Toward “The New Music”: From Plato to Caccini

During the Renaissance, interest revived in the music of the ancient Greeks. The humanist Girolamo Mei’s research was discussed at the Florence Camerata, a group of intellectuals, poets, and musicians meeting at the home of Count Bardi. Plato had defined song as a synthesis of text, rhythm, and melody, but contemporary polyphony obscured the text and its rhythm. Vincenzo Galileo attempted to restore Plato’s priorities, setting a text by Dante to a single vocal line (monody) accompanied by viols: monody gave rise to the first opera, Dafne, by Peri. Giulio Caccini’s “New Music” is an anthology of monodic song; in the Preface, Caccini defends this “noble manner of singing”: the music exists to express the text, uncluttered by divisions but enhanced by specific expressive devices. Monody was to be adopted by instruments, the earliest Italian sonatas of Biagio Marini, Carlo Farina, and others being offshoots of this new vocal style.