Andrzej Chyliński

Andrzej Chyliński was a Polish composer of the Baroque period; we do no know much about his life other than that his most productive time was around approx. 1625 - 1635 and that he was a singer as well. He was a member of the Franciscan order and was the director of music in a house of his respective order in Drohiczyn Podlaski in 1625. In 1630 he left for Italy, the city of Padova where he worked (One of the rare examples in which a Polish musician worked in Italy and not the other way round!) as a musician and priest in the Basilica di San Antonio - in the beginning as a bass in the choir, later (in 1632) as maestro di cappella. Since conflicts started to come up pretty soon, he returned to his homecountry in 1635 again.

Nowadays the only works from his hand that survived are a collection of canons, the "Canones XVI" which were published in Antwerp in 1634. These pieces are all based on the theme of "Da pacem in diebus nostris" and, from their artistic use of contrapuntal compository techniques, they strongly remind of Bach's "The Art of the Fugue".

Information supplied by Monika Fahrnberger
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