2. Sacred music was exploding. Now that
composers had the musical staff, and rhythmic
modes, it was MUCH easier to write more specific
and complex pieces.
Polyphony was everywhere!
But it was getting hard to understand.
3. Composers were writing music that stretched out
the syllables of the sacred text until the text was
incomprehensible.
With multiple voices singing multiple lines of
text, the meaning of the music was often
obscured.
4. Also, composers weren’t always using Gregorian
chant melodies as the basis of their sacred works
anymore.
They began to borrow from the popular music of the
day to create their motets and masses.
And they didn’t care how dirty the song was – if they
liked the tune, they borrowed it.
When the churchgoers showed up to services, they
might hear a lyrics with sacred meaning (although
most couldn’t understand Latin anyway), but the
tune would be a very recognizable pop song.
5. Meanwhile, in the early 16th century, the Catholic
Church had come under fire from the newly-
formed Protestant sects.
Enough Christians were leaving the Catholic
Church that Pope Paul III called a meeting of
Church leaders to discuss how to address the new
theological and social ideas introduced by
Protestantism.
6. The Catholic Church leaders met in the Italian city
of Trento in several sessions between 1545 and
1563.
In addition to clarifying Catholic doctrine, the
council also took a fairly objective (for the era)
look at the Protestants’ complaints about how the
Catholic Church operated.
Music was one of the hot topics.
7. One of the most obvious features of Protestant sacred
music is that right from the beginning of the
Reformation, Protestants were worshipping in their
native tongue instead of Latin.
While the Catholic Church would not budge on using
only Latin in services until the 1960’s, it DID realize
that much of its polyphonic music was either too hard
to understand or based on secular songs.
Some church leaders felt that all polyphony should be
abolished and the Church should go back to using
only simple, monophonic chants.
8. According to legend, Palestrina wrote the Pope Marcellus
Mass to convince the Council of Trent to allow polyphony
to remain in Catholic sacred music. By using a style of
polyphony that contained much more homophony, he
illustrated that polyphony could be understandable.
Modern scholarship shows that Palestrina actually wrote
the Pope Marcellus Mass well before the Council of Trent
convened. However, from time of the Council of Trent
onwards, his style was much more homophonic.
And the Council DID ban the use of secular melodies as a
cantus firmus – so no more masses based on racy songs!
