Library – 17th Century Classical Music – Don Robertson's Musical Kaleidoscope

17th Century:
The Forgotten Century

by Don Robertson

The birth of today’s classical music took place in Italy. The development of the instruments of the violin family, the incorporation of brass instruments, the beginning of what became Western tonal harmony, the terms concerto, symphony, adagio, piano, forte, allegro, and so on all came from Italy near the beginning of the 17th century.

The Florentine Camarata

The 1600s were ushered in by a group of highly educated noblemen who lived in Florence, Italy. They called themselves the Florentine Camarata. In their regularly held meetings, they discussed ways that they could employ to revive the ancient art of Greek tragedy and invented a new style of music based on the extensive research into ancient Greek dramatic music that had been conducted by Girolamo Mei, an erudite Florentine scholar who lived and worked in Rome. Based on the ideas of the Florentine Camarata, Emilio De’Cavalieri wrote the first important dramatic and liturgical works in the new style, and he and Jacopo Peri wrote the first operas ever written, which were performed for the first time in 1600, the first year of the new century.
From these humble beginnings, a new style of music was born. It was a style that moved away from the dominant polychordal choral singing of the previous century to instrumental music, solo singing, and a mixture of all three. This was also the beginning of a new cycle of music that was based on musical instruments, replacing the previous 700-year cycle of polyphonic music that had been primarily performed by choirs.
The Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi was the first renowned composer of the new era. his first great opera was his beautiful Orfeo, composed in 1607.

Bologna

By mid-century, the Italian city of Bologna had become a tremendous center of music. There, the full flowering of the 17th Century took place, not only in sacred choral music, but in purely instrumental music as well.
The fact that Bologna had been a great center of music during the 17th century was finally brought to attention by the musicologist Arnold Schering during the 1920s.

The Forgotten Century

For many years, the classical music that was composed during the 17th century was described, along with music from the first half of the 18th century, as “baroque music”, although the music that was composed in the style of the 17th century is recognizably different from that of the 18th century that had naturally (as in the case of all centuries) derived from it. Composers of the 17th century were absorbed into the general category of “baroque” by educational establishment. 18th-century composers such as George Frideric Handel, Antonio Vivaldi, and Johann Sebastian Bach became the figureheads of this genre in music textbooks, while the bulk of the music from the 17th century became a forgotten stepchild. Even Monteverdi’s great operas were unknown until a shortened version of Orfeo was performed in Berlin in 1881, and in 1905, French composer and educator Vincent d’Indy directed for the first time a concert performance of Monteveri’s opera L’incoronazione di Poppea.