Jacopo da Fogliano
was an Italian composer, organist, harpsichordist, and music teacher of the Renaissance, active mainly in Modena in northern Italy. He was a composer of frottole, the popular vocal form ancestral to the madrigal, and later in his career he also wrote madrigals themselves. He also wrote some sacred music and a few instrumental composition
Giacomo Fogliano was the older brother of Lodovico Fogliano
(c. 1475 – 1542). Lodovico, also a composer, was better known as a
theorist. Giacomo was born in Modena, where he evidently spent most of
his career. Details of his life are sketchy, but most of his years of
employment and at least one of his journeys are known. Early in his life
he was praised for his mastery of various instruments, particularly the
organ and the harpsichord, and in 1479 he became organist at Modena
Cathedral – an unusual achievement for a musician of 11.
The records of the cathedral list him as maestro di cappella (singing master) also starting in that year, ending in 1497, at which time he vanished from the record, reappearing again in 1504, from which year he held the dual post of organist and maestro di cappella until his death in 1548. For the period between 1497 and 1504 he may have been in Siena;
a reference to a similarly named individual in the records Siena city
archives from 1498 has been tentatively identified as the Fogliano. His
first published composition, a frottola in one of Ottaviano Petrucci's earliest prints, dates from 1502 (Venice).
Among his duties at Modena was teaching, and from 1512 to 1514 he instructed Jiulio Segni on organ and harpsichord. Late in his career, in 1543, he went to Parma to investigate the organ they had installed there. The cathedral in Modena contains a plaque in his honor.
Modena at this time was part of the domain of the House of Este, at that time centered in Ferrara.
While the town was not a major center of music-making, as it lacked a
local aristocratic court, it still had a substantial cathedral which
kept an up-to-date repertory of polyphonic music. Fogliano was maestro di cappella at this institution during the period of its collection, and also during the time when Cardinal Giovanni Morone, one of the principal reformers of the Council of Trent, began the process of simplification of polyphony in order to make the text understandable to listeners. Most of Fogliano's sacred music predates this time
