CHAPTER 19

Pressure of Radical Humanism

THE “REPRESENTATIONAL” STYLE AND THE BASSO CONTINUO; INTERMEDII; FAVOLE IN MUSICA

THE TECHNICAL, THE ESTHETIC, AND THE IDEOLOGICAL

As hinted in previous chapters, the central irony of the “Renaissance,” as the term is applied to music,

is the way in which the Greek revivalism that motivated the “rebirth” of philosophy and the other arts
actually undermined the dominant “Renaissance” musical style, if we take that style to be the ars perfecta.
It would be even sillier to say that the neoclassical revival produced the musical “Baroque,” since that
term was never used about art until the middle of the seventeenth century, when it was used to describe
Roman architecture, and was only first applied to a musical composition (Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opera
Hippolyte et Aricie, as it happened) nearly a century later, in 1733, as an insult. “Baroque” is a term that
musicians do not need. Trying to justify it in any terms that actually relate to the music of the period has
never led to anything but quibbling, sophistry, and tergiversation. All it is now is a commercial logo for a
kind of “classical music” that record companies and radio stations market as sonic wallpaper. Let’s try to
forget it.

So what shall we call the music that we used to call “baroque”—the repertory that arose in Italy at the
end of the sixteenth century and died out in Germany some time past the middle of the eighteenth, and what
shall we call the period of its ascendancy? We could simply call it the Italian age, since almost every
musical innovation during that century and a half took place in Italy and radiated out from there to other
parts of Europe. (There were pockets of resistance, to be sure, but conscious resistance is an
acknowledgement of dominion.)

If we want to emphasize its philosophy we could call it the Galilean period, after Galileo Galilei, the
great astronomer (1564–1642), who was the world’s first “modern” (that is, empirical or experimental)
scientist, and therefore emblematic of what we now call the “Early Modern” period, when for the first
time secular thought and secular art reached decisive ascendancy in the West. (That is why the story of
Galileo’s persecution by the Inquisition has achieved such mythic resonance.)

We might do even better to call it the Cartesian period, after René Descartes (1596–1650), the
philosophical founder of empirical science, whose extreme mind–matter dualism made possible the idea
of objective knowledge and representation. A great deal of music between 1600 and 1750 seeks to
represent objects (including objectified emotions) rationally and systematically and accurately, and to
formulate rules for doing so. The principle of “objective” musical representation that could be formulated
as “doctrine” was a very important idea at this time. (Still, the idea of musical representation was neither
born with this repertory, nor did it die out afterward.)

If we want to emphasize media, we could call it the theatrical age. Music theater as we know it today
was born at the turn of the seventeenth century (a great age for drama generally), precisely under the
influence of the neoclassical revival, and it was much abetted by the new emphasis on representation, for
that is what theater is: represented action. But we could just as well call it the orchestral age. Orchestral
music and large “abstract” instrumental forms were also an innovation of the seventeenth century, and it
was also a great age of instrumental virtuosity—which is to say instrumental music made theatrical.
(Again, though, both music theater and orchestral music—not to mention virtuosity—are with us still).