The term “basso continuo” (which translates to “continuous bass”) refers to a style of accompaniment that came to be used in almost all music of the Baroque period (ca. Although Galilei and his colleagues did not invent basso continuo, they did adopt it as the ideal vehicle for supporting sung text. Of course, a solo singer needs accompaniment. Today, this style is termed recitative, for it more closely resembles dramatic recitation than typical singing. The rhythms would be derived from the text, while the melodies and harmonies would portray the emotional content.
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Such music would be free of repetition, of course, since every note would be uniquely tied to the word it illuminated.
It would be modelled on the way in which actors used variations in pacing and pitch to expressively declaim text from the stage. In order to facilitate sung drama, Galilei sought to develop a new approach to writing vocal music that imitated dramatic speech. The leading music theorist of the Camerata was none other than Vincenzo Galilei (1520-1591), father of the famous astronomer Galileo Galilei. Source: Wikimedia Commons Attribution: Colmar Painter License: Public Domain Image 4.9: Music was very important in ancient Greece, both in the context of theater and as everyday entertainment. Their aim was to recapture the emotional impact that, according to Mei, sung plays had once had on audiences. His descriptions fascinated the Florentine intellectuals, who felt compelled to develop a modern approach to sung drama. He also wrote about the extraordinary power that music had over the listener. In his 1573 treatise On the Musical Modes of the Ancients, Mei argued that all ancient Greek poetry and drama had been sung, not spoken. The members of the Camerata drew much of their inspiration from the work of Girolamo Mei (1519-1594), a Roman scholar and the leading authority on ancient Greece. Source: Wikimedia Commons Attribution: Hartmann Schedel License: Public Domain Image 4.8: This map shows the walled city of Florence about 100 years before opera was born there.
Resurrecting the musical practices of ancient Greece, therefore, is a tricky endeavor. While many theoretical and philosophical treatises on music survive, very few compositions were preserved, and we don’t really know what those would have sounded like. Where music was concerned, however, ancient Greece could offer only limited guidance. In particular, they believed that the arts had become corrupted, and that artistic expression could only be revived by returning to the principles of ancient Greece. The members of the Camerata were courtiers, composers, poets, and scholars, and they were concerned with the modern development of artistic forms. They called themselves the Camerata (a name derived from the Italian term for “chamber”), and today are referred to as the Florentine Camerata. Beginning in the 1570s, a group of intellectuals began meeting in the home of Count Giovanni de’ Bardi to discuss artistic matters. \( \newcommand\)Įuropean opera was born in the city of Florence in the late 16th century.
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