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RENAISSANCE VS. BAROQUE

Believe it or not, there are not all that many completely new ideas left to be presented in this journey through the movements of the B Minor Mass—we’ve already discussed fugues, concertos, ritornellos, Choreinbau and the invertible counterpoint of duets, which actually covers a great deal of ground in Bach’s writing.

In the last of the three sections of the Kyrie—what we might call the Kyrie II, since it repeats the text of the Kyrie I—we encounter one of the few exceptions to those usual Baroque forms, however.  Before launching into a look at the specifics of that movement, we need to have a quick look at its particular compositional style: the stile antico.  And in order to understand the stile antico, we must go back to the dawn of the Baroque period, at the beginning of the 17^th century in Florence.

The primary compositional style for church music in the Renaissance was polyphony. In that style, parts would weave around each other according to a set of very sophisticated rules, sharing some motivic material, and even coming together for moments of hymn-like homophony, but in the main, acting more like a series of complex canons.

For example, listen to a bit of this section of the “Kyrie eleison” from Palestrina’s unnamed Mass for six voices.  You’ll hear a four-note rising scale motive recurring throughout, on the word “eleison”.

Audio clip of Palestrina Kyrie eleison

As beautiful as this music decidedly was, one of the real disadvantages of choral polyphony is the obscuring of the text, which is very difficult to hear when all the parts are singing different words at different times.  But in the early 17th century, a group of Italian composers —Peri, Caccini and above all, Monteverdi, were determined to devise a kind of music in which the text would be clear and the emotional content readily communicated.

In their artistic revolution, they advocated a clear melody which was deeply connected to the text, accompanied by simple chords, resulting in the innovation of monody, which led ultimately to the development of the recitative and aria.  In fact, the very first operas, such as Monteverdi’s Orfeo, spring from this new movement.

Corot, Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld

Though Bach’s music seems very complex, even he was actually still very much a part of this Baroque tradition. His choral movements may be contrapuntal, but his recitatives are highly emotive, and his arias are generally devoted to communicating a single emotion, a reflection of the Baroque Doctrine of Affects, which essentially posited that the communication of emotion was the single most important role of music.

This very famous aria by Claudio Monteverdi, who was a master of both styles, is a wonderful example of the emerging secunda prattica (the “second practice”, in contrast to the prima prattica of Renaissance polyphony), with its high emotional content and textual clarity.

Audio clip: Lasciatemi morire, Monteverdi

I do realize that this is all a terribly simplistic version of music history, but the potted version serves to remind us of one of the central tensions throughout all western music history: achieving a balance between the beautiful complexity of counterpoint and the beautiful simplicity of monody.

In the next post, we’ll examine how this contrast between the prima prattica of Palestrina and secunda prattica of the Florentine Camerata played itself out in the High Baroque of Johann Sebastian Bach.