Florentine Camerata - Composition

Composition

In his formative days, Vincenzo Galilei was trained in music theory by the famed Gioseffo Zarlino. In 1582 Vincenzo Galilei performed a setting, that he composed himself, of Ugolino's lament from Dante's Inferno. Caccini also is known to have performed several of his own songs which were more or less chanted melodically over a simple chordal accompaniment. The Camerata composers sought to recreate the style of Greek music, even though actual transcribed Greek music had been lost for centuries.

The musical style which developed from these early experiments was called monody. In the 1590s, monody developed into a vehicle capable of extended dramatic expression through the work of composers such as Jacopo Peri, working in conjunction with poet Ottavio Rinuccini. In 1598, Peri and Rinuccini produced Dafne, an entire drama sung in monodic style: this was the first creation of a new form called "opera." Though Peri's Dafne was the first performed opera, its music has been lost to the centuries. Instead, L'Euridice, his second opera is most-often heralded as the history-making work. The new form of opera also borrowed, especially for the librettos, from an existing pastoral poetic form called the intermedio; it was mainly the musical style that was new. The instrumentation for an opera from the Camerata composers (Caccini and Peri) was written for a handful of gambas, lutes, and harpsichord or organ for continuo.

Other composers quickly began to incorporate the ideas of the Camerata into their music, and by the first decade of the seventeenth century the new "music drama" was being widely composed, performed and disseminated. Instead of an immediate decline in contrapuntal vocal music, there was a time of coexistence and than an eventual synthesis of monody and polyphony. Florence, Rome, and Venice became the Italian capitals of innovation and synthesis.

The Camerata's view on counterpoint and monody did not rise to prominence without opposition. Galilei's famed theory teacher Zarlino countered, “What has the musician to do with those who recite tragedies and comedies?”

In the compositions of the Camerata members, the theory preceded the practice; the men decided how the music should sound before they set to compose it. The composers of the Camerata became so faithfully committed to the exploration of their declamatory style that often their pieces became rife with monotone sonorities.

Eventually the influence of the Bardi circle waned as Giovanni Bardi fell out of favor. Bardi publicly endorsed the marriage of Francesco I de' Medici and his mistress Bianca Capello. This endorsement was in stark contrast to the feelings of Francesco's brother Ferdinando I de' Medici, who was a cardinal in Rome at that time.