Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina ( 1525 – 2 February 1594) was an Italian Renaissance composer of sacred music and the best-known 16th-century representative of the Roman School of musical composition. He had a lasting influence on the development of church music, and his work is considered as the culmination of Renaissance polyphony.
R. J. Stove
Born in 1961 in Sydney, but later resident in Melbourne, Stove graduated from Sydney University in 1985. He is the author of four books: "Prince of Music"—a biography of the composer Palestrina; "The Unsleeping Eye"—a brief history of secret police from the sixteenth to the twentieth century ; "A Student's Guide to Music History"—summary history of classical music from the Middle Ages to the Second World War; and most recently "César Franck: His Life and Times". Also, he has co-edited, with James Franklin, "Cricket Versus Republicanism"—a posthumously published collection of essays by his father, the philosopher David Stove (1927–1994). Brought up as an atheist, he converted to Roman Catholicism in 2002.