Costanzo Festa was a musician known who’s noted for madrigals. Festa was an Italian composer of the Renaissance. Apart from the madrigals, he also wrote vocal music that’s sacred. Festa was the first to write madrigals with Philippe Verdelot, in the infancy of that very popular of all 16th-century Italian musical forms. Not much is known about his early life. Festa was probably born near Turin in the Piedmont, but the evidence for this being based mainly on later documents which referred to him as a clericis secularibus, and is therefore not certain. His birth date is also not certain. It is thought that he may have been related to Sebastiano Festa, his slightly younger contemporary, and another early madrigal composer. Festa wrote a motet in early 1514, Quis dabit oculis, on the occasion of the death of Anne Brittany, the Queen of France. The funeral was an extensive affair that lasted for 40 days; another piece was composed by Johannes Prioris.
The motet is the earliest composition of Festa's that’s datable, and the first record of his activity. In 1514, he visited Ferrara and brought some motets with him; Festa seems to have been an established composer by then, as indicated by the reception he received. This motet also contains music by Sebastiano Festa and appears in a manuscript copied between 1516 and 1519. Between 1510 and 1517 he lived on an island in the bay of Naples called Ischia, where he served as a music teacher to the family of aristocratic d'Avalos. He later moved to Rome where he was employed as a musician by Pope Leo X.
