Much of Pari's music is in the
manneristic style which was characteristic of the transformation of Renaissance into Baroque, and in addition conforms closely to the idea of
musica reservata: music of intense expressiveness, careful text setting, and elaborate
contrapuntal techniques, most likely intended for an audience of connoisseurs. In this regard it resembles that of some of his contemporaries, including the madrigalists
Gesualdo,
Sigismondo d'India,
Pomponio Nenna, and
Giovanni de Macque, although Pari avoids the extreme
chromaticism used by Gesualdo and never attained his fame. Pari's only surviving music are three books of madrigals, all published in Palermo between 1611 and 1619. Three other books of madrigals written prior to 1611 are lost. The collection published in 1611 includes a setting of
Guarini's famous
Il pastor fido, and the 1619 collection is subtitled ''Lamento d'Arianna
; it is clearly influenced by the famous composition by Monteverdi. In the Lamento d'Arianna'' collection, Pari derived most of the motivic material directly from Monteverdi, but worked it into a dense, archaic contrapuntal texture more akin to
Gombert, who had died sixty years earlier, than to the currently popular style of
monody. The connection with Gombert may not have been coincidental. Gombert also spent time in the galleys, only being pardoned, according to one story, after the publication of a set of
Magnificats dedicated to
Emperor Charles V. It is possible that Pari not only knew Gombert's music but looked to his experience as inspiration to survive his own hard years of slavery; and the music akin to the dense contrapuntal style of Gombert was all composed after the end of Pari's sentence. Although Pari had a liking for the dense counterpoint of the middle of the 16th century, he experimented with piquant
dissonances, and also with the
stile concertato, features which were quite contemporary; he also varied the texture widely within individual pieces as a way to highlight the dramatic contents of the text. ==Publications==