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Tenor
Marco Beasley is a specialist in early music as well as new music written in those styles. With
Guido Morini and Stefano Rocco,
Beasley co-founded the early music ensemble
Accordone. An active researcher and educator of the techniques of the Renaissance and Baroque, he is acclaimed for his vocal ability and for reviving forgotten styles.
Beasley was born on February 26, 1957, in Portici, near Naples, Italy. Growing up listening to classical and popular music on the radio, a revelation happened when traditional Napoli songs had a revival in popularity, spurring
Beasley into re-creating the music with friends. In 1979, without any prior formal training, he began studying musicology at the University of Bologna, where one of his teachers was
Cathy Berberian. While at university,
Beasley developed an interest in Renaissance polyphony and recitar cantando, a style that he is credited with reviving. His ability to perform many different techniques -- from Gregorian chant, sacred and secular Renaissance and Baroque music to modern-day re-creations of earlier styles -- has taken him throughout Europe and North America, where he has performed in many of the world's top venues, including the Salzburg Mozarteum and New York's Lincoln Center.
In 1984,
Beasley, with
Morini and Rocco, founded
Accordone, an early music ensemble
Beasley continued to perform and record with until 2014, although he still occasionally performs with the group. Along with
Morini,
Beasley also wrote new music for
Accordone, including Stella Diana and Tarantella Primma, siconna e terza.
Beasley has recorded for several labels, including Cypres, Alpha, and Arts Music, among others. He began his recording career in a production of Alessandro Stradella's opera Moro per Amore. Since then, most of
Beasley's recorded output has been with
Accordone: among these are
Le Frottole (2005), Recitar Cantando (2006), and
Storie di Napoli (2012). In 2013,
Beasley started self-producing albums that are sold exclusively at his performances, though he has continued issuing commercial releases, such as
Meraviglia d'amore: Love Songs from 17th-century Italy on Accent in 2017 and
La Porta d'Oriente on Glossa in 2020.