RENAISSANCE SUPPLEMENT

This NOT covered in your book!

When we left off in the Medieval period…

Sacred music was exploding. Now that composers had the musical staff, and rhythmic modes, it was MUCH easier to write more specific and complex pieces.

Polyphony was everywhere!

But it was getting hard to understand.

Remember the organum from last week’s listening assignment?

Composers were writing music that stretched out the syllables of the sacred text until the text was incomprehensible.With multiple voices singing multiple lines of text, the meaning of the music was often obscured.

Cantus firmus

Also, composers weren’t always using Gregorian chant melodies as the basis of their sacred works anymore. They began to borrow from the popular music of the day to create their motets and masses.And they didn’t care how dirty the song was – if they liked the tune, they borrowed it. When the churchgoers showed up to services, they might hear a lyrics with sacred meaning (although most couldn’t understand Latin anyway), but the tune would be a very recognizable pop song.

The Reformation

Meanwhile, in the early 16th century, the Catholic Church had come under fire from the newly-formed Protestant sects. Enough Christians were leaving the Catholic Church that Pope Paul III called a meeting of Church leaders to discuss how to address the new theological and social ideas introduced by Protestantism.

The Council of Trent

The Catholic Church leaders met in the Italian city of Trento in several sessions between 1545 and 1563. In addition to clarifying Catholic doctrine, the council also took a fairly objective (for the era) look at the Protestants’ complaints about how the Catholic Church operated.Music was one of the hot topics.

Reforming Polyphony

One of the most obvious features of Protestant sacred music is that right from the beginning of the Reformation, Protestants were worshipping in their native tongue instead of Latin.While the Catholic Church would not budge on using only Latin in services until the 1960’s, it DID realize that much of its polyphonic music was either too hard to understand or based on secular songs.Some church leaders felt that all polyphony should be abolished and the Church should go back to using only simple, monophonic chants.

Palestrina and the Pope Marcellus Mass

According to legend, Palestrina wrote the Pope Marcellus Mass to convince the Council of Trent to allow polyphony to remain in Catholic sacred music. By using a style of polyphony that contained much more homophony, he illustrated that polyphony could be understandable.

Modern scholarship shows that Palestrina actually wrote the Pope Marcellus Mass well before the Council of Trent convened. However, from time of the Council of Trent onwards, his style was much more homophonic.

And the Council DID ban the use of secular melodies as a cantus firmus – so no more masses based on racy songs!

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