Jacques Brunel

From 1532 until 1564 a Brunel, probably the same person, worked as organist at the Este chapel in Ferrara, where in 1547–1558 he served under the famous composer Cipriano de Rore.

Between 1543 and 1559 Brunel received money for the keep of a horse, which he needed to travel to oversee the Este chapels at Modena and Reggio nell'Emilia.

Numerous writers, including Cosimo Bartoli, Cinciarino, Jacopo Corfini and Luigi Dentice, praised his skills.

These works are of considerable importance in the evolution of the genre: there are frequent instances of advanced contrapuntal techniques such as inversion and augmentation, hexachord transpositions (inganno) of the subjects; some of the pieces even employ countersubjects.

[3] One other piece was attributed to Brunel by Knud Jeppesen: an organ mass discovered in the 1940s in manuscripts that were kept in the main church of Castell'Arquato.

A late 16th or early 17th century map of Ferrara, where Brunel lived for at least 32 years of his life