Biography
Annibale Coma was a Mantuan madrigalist and organist active in the later sixteenth century. Born in Mantua around 1543, he served as organist of Mantua Cathedral from 1570 to 1580, with a brief period in the winter of 1576–77 when he was drawn into Gonzaga court service.
His surviving reputation rests on madrigals. Coma published a sequence of books between 1568 and 1588, including Il primo libro de madrigali a cinque voci, Il terzo libro de madrigali a cinque voci, Il quarto libro de madrigali a cinque voci, and the Secondo libro de madrigali a quattro voci of 1588, the last tied to RISM C 3478. His dedicatees place him firmly in the aristocratic musical networks of Mantua, Guastalla, Ferrara, and Verona.
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Individual madrigals such as Da te chieggio pietate, Cantavan tre leggiadre, Come tutto m’ardete, Vidi da duo bei lumi, and Semplicetta farfalla circulated beyond his single-author books through anthologies and later reprints. His writing shows a flexible late-Renaissance madrigalian craft, attentive to text, contrast, and even visual notation effects.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.