In this minute of classical music history, I’ll delve into the make-up and influences of the Florentine Camerata. They had a big impact on the arts in the latter part of the 16th century, more specifically the development of a new kind of music.
Fun Fact:
Did you know that Jacopo Peri’s Dafne (1598) is said to be the first opera ever written? Apparently, Jacopo might have popped in on Camerata meetings every once in a while to get the latest scoop.
About Steven
Steven is a Canadian composer living in Toronto. He creates a range of works, with an emphasis on the short-form genre—his muse being to offer the listener both the darker and more satiric shades of human existence. If you're interested, please check out his website for more.
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Hi, I’m Steven Hobé.
So, who were the Florentine Camerata?
They were a group of cool cats made up of humanists, musicians, poets and intellectuals in late Renaissance Florence that got together to chat about the arts.
They began meeting around 1573, with their better-known members including Giulio Caccini, Pietro Strozzi, and Vincenzo Galilei (the father of the astronomer Galileo Galilei).
They believed music had become corrupt, their biggest beef being the overuse of polyphony, at the expense of understanding sung text.
They felt that too many lines of music all playing at once was way too confusing and convoluted. Oh to be a fly on the wall for those conversations.
They proposed returning to the dramatic style of the ancient Greeks, and that works be sung as a single line to a simple instrumental accompaniment, thereby creating a new kind of music.
This led to the invention of the recitative, a driving force in the development of opera, one of the biggest achievements of the following baroque period.