| Florentine Camerata |
Article Index for Florentine |
Shopping Camerata |
Website Links For Camerata |
Information AboutFlorentine Camerata |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT FLORENTINE CAMERATA | |
| renaissance music | |
| italian music history | |
| italian composers | |
| italian renaissance humanists | |
|
Unifying them was the belief that music had become corrupt, and by returning to the forms and style of the Ancient Greeks , the art of music could be improved, and thereby society could be improved as well. They were influenced by Girolamo Mei , the foremost scholar of ancient Greece at the time, who held—among other things—that ancient Greek drama was predominantly sung rather than spoken. While he may have been mistaken, the result was an efflorescence of musical activity unlike anything else at the time, mostly in an attempt to recover the ancient methods. The criticism of contemporary music by the Camerata centered on the overuse of Polyphony , at the expense of intelligibility of the sung text. Paradoxically, this was the same criticism levelled at polyphony by the Council Of Trent which had met in the immediately preceding decades, although the world-view of the two groups could not have been more different. Intrigued by ancient descriptions of the emotional and moral effect of ancient Greek Tragedy and Comedy , which they presumed to be sung as a single line to a simple instrumental accompaniment, the Camerata proposed creating a new kind of music. In ." Other composers quickly followed suit, and by the first decade of the seventeenth century the new "music drama" was being widely composed, performed and disseminated. It should be noted that the new form of opera also borrowed from an existing pastoral poetic form called the Intermedio , especially for the Libretto s: it was mainly the musical style that was new. Of all revolutions in music history, this one was perhaps the most carefully premeditated: it is one of few examples in music, before the twentieth century, of theory preceding practice. Both Bardi and Galilei left writings expounding their ideas. Bardi wrote the ''Discorso'' ( 1578 ), a long letter to Giulio Caccini, and Galilei published the ''Dialogo della musica antica et della moderna'' ( 1581 - 1582 ). SOURCES
EXTERNAL LINKS |
|
|