5 - Italy, ii : 1560–1600

Summary

DEVELOPMENTS in Italian music during this forty-year period were to prove crucial to the direction Western art music was to take in the following two centuries. In both sacred and secular music, Italy in the late sixteenth century served as a powerhouse for experiments in texture, in harmony, and in vocal and instrumental technique, all of which laid the foundations for stylistic change throughout Europe and beyond. In sacred music this was primarily due to a newly revitalized and centralized Catholic church, which in the wake of the Council of Trent looked to Rome in particular and Italy in general for models ; this influence was to spread into other confessions too, especially in Lutheran Germany. In secular music the madrigal continued to dominate : by the end of the century it had moved well beyond its Italian roots to challenge the supremacy of the French chanson on the European stage. In seeking an ever closer relationship between words and music, as well as adapting to the increasingly wide variety of contexts in which both madrigal and motet were performed, musical language developed in ways hitherto undreamed of. New developments in solo and smallgroup singing began in Naples and Rome and moved rapidly on to Florence and northern Italy ; these, together with advances in instrumental writing, opened up a further range of stylistic possibilities.

All this happened in an Italy that, in the wake of the Treaty of Câteau-Cambrésis of 1559, enjoyed a period of relative stability, with rivalries between courts played out on the cultural stage rather than on the battlefield. Spanish hegemony was a political reality, but in musical terms this was not hugely apparent, except for some interventions by Philip ii and his representatives in the debate over the retention of polyphony during the Council of Trent and the subsequent reform of plainchant ordered by Pope Gregory xiii. Indeed, musically, Spain was to gain much more from Italy than vice versa, with the Italian polychoral idiom in particular taking productive root in Spanish soil by the end of the century.