This lively new book, written by a general historian, explores the music of the great composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525-1594). Palestrina worked during a tempestuous phase of European history – the Counter Reformation or Catholic Reform. More than four centuries of discussion and controversy have followed, continuing to highlight fundamental issues about music's relationships with emotion, imagination and the sublime. The large numbers and varieties of Palestrina's works are daunting for singers and listeners, but here's a guide to mapping one's way through the labyrinth. Even now much glorious music remains hidden away, still to be performed and enjoyed.
Palestrina's music excels in its sensitivity to text, disciplined consonance and exploitation of the richly contrasting voice parts - cantus, alto, tenor and bass - and their varied interweaving's. It delights in part-erotic love poetry while chiefly focusing on religious themes. Here is music for every changing event through the Church's Year, but also for underlying beliefs to be persistently symbolized about the eternal God as beauty, wonder, mercy, love and mystery. Particularly outstanding are certain parts of Palestrina's Masses, the Kyrie, Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei. The book explores different ways of enjoying and relating to the music, whatever one's beliefs. The author suggests that its combination of vocal diversity, equality and harmony symbolizes good social relationships or ideal community. This is music, which strikingly avoids tight metricality, mighty forces, tumult or disjunction. Its prevailing values are those of clarity, ensemble, balance and graceful flowingness.
