Humanism and the Emergence of Opera in Italy (jan 1, 1590 – jan 1, 1640)

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We could simply call this the Italian age, because most of the musical innovations during the time first took place in Italy and then spread to other parts of Europe.


...But we could just as well call this the instrumental age because large, purely instrumental forms were also an innovation of the seventeenth century. It was a great time of instrumental virtuosity--which is to say, instrumental music made theatrical. Both music theater and instrumental music, not to mention virtuosity, are very much still with us and therefore not uniquely defining characteristics of the Baroque.

If we want to keep the emphasis on musical technique, then the obvious name for the period would be the continuo age. The basso continuo as a virtually obligatory aspect of any musical performance that was not a keyboard solo originated around the turn of the seventeenth century, as we learned in Chapter 6, and it died out before the end of the eighteenth. Clearly the presence of the basso continuo as a constant factor throughout this period in some sense defines the period. And that sense has to do with harmony itself, reconceived and newly emphasized as a driving force in music. It was the development of harmony as an independent shaping factor and it unfolding over larger and larger spans of time in compositions that made the creation of abstract musical forms possible. In short, there are many ways to characterize the period covering the repertory that arose in Italy at the end of the sixteenth century and died out in Germany in the middle third of the eighteenth. Were there connections among all these political, cultural, aesthetic, and musical changes that bound the neolclassical impulse, the theatrical impulse, and the rise of the continuo? To discover them, we need to turn our attention to the Italian humanists active in Florence during the late sixteenth century.

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