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The details of the invention of the nuove musiche, the ideas which brought it forth, how these were nursed in the salons of Florentine noblemen, especially in that of Bardi Conte Vernio, are all well known. They were vehement in their denunciations of the barbarous institutions of counterpoint and loudly called for a return to the only true principles of music as taught by the ancients.
The contrapuntal mass or motet expressed the commonwealth of the Church, where the individual disappears, absorbed in the community. The nuove musiche sought to emancipate the individual, and allow him to express his own independent existence.
The revolt was not only against polyphonic music in which text was treated without regard for its communicative purpose, but also against the decorative manner of solo singing, which made words only backgrounds for arabesques of sound. On this point we have the conclusive evidence of Caccini's own words as found in the preface to his "Nuove Musiche."
But it was in 1602 that he published his "Cento concerti ecclesiastici a 1, a 2, a 3, e a 4 voci, con il basso continuo per sonar nell' organo." The basso continuo had been in use for some time before this. It appears in the score of Peri's Euridice as well as in the "Nuove Musiche" of Caccini.
But on the other hand it is impossible to be blind to its relationship to the more metrical arioso of Monteverde's earlier work or perhaps to the canzone of Caccini's "Nuove Musiche." The line of development or progress is distinctly traceable.
The opening measures of one of the numbers in the "Nuove Musiche" will serve to show in what manner Caccini developed his theories in practice and equally what close relation this style had to that of the new dramatic recitative. In the preface to his score of "Euridice" Peri has set forth his ideas about recitative.
This was the spirit in which the founders of the nuove musiche sought to carry out their reforms; their intolerance rivals that of Lucretius or Haeckel. It is impossible to suppose that men of their highly-cultured aesthetic sense were deaf to the purely musical beauty of polyphony. They were trained in its school, and had employed it themselves most skilfully in their madrigals.
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