Marco Antonio Cavazzoni

Marco Antonio Cavazzoni
(b Bologna, c1490; d Venice, c1560). Italian keyboard composer, father of Girolamo Cavazzoni.

He belonged to a prosperous Bolognese family with its own coat of arms. He probably spent considerable time at Urbino, possibly as early as 1512: Duchess Leonora Gonzaga referred, in June, July and November 1512, to a ‘Marc Antonio mio musico’ who was making short trips to Rome and Mantua. Whether ‘el Bolognino’, one of five organists esteemed as ‘divino’ in 1513 by Philateo in his Viridario, was Cavazzoni remains uncertain. In 1516 he was testing an organ in Ferrara. From August 1517 until 1524 he lived in Venice and corresponded with the theorist Giovanni Spataro at Bologna; he was in Rome playing for Pope Leo X from about April 1520 until February 1521. Returning to Venice after Leo's death in December 1521, Cavazzoni dedicated his Recerchari, motetti, canzoni … libro primo (1523) to the Venetian patrician Francesco Cornaro, in whose service he may have been from 1512 to 1517. He may have been the singer called Marc'Antonio who was at S Marco as early as 1522. In the dedication of an edition of Petrarch to Cavazzoni in 1523 Giovannilanzo Gabbiano noted Leo X's fondness for him and his pre-eminence in playing keyboard instruments. At the birth of his son, Girolamo (probably c1525), Cavazzoni was with Pietro Bembo, who was then living in nearby Padua. From 1528 to 1531 he was again in Venice, and was a friend of Pietro Aaron and Willaert. In addition to teaching, a sinecure in Brescia supplemented his income. Cavazzoni was possibly the organist ‘M. Marco’ at S Stefano in Venice who in 1532 was appointed at Treviso Cathedral, and was almost certainly the ‘Marcho Antonio da Urbin’ at Chioggia Cathedral from 1536 to 1537.