Changes in Music in 17th Century

The seventeenth century was a time of great change in musical style, particularly in opera, which was becoming much more popular and was beginning to be focused on a lot more. Opera was spreading out from Italy and into other countries in Europe, although Venice remained the centre of activity. In October 1697, a Venetian opera newsletter stated that “Truly today operas have become so common in every part of Italy, that not only in its famous cities, but even in various towns and villages they are performed incessantly”.1 Composers began to write music for the specific intention of public appeal. Opera was no longer a luxury afforded only by the aristocracy, it was now open to the general public, who went to hear the beautiful arias in particular.

The previous musical style had been quite simple. The arias in Caccini’s Le Nuove Musique are characteristic of the style that was present at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Caccini himself named them “Canzonette a uso di aria”, which suggests a relationship between the poetry and the music. The poems are all strophic and they are set for solo voice along with a continuo accompaniment. They have quite a lot of ornamentation. The strophic aria was common during the first half of the seventeenth century. The majority of them were in a recitative style but some of them made use of regular rhythmic patterns. Most arias from Venice before 1660 are in either triple time or a mixture of triple and duple, and they had four or more verses. The vast majority of them had a continuo accompaniment, along with instrumental ritornellos between verses. These arias in which instruments would appear between verses or accompanied the voice were known as arie concertate2. They first appeared in the 1640’s and grew in popularity a little as the century went on, although they did not come into prominence until the time of the opera seria. They tended to be accompanied by the strings and the continuo, sometimes with an added

Bibliography: Grout, Donald J.; Palisca, Claude V., A History of Western Music (USA: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001) Sadie, Stanley (ed.); Tyrell, John (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 2nd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) Brody, Elaine, Music in Opera, a Historical Anthology (USA: Prentice Hall Inc., 1970) Grout, Donald J.; Williams, Hermine Weigel, A Short History of Opera (USA: Columbia University Press, 2003) Schulenberg, David, Music of the Baroque, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) Hill, John Walter, Baroque Music (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2005) Crocker, Richard L., A History of Musical Style (New York: McGraw Hill, 1966) Buelow, George J., The Late Baroque Era (London: Granada Group and the Macmillan Press Ltd., 1993) Palisca, Claude V., Baroque Music (USA: Prentice Hall Inc., 1991)