Agostino Agresta (fl. 1600–1617) was a Neapolitan composer working at the beginning of the 17th century, who can be seen as having been strongly influenced by Carlo Gesualdo. Agresta's only known surviving works are unaccompanied madrigals, including a complete book of six-voice pieces. Biography Incredibly little is known about the life and career of Agresta, including neither the circumstances of his birth or death. Apart from his works (discussed below), there are only two contemporary or near-contemporary references to him. He and his elder brother Giovanni Antonio are listed together in the third book of Scipione Cerreto's 1601 Della prattica musicale as excellent composers operating in Naples ('Compositori eccellenti della Città di Napoli, che oggi vivono'); however, no works by Giovanni Antonio survive. And a 1664 work by the Neapolitan scholar Camillo Tutini lists him as a madrigalist in a section devoted to promoting the cultural claims of Naples against Rome. Madrigali a sei voci ... Libro primo (1617) Agresta's only surviving book of madrigals, Madrigali a sei voci ... Libro primo, was published in Naples in 1617 by Costantino Vitale, and dedicated to Don Roderico di Salazar. Salazar had been commissioner of contraband in the provinces of Terra di Bari and Capitanata (today the province of Foggia) but was prosecuted in 1607 for extortion and corruption (Larson 1985: 758); his status in 1617 is unknown. Agresta's relationship to him is similarly unclear, although Larson has speculated that the composer may have been employed by Salazar as a tutor for his children, in a similar capacity to that of his brother in the household of the Count of Roccella (the records of the Banco Mari, which are contained in the Archivio di Stato in Naples, list a payment made to Giovanni Antonio Agresta on 18 March 1598). While composers in the northern Italian peninsula were beginning to move away from what was regarded as the old-fashioned polyphonic madrigal without continuo, Naples remained the most important centre for its composition and publication. In this context, Agresta's Madrigali a sei voci ... Libro primo occupies an important position, as during the first 30 years of the 17th century only two books of six-part unaccompanied madrigals were published in Naples: Agresta's and Gesualdo's posthumous collection of 1626 (of which only the Quinto part-book survives). While it is impossible to speculate with any accuracy on the basis of such scant evidence, Larson suggests that