These events certainly did take place, but a number of essential issues regarding Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (ca. 1525-1594) and his reputation as the “saviour of church music” need to be examined more closely. It is generally believed that Pope Marcellus II influenced both Palestrina’s musical ideology and that of his contemporaries. But the facts lead to a very different story, given that Pope Marcellus died in 1555 after only a very brief period in office, while the Missa Papae Marcelli, often considered the best representation of the pope’s proposals, and one of the Palestrina’s best-known works, was composed around 1562. Many of the rules suggested during the Council’s early years, principally advocating the understanding of the text, were not approved until its final sessions in 1563. From a technical point of view, this led to greater contrapuntal flexibility and a more tight-knit and smoother balance of sound. Palestrina carried out this spiritual-artistic synthesis with undeniable mastery, but he alone was not responsible for the so-called “stile da Palestrina” or Palestrinian style. A whole generation of composers was there to serve the needs of the Roman Church. Posterity has designated him as the creator of a compositional code, which was, in fact, already in the minds of many artists, and not just those in the musical terrain. Once again, music history has created an icon to suit the mentality of the period from which it is being observed and analysed. And Palestrina is a clear example of this.
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Posterity has designated him as the creator of a compositional code, which was, in fact, already in the minds of many artists, and not just those in the musical terrain. Once again, music history has created an icon to suit the mentality of the period from which it is being observed and analysed.
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The Imitation of Nature
Palestrina’s music was undoubtedly the first to be studied as a model of modal counterpoint, which would be extremely important to the evolution of the art of music and the emergence of the concept of tonality that was gradually strengthened over the next century. As stated above, it is a well-known fact that his compositional method led to a musical ideal and to the implementation of the term to compose alla Palestrina at the end of the sixteenth century. During the eighteenth-century, the composer and theorist Johann Joseph Fux recommended Palestrina’s style as the contrapuntal ideal in his Gradus ad Parnassum (1725), despite criticising some of the essential points of his ideal sonority, including the unfailing use of a cantus firmus. These differences of opinion were logical, bearing in mind the thoughts of a composer who was contemporaneous to Johann Sebastian Bach, and given that the art of counterpoint was initially treated from a tonal viewpoint prior to being interpreted from a modal stance. Fux’s method was used for many generations and its followers included leading classical composers such as Joseph Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. It became synonymous with harmonic counterpoint and was almost completely stripped of its Palestrinian roots. However, this led to advances in the technique of contrapuntal composition and stimulated revision and a search for polyphony during the second half of the sixteenth century, which implied its historical revival and a reflection on the artistic monuments of the past. Subsequent authors, such as the twentieth-century theorist Knud Jeppesen, have also based their work on the laws propagated by Palestrina, using his works as a model for “the most sublime ideal in the study of counterpoint”.
In his Fronimo (1568), which was essentially devoted to lute tabulation, Vincenzo Galilei the father of the astronomer Galileo, defined his contemporaries with eloquent descriptions: Lasso was described as “admirable”, Willaert treated as “very famous”, and Cipriano di Rore as “exceptional”, while Palestrina was simply proposed as a great “imitator of nature”. This description, which, in principle, could seem less favourable, had already been used by Gioseffo Zarlino in his Le istitutioni harmoniche (1558), where he noted that as a “good imitator of Nature, he reduces things to perfection”. Galilei’s observations reflect the interest in recuperating the ancient Greek tradition of the “imitation of nature”, a concept central to the aesthetic of Italian Renaissance art of the sixteenth century. In music, as in other artistic disciplines, imitation does not merely refer to “naturalism”. Here it is very important to distinguish between imitation (imitatio) as a philosophical idea originally discussed by Aristotle -the true meaning it acquired during the sixteenth century- and the imitation of ancient myths or rhetoric (Cicero). A distinction can also be made between the imitation of the nature of texts (semantic translation into musical figures), or imitation as a mere compositional technique. This concept (imitation of nature = perfection) was added to that of “science”, which is also present in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century aesthetics. A boundary was thus set up between artists who used traditional artisan techniques (composer = artisan) and those who ascribed to the philosophy of Italian renaissance art (composer = scientist). The concept of a constitutive relationship with the text, an issue central to humanism, was subsequently defined in the Ars oratoria and the ideals of new expressivity.
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