2. • Counter-reformation: The Catholic Church's
aggressive response to the Protestant Reformation.
While clinging to traditional Catholic practices such
as the centralization of power in Rome, the Catholic
reformers limited the sale of indulgences, and
purified the sanctuary by banning secular tunes and
painting over nudity in religious art. Seventeenth-
century Rome, with its more than 200 churches,
expressed the spirit of the Counter-Reformation.
• Jesuits: a relatively new religious order in the
seventeenth century that fostered the teachings of
the Church. Promoted by the popes, Jesuit priests
established colleges to impart a sense of a true
Catholic life by means of education.
3. • Cappella pontificia sistina: the pope's vocal
ensemble, whose home was the Sistine Chapel. In
1625 there were thirty-four singers, that is, eight for
each vocal part.
• A cappella: Music that is strictly vocal (no
instruments participated). It was the distinctive
mode of performance of the cappella pontificia
sistina.
• Stile antico: The conservative style, at first called
prima pratica, that emphasized imitative
counterpoint and followed strict sixteenth-century
part writing. Most of the repertoire of the cappella
pontificia sistina was in stile antico.
4. • Tenebrae Service: The morning offices of the three most solemn days of
Holy Week: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. It is
called Tenebrae service (Latin for "darkness") because the service was
sung in almost total darkness.
• Miserere: Penitential Psalm No. 50, whose celebrated setting by the
composer Gregorio Allegri (1638) became the musical high point of the
Tenebrae service (Anthology, No. 87).
• Falsobordone: a type of music in which the voices chant in simple
psalm-tone style employing root position chords with slightly ornamented
cadences.
5. St. Peter's Basilica
A basilica is a special,
grand church that happens
not to be a cathedral (not
the seat of a bishop). St.
Peter's Church is the
exception, as it is the seat
of the Bishop of Rome,
namely, the pope. It is
believed to be built directly
above the remains of St.
Peter, the Apostle to
whom Christ gave the
authority to build the
Church. It was
consecrated by Pope
Urban VIII in 1626.
6. • The colossal Baroque: Church music for large-
scale multiple choirs of voices and instruments. It
usually involves four or more choirs, all answering
each others and sometimes singing in impressive
tutti passages.
• Reverberation time: the time it takes the sound
to die out. Composers writing music for large
Baroque churches compensated the rather long
reverberation time by employing a few basic chords
and changing them only very slowly.
7. Girolamo Frescobaldi
• Composer and organist
at St. Peter's (1608-
1643), he was
recognized by the end of
his life as the greatest
organ composer of all
Europe.
• Fiori musicali:
Published by
Frescobaldi in 1635, it is
a collection of Mass
music for St. Peter's and
other churches. It
includes organ music for
Mass for most Sundays
and feast days of the
church year.
8. • Organ Mass: A Mass in which an organ
alternates, or entirely replaces, the choir.
Frescobaldi was in the seventeenth century its
principal exponent.
• Alternatim technique: When the organist
alternates with the choir, playing a solo in place of
the choral chant or polyphony.
• Organ verset: each independent organ section in
an alternatim organ Mass.
• Toccata: an instrumental work designed to show
off the creative spirit of the composer and the
technical skill of the performer.
9. • Ricercar: A highly contrapuntal instrumental composition
developed from a single subject and countersubject. The
eighteenth-century fugues of J.S. Bach owe much to Frescobaldi's
organ ricercars in Fiori musicali, which the German composer
obtained in manuscript copy as early as 1714.
• Tonal answer: When a voice imitates the subject at the interval of
a fifth and modifies the subject so as to keep the answer in the
home tonality.
10. • Oratorio: A new dramatic musical genre emerged in
seventeenth-century Rome based on a Latin or Italian
text that usually elaborates upon a story found in the
Old Testament. Differently from opera, oratorio
disposes of lavish sets, costumes, choreography, and
features a narrator who reports what happens,
whereas it retains the operatic processes of recitative,
aria, and chorus. It was performed during Lent, a
solemn time when opera was not allowed in Rome.
• Oratory: A prayer hall set aside just for praying,
preaching, and singing where oratorios were
performed.
• Confraternity: A fraternal order emphasizing
religious devotion and charity. Each oratory in Rome
was supported by one such fraternity.
11. • Giacomo Carissimi: Composer and director of
music at the German College in Rome for more than
forty years. In addition to Masses, motets, and about
a hundred and fifty secular cantatas, Carissimi is
remembered today mostly for his surviving fourteen
oratorios.
• Chamber Cantata: By the end of the
seventeenth-century it consisted of a succession of
movements for solo voice and accompaniment that
alternated between recitative and aria. Most
cantatas were in Italian and spoke of love.
Compared to opera, it featured only one single
voice, basso continuo and a few strings at most, and
incorporated only a small number of recitatives and
arias.
12. • Alessandro Scarlatti: Composer-in-residence for
Queen Christina of Sweden and then Cardinal Pietro
Ottoboni. the leading composer of opera in Rome
by the end of the seventeenth century, Scarlatti
composed oratorios and more than six hundred
chamber cantatas.
• Da capo aria: An aria with two contrasting musical
sections in which at the end of the second the first
returns exactly, thus producing ABA form. The
reprise of A was not written out, but simply signaled
by the inscription "da capo" (Italian for "from the
head"). Scarlatti established this formal
arrangement in the 1690s.
