The Duet in Early Seventeenth-Century Italian Church Music

Abstract

Let us picture an average parish church of a north Italian city at the beginning of the seventeenth century—a church not of cathedral status, and one run on a fairly limited budget. What kind of music might one have heard there of a Sunday? Here there would be none of the pomp of Counter-Reformation Rome and its suave, sonorous polyphony; none of the stereophonic splendours of Venetian polychoral music. The total assembly of musicians could probably be counted on the fingers of the hand, and performance of sixteenth-century polyphony even in the least feasible number of parts (usually four) would have been poor. It was impractical for this type of choir.