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A Catholic visitor to a Protestant worship service in sixteenth-century Europe would immediately have been struck by stark contrasts to the familiar tradition of his own upbringing. The scale of the physical alterations would obviously vary, depending on whether he had stumbled upon a church cleansed of all images for Calvinist worship, or a Lutheran church, in which the internal fabric might be largely untouched. But it is unlikely, one might surmise, that if the service were in progress, his mind would linger much on architecture and internal decoration: more arresting by far was the essential unfamiliarity of the worship service. For a start, there would only have been one service in progress; in this Protestant church he would not have observed one priest celebrating Mass at the High Altar, while others were engaged in duties in the side chapels. No priests would have been hearing confession; the familiar bustle and variety would have been missing. Rather the attention of the congregation gathered in the nave would have been focused on the pulpit, from which the minister would be conducting the service. If his arrival was unplanned, our Catholic visitor would in all likelihood have first heard the voice of the minister, leading the congregation in prayer, reading from Scripture or preaching. Preaching would obviously have occupied the longest time: probably an inordinate length for someone not inured by long practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Music in the Catholic liturgy Musicologists, in some future attempt to reconstruct the history not only of musical style and composition but also of what the listener actually heard, would not be unjustified in asking, paradoxically indeed, whether the composer of greatest significance for seventeenth-century liturgical music were not, in reality, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (d. 1594). There are no easy answers to this question. The editorial appeal of Palestrina endures, roughly speaking, to the second decade of the new century; latest of all to be reprinted are his hymns (1625, again in 1644 after the textual reforms of Pope Urban VIII – see chapter 12), most frequently published are his settings from the Song of Songs (the most highly impassioned and least severe of all his motet compositions, possibly destined for a function that was more devotional than strictly liturgical) with six editions between 1601 and 1613. But the various sixteenth-century editions of his masses were already well represented in cappelle musicali up and down the Italian peninsula, where they continued to represent a permanent corpus of performable music (surviving copies, indeed, bear every sign of wear and tear). The seventeenth century also gives rise to the myth of Palestrina princeps musicae, ‘restorer and benefactor of music’, as also to the legend which tells how his Missa Papae Marcelli (first published in 1567) was responsible, at the eleventh hour, for convincing delegates to the Council of Trent to desist from the proposal that polyphonic music be banned from liturgical use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The classification of styles The multiplicity of musical styles brought together so perfectly in Monteverdi's Book 8 is indicative of an aesthetic and poetic problem of which the seventeenth century itself – in Italy, as indeed throughout Europe – was fully aware. This awareness was above all empirical: the musician who had lived through the decades surrounding the turn of the century and witnessed the disintegration of vocal polyphony as the dominant musical force of the day had every reason to raise the issue of the proliferation of styles. On the surface, it was a question of pronouncing either for or against ‘modern’ music. Thus, the Della musica dell'età nostra, che non è punto inferiore, anzi è migliore di quella dell'età passata (1640) of the Roman patrician Pietro Della Valle is a controversial attack on a defender of the music of the past; for its author, the fundamental distinction is between a concept of music as counterpoint tout court, and another in which it is seen as a harmony of three identifiable components or requisites: ‘counterpoint’, ‘song’ and ‘sound’. In other words: within the framework of a contrapuntal theory and art handed down from the previous century, different manners of singing and playing now imbue contemporary music with a variety of qualities – all quite separate and distinct. These qualities derive not only from different manners of performance but also from different compositional styles: each musical genre is attributed with specific, variable ‘song’ and ‘sound’ characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Any study relating to performance practice is based on primary sources – treatises, letters etc – which either singly or as a group give us some inkling of the context and specifics of historical performance. Problems often arise, though, for we cannot always be sure of the background of the writer concerned, his motives – benign or otherwise – or his relation to his contemporaries. Moreover, we are often equally unsure of the specific musicians to whom he addressed his remarks, or of who actually read his works. In the case of the present study there are certain factors which minimise these problems. First, the treatises concerned are, on the whole, chosen for their express relation to practical music instruction in a specific, semi-standardised education system; most writers belong to this system as practising teachers and musicians. There are sufficient similarities between the works and sufficient instances of direct plagiarism and reprinting to suggest that they offer a realistic picture of musical education and are thus not merely the speculations of a few eccentric cantors. Indeed some writers seem positively to be proud to have drawn their material from important authors; evidently adherence to tradition was often more desirable than originality. On the other hand, it must continually be stressed that the body of surviving literature is no substitute for what actually happened in public and private instruction; at most it offers a trace of what successive musicians and teachers themselves must have read, and – to a lesser and vaguer extent – a summary of what each may have consciously experienced in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]