If we want to keep the emphasis on musical technique, then the obvious name for the period—and
perhaps the best one—would be the continuo age: the basso continuo as a virtually obligatory aspect of
any musical performance that was not a keyboard solo originated around the turn of the seventeenth
century, as we learned in the previous chapter, and it died out before the end of the eighteenth. Clearly the
presence of the basso continuo (a bass line “realized” in chordal harmony) as a constant factor throughout
this period, and its failure to survive the period, in some sense define the period. And that sense has to do
with harmony itself, reconceived and newly emphasized as a driving or shaping force in music. It was the
development of harmony as an independent shaping factor, and its deployment over larger and larger
temporal spans, that made possible the development of “abstract” musical forms.
But were there no connections between the technical and the esthetic and the ideological? Were there
no affinities binding the neoclassical impulse, the theatrical impulse, and the rise of the continuo? There
certainly were; and to locate them we must turn our attention to the Florentine academies of the late
sixteenth century, and to the writings of a remarkable scholar, Girolamo Mei.
ACADEMIES
The original Academy, a school located in the gardens of Academus (a legendary hero) near Athens, was
founded by Plato early in the fourth century bce and lasted until 529 CE, when, having long since moved
to the grounds of Cicero’s villa at Tusculum near Rome, it was closed down by the Emperor Justinian as
part of an antipagan campaign, an act often associated with the coming of the “Dark Ages.” The revival of
the term by associations of artists and thinkers—beginning with the Accademia Platonica, an informal
circle led by Marsilio Ficino that met at the palace of Lorenzo dei Medici in Florence between 1470 and
1492—was thus one of the most self-conscious, programmatic acts of the humanist rebirth of learning.
During the sixteenth century Accademie—literary and artistic coteries supported by noble patronage
—flourished in many Italian cities, but Florence would always be the center. The most prestigious one of
all was the Accademia degli Umidi, later the Accademia Fiorentina, founded in 1540, which
commissioned translations of works by Greek and Latin authors and also treatises on Italian (that is,
Tuscan) literary style. Mei (1519–94) was at twenty-one the youngest charter member of this academy.
His initial academy-sponsored treatises, though devoted to Italian literature, already reveal some
knowledge of Greek music theory. Beginning in 1551, he made Greek music his main subject and
completed a four-volume treatise on the modes (De modis musicis antiquorum, “On the musical modes of
the ancients”) in 1573, by which time he was living in Rome.
This enormously erudite dissertation, which draws on classical writers from Aristoxenus and Ptolemy
to Boethius, and also summarizes “modern” mode theory up to and including Glareanus, deals both with
the tuning and structure of the modes and with their expressive and “ethical” effects. The concluding book
is a discussion, based mainly on Aristotle, on the uses of the modes in education, in therapy, and, finally,
in poetry and drama. In ancient times, Mei asserted, poems and plays were always sung—and always
monophonically, whether by soloists or by the chorus, whether unaccompanied or doubled by instruments.
Despite the wealth of information it contains, Mei’s treatise contains no actual examples of Greek music
beyond the late Delphic hymns mentioned and illustrated near the end of the first chapter of this book.
So despite all his expertise and diligence, Mei’s treatise contained everything anyone might have
wanted to know about Greek music except an idea of what it sounded like. And that, paradoxically
enough, is exactly why it became an important influence on the course of contemporary music. There was
no musical evidence to contradict his impressive assertions about what Greek music could do and how it
did it, and why contemporary music could no longer equal its effects.