Pietro Cerone

Four years later, however, he published a monumental volume on music theory, El melopeo y maestro: tractado de música theorica y pratica; en que se pone por extenso; lo que uno para hazerse perfecto musico ha menester saber, which consisted of 22 volumes, 849 chapters, and 1160 pages in the original Spanish.

El melopeo achieved considerable notoriety, and was sufficiently famous as late as 1803 to be lampooned by the Spanish novelist Antonio Eximeno, who compared it to the chivalric romances in Don Quixote: an impossibly detailed and absurd compilation of nonsense.

Cerone was musically conservative, and his conservatism in this influential treatise doubtless had some effect on the delay of the Baroque style arriving in the Iberian peninsula.

He discusses the previous theoretical treatises of Zarlino, Vicentino, Juan Bermudo and others; he describes in detail how a composer can achieve expressive intensity when writing masses, motets, madrigals, frottolas, canzonettas, canticles, hymns, psalms, lamentations, ricercares, tientos, strambotti, and other forms of the time.

The compositional ideal which he maintained was the style of Palestrina, though curiously he maintained that the "rules" of counterpoint were made to be broken, and should be abandoned as soon as a composer had learned his craft: paradoxically, even in the 21st century, no style of composition is taught in a more rigorous, rule-based way than the polyphonic idiom of Palestrina.