Italian classical music
Plainsong, also known as plainchant, and more specifically Gregorian, Ambrosian, and Gallican chant, refer generally to a style of monophonic, unaccompanied, early Christian singing performed by monks and developed in the Roman Catholic Church mainly during the period 800-1000 .
These differences reflect the great ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity that existed after the fall of the Roman Empire on the Italian peninsula.
In any event, the formal Gregorian chant was imposed throughout Italy by 1100, although the music of Greeks rites continued to be heard at various places on the peninsula, especially in those places which Byzantium had once held, such as Ravenna or in the southern peninsula, which had been a refuge for those Greeks fleeing the great Byzantine iconoclast controversies before the year 1000.
The Trecento, from about 1300 to 1420, was a period of vigorous activity in Italy in the arts, including painting, architecture, literature, and music.
Thus, Dante showed with the Divine Comedy in 1300 that the common language (his was called "Tuscan" and not "Italian" until as late as the 18th century) could be a vehicle for fine literature.
The complicated polyphonies of what is called the Ars Nova began to be heard in the 14th century and 15th century; popular items such as madrigals employed increasing dense overlays of different melodies sung at the same time, the point being to create an interwoven and euphonious texture of sound; this is NOT the same as harmony, the sounding of many notes together in order to form a chord.
Yet, in the same sense that architects, painters, and sculptors of the 16th century were paying tribute to the newly rediscovered values of classical Greece, poets and musicians of that period attempted to do the same thing.
Readers will have noted the move from the monophony of Gregorian chants to the complicated polyphonies of madrigals and other music of the few centuries before 1500.
Third on the list of factors that make the 16th century so important was the Renaissance desire to tell a story, to put people up on a small stage and have them sing songs about Greek mythology—the tale of Orpheus, for example.
(See also: Florentine Camerata, Vincenzo Galilei, Jacopo Peri, Claudio Monteverdi, Palestrina, Arcangelo Corelli.)
One was a return to the melodic complexities of polyphony; however, the melodies ran within a modern, established system of harmony based on chords and major and minor scales.
This latter element is an extension of the concept of homophonic music and allowed melodic complexity of any variance to rise to dominance over the importance of text.
It is the period in which the great opera houses in Naples and Milano were built: the San Carlo Theater and La Scala, respectively.
It is also the time of the early career of Giacomo Puccini, perhaps the greatest composer of pure melody in the history of Italian music, and certainly the last one.
Yet, it was inevitable that Italian composers would respond to the fading values of Romanticism and the cynicism provoked in many European artistic quarters by such things as World War I and such cultural/scientific phenomena as psychoanalysis in which—at least according to Robert Louis Stevenson—"all men have secret thoughts that would shame hell."
