Rappresentatione, except that it had far more recitativo. Dramatic continuity was given greater emphasis
than spectacle.
Late in 1601 (or early in 1602 by the new-style calendar), Caccini issued a book of solo songs with
figured bass, called Nuove musiche. That title has been one of the most oversold in all of music history.
All it means is “new songs” or “new musical pieces,” but it has been invested with a much deeper
significance by those who, misunderstanding Italian usage, have seen in it the proclamation of a “new
music” or the dawn of a new musical epoch. The din of neoclassical propaganda must partly account for
the inflation of the volume’s reputation, but surely even more critical was its appearance at the turn of a
century. (The influence of the calendar—or just the decimal system, really—on our sense of history
should never be underestimated, as anyone who lived through the millennial frenzies of the year 2000 will
hardly need reminding.)
Cavalieri’s, Peri’s, and Caccini’s cluster of turn-of century publications—plus Viadana’s Cento
concerti ecclesiastichi of 1602, familiar from the previous chapter, which amounted to “nuove musiche”
set to sacred Latin texts—brought the monodic style into the authoritative medium of print. Print spread it
far and wide: that was what made the difference. And there was also the prestige of high aristocratic
patronage behind the publication of the Euridice plays, which now have the reputation of being the first
operas. Owing to that prestige and that authoritative dissemination, performance practices that had been
cooking in Italy for many decades could now become standard compositional practices in all the
countries of Europe.
And that was a revolution after all. It was not, however, a revolution brought about singlehandedly by
a determined composer or band of composers. That is how traditional historiography—bourgeois
historiography, lest we forget—represents and celebrates change. Whether in the arts or elsewhere,
change is brought about in such narratives by the heroic efforts of superior, visionary (“revolutionary”)
individuals. In fact, the monodic revolution was the slowly evolving work of performers, arrangers,
patrons, churchmen, scholars, teachers, composers, and printers, to put the overlapping personnel in rough
(and again overlapping) chronological order. The only sudden role was that of the printers.
MADRIGALS AND ARIAS REDUX
For a closer look at the early printed artifacts of the “revolution,” the most expedient way to proceed will
be in reverse chronological order, which in this case produces an order of increasing size and complexity
of genre. Caccini’s Nuove musiche, which may contain songs composed (or, possibly, first improvised)
decades earlier at meetings of the Camerata, amounts to a sort of showcase displaying the basic elements
or raw materials out of which the early continuously musical plays and “representations” were fashioned.
Indeed, it contains bits of Caccini’s own larger spectacles, including four arias and two choruses from a
musical play called Il rapimento di Cefalo (“The jealousy of Cephalus,” after Ovid), which had
furnished the main entertainment for the same Medici wedding pomp as witnessed the unveiling of Peri’s
Euridice.
The larger part of Nuove musiche is given over to individual songs and to a treatise that instructs the
singer on the properly aristocratic way of tossing them off—with great artfulness, but carelessly. The
songs are of two basic types, both familiar to us from previous incarnations. The strophic ones, based on
repetition, are the “airs” (arie). The others—in single stanzas, or “through-composed,” as we now rather
gracelessly say in musicologese (a dialect of German)—are the “madrigals.” Thus we are reminded (and
we should remember!) that a madrigal is not necessarily a part-song. Any setting of a single stanza in a
word-sensitive style that employs no formulaic repetitions or refrains could be called a madrigal. And