FRESCOBALDI, GIROLAMO, a celebrated Italian organist and musical composer, was a native of Ferrara. The date of his birth is not known. At the age of twenty-three he became organist of St Peter's at Rome. He is regarded as the father of that style now universally employed in all compositions for the organ. Talking of his first work, the Ricerchi e Canzoni Francese fatte sopra dieci obbligati in Partitura, Dr Burney remarks that it "contains the first compositions we have seen printed in score, and with bars. They are likewise the first regular fugues that we have found upon one subject, or of two subjects carried on at the same time, from the beginning of a movement to the end." Frescobaldi was alive in 1641, but it is not known in what year he died.