The art music of the time was polyphonic, that is,
constructed by so interweaving melodies that harmonies resulted. Of
solos in our modern sense nothing was known beyond the folk-songs,
instinctive outpourings of the human heart, and these learned composers
had merely used as pegs on which to hang their counterpoint. Not content
with giving his ideas to the world in the form of a dialogue, Galilei
composed two musical monologues, between 1581 and 1590, one to the scene
of Count Ugolino, in Dante's "Inferno," and one to a passage in the
Lamentations of Jeremiah. These the chroniclers tell us he sang very
sweetly, accompanying himself on the lute. He was also a fine performer
on the viola.
A dramatic representation at a court marriage, in 1590, in which the
artificially constructed ecclesiastical music illy fitted the text
lauding the bride's loveliness, gave a new impulse to the "Academy"
efforts. Soon there was produced at court, by a company of highborn
ladies and gentlemen, two pastoral plays: "Il Satiro" and "La
Disperazione di Fileno," so set to music that they could be sung or
declaimed throughout.
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