Giulio Caccini Le nuove musiche (22), collection of arias and madrigals for voice & continuo Giulio Caccini wanted to secure his place in music history. In the preface to his 1602 publication Le Nuove Musiche, Caccini insists that he himself invented the new genre of monody, which would change the face of music across the entire century. Caccini was not actually monodys sole inventor, and Le Nuove Musiche was not technically even the first monodic collection published. It nevertheless enjoyed a spectacular influence, going through numerous reprintings and inspiring countless later composers. To this day, Le Nuove Musiche remains one of the best-known musical publications of all time; very few contemporary collections of solo songs fail to include an excerpt. The monodic genre of Le Nuove Musiche first took root and grew in Renaissance Florence. Caccini, with Jacopo Peri, Ottavio Rinuccini, and Vincenzo Galilei, established the revolutionary experimental music studio known as the Florentine Camerata. Meeting in the home of Count Giovanni de Bardi, the Camerata considered the very principles of music. They believed that ancient Greek stage music achieved its dramatic effect because it was performed by a single voice; the polyphonic madrigal of their own time had exhausted the possibilities of musical expression. They sought a new and newly affective musical form. They pioneered the new style of solo operatic singing and the solo monodic madrigal; Florentines first heard their new music in public during the citys 1600 feste. The ambitious Caccini (also jealous of Peri) named his published collection The New Music, and claimed in the preface to have himself invented the style decades before. The musical style of Le Nuove Musiche is founded on vocal virtuosity (Caccini was an excellent bass). The book contains 22 songs, 12 madrigals, and ten arias, each for a solo singer accompanied by citarrone or other stringed continuo instrument. The madrigals do not showcase the kind of mimetic word-painting famous in the sixteenth century madrigal; Caccinis settings achieve their power by sensitive reflection of the poetic structure, and by carefully mapped displays of vocal ornamentation. Some of the ornaments are helpfully explained in the volumes preface; many others are written in to the printed score. Among the madrigals are some of his best-known compositions: Amarilli mia bella and Perfidissimo volto. The arias adopt a similar compositional profile, setting strophic Italian canzona texts. Caccini closes the collection with a set of monodic opera excerpts. In 1614 he was driven by the success of Le Nuove Musiche to release a second volume.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 15:42:16 +0000
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