen, Zeeland, c1510; d after August 1565). Netherlandish composer, singer and writer on music. Although he mentioned in an unpublished treatise on music that he was at one time in the service of Pierluigi Caraffa, member of a well-known Neapolitan family, his principal post was as a papal singer. He remained a member of the Cappella Sistina from 1538 until August 1565, when he was compelled to retire as part of a reorganization of the chapel on the grounds that ‘he has no voice, is exceedingly rich, given to women, useless’ (‘vocem non habet, excellens dives, mulieribus deditus, inutilis’). He served at various times as the chapel’s punctator and camerlengo; De Bruyn deduced from the partly published diaries of the Cappella Sistina that Danckerts was rarely absent from his post.

As a composer he was evidently little known and sparsely published; no single collection of his works remains. In 1551 Danckerts was chosen along with Bartolomé de Escobedo to judge the debate between Don Nicola Vicentino and Vicente Lusitano on the role of the chromatic and enharmonic genera in contemporary musical practice. The debate was won by Lusitano but its most lasting consequences were the writing of Vicentino’s well-known treatise, L’antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica (Rome, 1555) and Danckerts’s own unpublished treatise, written in the wake of the debate. De Bruyn dated the first redaction of the treatise at about 1551, followed by two later versions written c1555–6 and 1559–60. Its importance lies mainly in its presentation of Danckerts’s views on the musical developments of his time; it is in part drawn from his experience as a papal singer. In one interesting chapter in what is taken to be the second version, Danckerts described a controversy about the application of accidentals between two Roman singers of the church of S Lorenzo in Damaso, which must have taken place between 1538 and 1544. This revealing passage is one of the few in contemporary writings which give some idea of the practical difficulties faced by 16th-century singers in coping with the problem of applying unspecified accidentals to polyphony (see Lockwood). In another important passage Danckerts attacked what he called the ‘nuova maniera’ in music of his own time, by which he meant the tendency of composers of about 1550 to introduce degree-inflecting accidentals into their works, to use the terms ‘cromatico’ and ‘misura di breve’ in titles of publications, to confound the traditional meaning of certain mensuration signs and most of all to undermine the traditional eight-mode system. Even though it remained in manuscript, the treatise became known beyond Roman musical circles as a contribution to the conservative side of musical thought in the second half of the 16th century. The Bolognese theorist Artusi later issued a defence of Danckerts’s and Escobedo’s sentence against Vicentino, which he eventually incorporated into his Imperfettioni della moderna musica, i (Venice, 1600).

WORKS

WRITINGS

Trattato di Ghiselino Dankerts, three versions in I-Rv: R56 no.15, R56 no.15b and R56 no.33 (the first two evidently autograph, the third a contemporary copy); another copy in Rc

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (G. van den Borren)

N. Vicentino: L’antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica (Rome, 1555, 2/1557; ed. in DM, 1st ser., Druckschriften-Faksimiles, xvii, 1959; Eng. trans., 1996 as Ancient Music Adapted to Modern Practice)

G. Baini: Memorie storico-critiche della vita e delle opere di Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (Rome, 1828/R)

A. de La Fage: Essais de diphthérographie musicale (Paris, 1864/R), 224ff

A. Mercati: ‘Favori di Paolo III a Musici’, NA, x (1933), 109–15

J. De Bruyn: ‘Ghisilinus Danckerts’, TVNM, xvi/4 (1946), 217–52; xvii/2 (1949), 128–57

L. Lockwood: ‘A Dispute on Accidentals in Sixteenth-Century Rome’, AnMc, no.2 (1965), 24–40

R. Sherr: ‘Competence and Incompetence in the Papal Choir in the Age of Palestrina’, EMc, xxii (1994), 606–29

LEWIS LOCKWOOD