The New in Music

Abstract

In the year 1601 there appeared in Florence a musical work entitled Le Nuove Musiche (The New Music). The composer was Giulio Caccini, one of the leading members of the circle associated with the noble dilettanti who in attempting to revive the Greek drama laid the foundations of a new branch of music—opera. Le Nuove Musiche contains a collection of songs for solo voice to harp or lute accompaniment, of the kind that Caccini, who was singer to the Tuscan Court, had been singing for many years. The work—called not New Music, but The New Music—was a contribution to a current controversy in which the opposing side supported the “old” manner of musical composition, the one in which two or more melodies are woven together to form an elaborate pattern. (This manner of composition is known as polyphony, and in modern times the style has been called after one of its greatest masters, Palestrina). Consequently, Le Nuove Musiche has a long preface in which Caccini expounds the meaning of his songs, declaring, among other things, that the new style considers its principal task to be to interpret the poetry, to give rightful scope to the words by careful enunciation, and to let the tune bring out the phrasing of the poem, an aspect which, in the modernists' view, had been singularly neglected in polyphonic compositions.