Florentine Camerata - Foundation

Foundation

Prior to the Camerata's inception, there existed a popular sentiment among the Camerata's Renaissance contemporaries that music should mimic the ancient roots of the Greeks. The current day's thought held that the Greeks used a style between speech and song, and this belief guided the Camerata's discourse. They were influenced by Girolamo Mei, the foremost scholar of ancient Greece at the time, who held—among other things—that ancient Greek drama was predominantly sung rather than spoken. Foundational for this belief was the writing of the Greek thinker Aristoxenus, who proposed that speech should set the pattern for song.

Largely concerned with a revival of the Greek dramatic style, the Camerata's musical experiments led to the development of the stile recitativo Cavalieri was the first to employ the new recitative style, trying his creative hand at a few pastoral scenes. The style later became primarily linked with the development of opera.

The criticism of contemporary music by the Camerata centered on the overuse of polyphony at the expense of the sung text's intelligibility. Excessive counterpoint offended so the ears of the Camerata because it muddled the affetto (the “affection”) of the important visceral reaction in poetry. It is the job of the composer to communicate the affetto into an audible, comprehensible sound. Intrigued by ancient descriptions of the emotional and moral effect of ancient Greek tragedy and comedy, which they presumed to be sung as a single line to a simple instrumental accompaniment, the Camerata proposed creating a new kind of music. Instead of trying to make the clearest polyphony they could, the Camerata voiced an opinion recorded by a contemporary Florentine, “means must be found in the attempt to bring music closer to that of classical times.”