"Ballo della Battaglia" (1664)

Bernardo Storace (fl. 1664) was an Italian composer. Almost nothing is known about his life; his only surviving collection of music contains numerous variation sets and represents a transitory stage between the time of Girolamo Frescobaldi and that of Bernardo Pasquini.
Very little is known about his life, except that in 1664 he served as Vice-Maestro di cappella to the senate of Messina. This fact is mentioned on the title page of "Selva di varie compositioni d'intavolatura per cimbalo ed organo", the single surviving collection of Storace's music, which is also the only source of information on the composer. Messina was twice devastated by earthquakes, in 1783 and in 1908, so archival research is impossible. Given that "Selva di varie compositioni" was published in Venice and the music is stylistically somewhat more related to that of northern Italian composers, it is possible that Storace was originally from the north of Italy.
Storace's main interest in "Selva di varie compositioni" is the variation form. Particularly notable are the four passacaglias, which contain, in total, 320 representations of the descending tetrachord.

To download the sheet music copy and paste it into a new web page address:
http://imslp.org/wiki/Ballo_della_battaglia_(Storace,_Bernardo)