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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]

The seventeenth-century madrigal To modern eyes, a survey of the musical life of Italy during the first two decades of the Seicento reveals a number of innovations, ‘inventions’ destined (as a knowledge of later seventeenth-century musical history will show) to fall on fertile ground. There is the rise of the basso continuo; the vocal solo with instrumental accompaniment; the birth of opera. As examination of the music of the preceding century will show, these three ‘inventions’ are in reality the natural outcome of underground practices and experiments that run through much of the earlier period. If they appear so distinctly around the years 1600–02 (not only, indeed, to the eyes of the modern observer, but also to those of contemporaries), this is to be attributed to the fact that only now had their excellence and effectiveness begun to be brought to the attention of a more general public by musical printing. One need think only of the Cento concent ecclesiastici … con il basso continuo per sonar nell'organo (1602) of Ludovico da Viadana, the Nuove musiche (1602) for vocal solo by Giulio Caccini, the two different settings of Musiche … sopra l'Euridice del sig. Ottavio Rinuccini (both published in the winter of 1600–01) respectively by Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini, and the Rappresentazione di Anima et di Corpo (1600) of Emilio de' Cavalieri. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]