The former was a nephew of the Archbishop of Naples, was born in 1550, and died in 1613. His name is important from the fact that he went boldly beyond Monteverde, his contemporary, in the use of the new dissonant chords (sevenths and ninths) which were just beginning to be employed, and adopted a chromatic style of writing which strangely foreshadowed the chromatic polyphonic style of the present century. He wrote innumerable madrigals for a number of voices, but his innovations remained sterile so far as the development of music is concerned, for the reason that while his music often acquired a wonderful poignancy for his time by the use of chromatics, just as often it led him into the merest bramble bush of sound, real music being entirely absent. Viadana (1566-1645) has been placed by many historians of music in the same category as Guido d'Arezzo (who is credited with having invented solmization, musical notation, etc.), Palestrina, Monteverde and Peri, who are famed, the one for having discovered the dominant ninth chord, and the other for the invention of opera. Viadana is said to have been the first to use what is called a _basso continuo_, and even the figured bass. The former was the uninterrupted repetition of a short melody or phrase in the bass through the entire course of a piece of music. This was done very often to give a sense of unity that nowadays would be obtained by a repetition of the first thought at certain intervals through the piece. The figured (or better, ciphered) bass was an entirely different thing. This device, which is still employed, consisted of the use of figures to indicate the different chords in music. These figures or ciphers were written over or under the bass note on which the chord represented by the figures was to be played or sung. A 5 over or under a bass note meant that with that note a perfect major triad was to be sounded, considering the note written as the root of the chord; a 3 was taken to stand for a perfect minor triad; a 6 for the chord of the sixth (first inversion of a triad), and 6/4 for the second inversion; a line through a 5 or 7 meant that the triad was a diminished fifth or a diminished seventh chord; a cross indicated a leading tone; a 4 stood for the third inversion of the dominant seventh chord. This system of shorthand, as it may be called, was and is still of tremendous value to composers. In the olden days, particularly, when many of the composers engraved their own music for publication, it saved a great deal of labour. It is probably not generally known that the engraving of music by the composer was so common; but such was the case with Bach, Rameau, and Couperin.