founded by Palestrina’s older contemporary Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556, canonized 1622),
devoted equally to learning and to the propagation of the faith. The use to which Palestrina’s music has
been put in educational institutions both sacred and secular substantiates the affinity. The incipient tonal
functionalism one finds in his music does seem to have something to do with his being an Italian composer
—the first to achieve parity with the northern masters of the literate tradition, and for that reason an
inspiring historical figure for Italian musical nationalists in years to come, especially after the period of
Italian musical hegemony that began quite soon after his death had ended. (To Giuseppe Verdi in the
nineteenth century, Palestrina was not only the pure spring of Italian melody but the best shield against the
“German curse.”)
The relevance of Palestrina’s nationality to his tonal practice, and the way the latter inflected his
style, had to do above all with the nonliterate musical culture that surrounded him in his formative years,
as it did every Italian—the art of improvvisatori, whether poets declaiming their stanzas (strambotti) to
stock melodic-harmonic formulas (arie) or instrumentalists making their brilliant divisions and passaggii
over ground basses, all defined by regularly recurring, cadential chord progressions. The earliest written
“part music” to emulate these improvisations were settings of Italian poetry that began appearing near the
end of the fifteenth century, and were published in great quantities in the early 1500 s by Petrucci and the
other early printers. These simple part songs called frottole have long been viewed as a major hotbed of
functional or “tonal” harmony, and we will see some specimens in the next chapter. Palestrina, being
(after Ruffo) the first important native-born Italian composer of church music, was among the first to
transfer something of their tonal regularity to the loftiest literate genres. And it was the technical
regularity of his music, along with its towering prestige, that made Palestrina the basis of the most
enduring academic style in the history of European music. At first this was a matter of turning the Sistine
Chapel—the pope’s own parish church—into a musical time capsule, sealing it off from history by decree
and freezing the perfected polyphonic art of Palestrina into a timeless dogma, as it were, to join the
timeless dogmas of theology. Long after the “concerted” style that mixed separate vocal and instrumental
parts (the topic of a coming chapter) had become standard for Catholic church music, especially in Italy,
the Sistine Chapel maintained an a cappella rule that forbade the use of instruments and mandated the
retention of ars perfecta polyphony as its standard repertory.
Palestrina remained the papal staple: he is thus the longest-running composer in Western musical
history, the earliest composer whose works have an unbroken tradition in performance from his time to
ours. What is even more remarkable, composers continued to be trained to compose in the a cappella, ars
perfecta style (or what was taken as the “Palestrina” style) for Roman church use long after Palestrina’s
time. By the early seventeenth century, two styles were officially recognized by church composers: the
stile moderno, or “modern style,” which kept up with the taste of the times, and the stile antico, or “old
style,” sometimes called the stile da cappella, which meant the “chapel” style, which is to say the
timelessly embalmed Palestrina style, a style that had in effect stepped out of history and into eternity.
Ex. 16-14 is the opening of Omagnum mysterium, a setting of the same text Palestrina himself had set
(Ex. 16-4) and then made the basis of a Mass (Ex. 16-5). It was composed for the Sistine Chapel by a
member of the choir named Balthasar Sartori, and it is preserved in a Sistine Chapel manuscript
alongside the works of Du Fay, Ockeghem, Busnoys, Josquin, and of course Palestrina. The manuscript’s
date, however, is 1715—a century and a quarter after Palestrina’s mortal expiration. When it was put
together, the streets and theaters of Rome were filled with the sounds of Vivaldi concertos and Scarlatti
operas. Inside the Sistine Chapel, though, it was as if Palestrina had never died. In the most literal sense
he had been canonized.
Of course a connoisseur can easily tell an eighteenth-century imitation like this one from a Palestrina
original; but that it is a studied attempt to write in “the Palestrina style” is nevertheless patent.