Italian classical music
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Gregorian chant | ||||||||
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Medieval music
Plainsong
Plainsong, also known as plainchant, and more specifically
Music of the Trecento
The Trecento, from about 1300 to 1420, was a period of vigorous activity in Italy in the arts, including painting, architecture, literature, and music. The music of the Trecento pioneered new forms of expression, especially in secular song and in the use of vernacular language, Italian. In these regards, the music of the Trecento may seem more to be a Renaissance phenomenon; however, the predominant musical language was more closely related to that of the late Middle Ages, and musicologists generally classify the Trecento as the end of the medieval era.[1]
Secular music
Secular music before the year 1500 was largely the work of jongleurs,
Two points are worth mentioning in this regard: (1) we know much more about the words of songs than we know about the actual sound of the music. Words were written down with much more ease than melodies were notated. (See
The complicated
The Renaissance
Most people do not think of music when they hear the term Renaissance. Yet, in the same sense that architects, painters, and sculptors of the 16th century were paying tribute to the newly rediscovered values of classical Greece, poets and musicians of that period attempted to do the same thing. The years between 1500 and 1600 are the most revolutionary period in European musical history; it is the century in which harmony was developed and the century that gave birth to opera.
These two developments are connected. Readers will have noted the move from the monophony of Gregorian chants to the complicated polyphonies of madrigals and other music of the few centuries before 1500. The next shift in musical perception involves a less common term: homophony; that is, the sounding of a harmonic chord or progression of chords, not meant to stand out, but which support an obvious melody on top of the harmony.
The desire—perhaps need—for homophonic music arose from a number of factors. First, there was a rejection of overly complicated polyphony of many different melodies running at the same time: second, a general, new musical aesthetic of the period, best summed up in the words of
Besides Florence, two other Italian cities are particularly worthy of mention in the period around 1600. There is somewhat of a friendly rivalry between advocates of the two cities as to which one is more important in the history of the development of music in Italy. Venice justly claims its place as the birthplace of commercial opera; Naples points to its own history of church-sponsored music conservatories, institutions that developed into "feeder-systems," providing composers and performing musicians for much musical life in Italy and, indeed, Europe as a whole. (See also:
17th century
The period from about 1600 to 1750 encompasses the Baroque era of music. Many important things happened in this period. One was a return to the melodic complexities of polyphony; however, the melodies ran within a modern, established system of harmony based on chords and major and minor scales. This latter element is an extension of the concept of homophonic music and allowed melodic complexity of any variance to rise to dominance over the importance of text. The struggle for dominance between text and music goes back to the music of the Greeks and is still going on in all forms of European art music and popular music. This new dominance of melody within harmony at the expense of text led to great changes, including the expansion and invention of instrumental resources of the orchestra; the keyboard was extended in both directions; the making of instruments such as those by Stradivarius became a great industry in Cremona; and instrumental music started to develop as a separate "track," quite apart from the traditional role of accompanying the human voice. Instrumental forms include such things as the sonata and fugue. Well-known and influential musical figures from this time period in Italy include Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti, Benedetto Marcello and Antonio Vivaldi, representing the importance of Naples and Venice, respectively, within this period.
18th century
From the early 18th century to the end of that century encompasses what historians call "classical music". (Note that this use of the term "classical" does not correspond to what non-historians mean when they say "classical music"—that is, all opera and symphonic music, as opposed to "popular music".)
The term "classical" is appropriate for this period of music in that it marks the standardization of musical forms such as the symphony and concerto. Thus the term "classical" is used in the Renaissance sense of classical Greek philosophy—Platonic form, the idea that things such as beauty exist eternally as ideals, and that the artist's job—in this case, the composer's job—is put form on that ideal. Thus, we have, for example, a symphony formalized as a standard work in four movements for orchestra, and so forth.
The physical plant for composition and performance of music in Italy advanced greatly during this century. It is the period in which the great opera houses in Naples and Milano were built: the
Important Italian composers in this century are: Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Niccolò Piccinni, Giovanni Paisiello, Luigi Boccherini, Domenico Cimarosa, Muzio Clementi, Luigi Cherubini, Giovanni Battista Viotti and Niccolò Paganini. It is also the age in which "Italian music" became international, so to speak, with many of these Italian composers beginning to work abroad.
19th century
This is the century of Romanticism in European literature, art, and music.
20th century
Romanticism in all European music certainly held on through the turn of century. In Italy, the music of Verdi and Puccini continued to dominate for a number of years. Other Italian Romantic composers—at least composers who continued to compose in the tonal traditions of Western music (as opposed to the new
.Yet, it was inevitable that Italian composers would respond to the fading values of Romanticism and the cynicism provoked in many European artistic quarters by such things as
Notes
- ^ Richard H. Hoppin, Medieval Music (New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1978), pp. 433ff.