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Polyphony and the Roman Catholic Church -1610 CE
Religion has supported music for a very long time. Indeed, without church sponsorship of composers and musicians, much of the music that forms the foundation of modern music might not have existed. Music has also generated much conflict through the centuries. This article on the revolution of polyphonic music, is a glimpse into the battle between tradition and innovation in the Roman Catholic Church of the early 17th Century.
http://www.ccwatershed.org/blog/2017/aug/25/very-great-mischiefs-which-arise-use-polyphony/
Very Great Mischiefs Which Arise From The Use Of Polyphony By Religious Orders (1610)
published 25 August 2017 by Jeff Ostrowski
HESE DAYS, it’s easy to find foolish statements made about church music. This can be discouraging, without a doubt. However, when I was in college, we had to read a lot of material from the Renaissance, and I discovered that throughout history, bishops and cardinals have fought over sacred music—and some of them even published absurd comments!
Did you know Pope Gregory XIII commissioned two of the greatest polyphonic composers—Palestrina and Zoilo—to destroy the Gregorian repertoire? Some felt that plainsong was full of “barbarisms, obscurities, contrarieties, and superfluities.” The king of Spain tried to prevent such destruction:
On 25 November 1577, a Spanish composer named Fernando de las Infantas wrote King Philip II from Rome, advising the king that a new edition was contemplated, Palestrina and Zoilo having undertaken the task of revision at the behest of Pope Gregory XIII. lnfantas complained that the melismas were to be retrenched, ligatures revised to conform with accent, and certain chants to be rewritten so that they would remain within a single tone. Philip II became genuinely alarmed. He not only wrote the Spanish ambassador, instructing him to intercede with the pope, but even dispatched a personal missive to Gregory XIII. Infantas, meanwhile, sent the pope a memorial in Italian in which he said that even Palestrina, after conversation on the matter, agreed that what he had previously deemed “errors” in the chant were not so in reality. “Far from being errors, they were actually admirable musical artifice, which the maestro to whom Your Holiness entrusted the task [of revision], after further study, agreed should in no wise be altered.”
lnfantas appealed to Gregory XIII not to undo the work of his great namesake, Pope St. Gregory the Great.
In the end, however, Palestrina’s students did great harm to Gregorian chant—but that’s another story for another day.
published 25 August 2017 by Jeff Ostrowski
HESE DAYS, it’s easy to find foolish statements made about church music. This can be discouraging, without a doubt. However, when I was in college, we had to read a lot of material from the Renaissance, and I discovered that throughout history, bishops and cardinals have fought over sacred music—and some of them even published absurd comments!
Did you know Pope Gregory XIII commissioned two of the greatest polyphonic composers—Palestrina and Zoilo—to destroy the Gregorian repertoire? Some felt that plainsong was full of “barbarisms, obscurities, contrarieties, and superfluities.” The king of Spain tried to prevent such destruction:
On 25 November 1577, a Spanish composer named Fernando de las Infantas wrote King Philip II from Rome, advising the king that a new edition was contemplated, Palestrina and Zoilo having undertaken the task of revision at the behest of Pope Gregory XIII. lnfantas complained that the melismas were to be retrenched, ligatures revised to conform with accent, and certain chants to be rewritten so that they would remain within a single tone. Philip II became genuinely alarmed. He not only wrote the Spanish ambassador, instructing him to intercede with the pope, but even dispatched a personal missive to Gregory XIII. Infantas, meanwhile, sent the pope a memorial in Italian in which he said that even Palestrina, after conversation on the matter, agreed that what he had previously deemed “errors” in the chant were not so in reality. “Far from being errors, they were actually admirable musical artifice, which the maestro to whom Your Holiness entrusted the task [of revision], after further study, agreed should in no wise be altered.”
lnfantas appealed to Gregory XIII not to undo the work of his great namesake, Pope St. Gregory the Great.
In the end, however, Palestrina’s students did great harm to Gregorian chant—but that’s another story for another day.
If you're interested in this topic, I encourage you to read the entire blog article at the link.
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