Imitation and innovation in the north-Italian motet, 1560-1605. (Volumes I and II)

In the decades that followed the Council of Trent Italian composers set at least a thousand different motet texts of which approximately fifty appear repeatedly in printed collections of the time. This dissertation studies settings of four well-known liturgical texts, Veni sponsa Christi, Surrexit pastor bonus, Quem vidistis pastores, and O sacrum convivium. Motets by north Italian composers are emphasized but those by famous Roman composers are included but comparative purposes. The analytic method I have used to study these works is based on Zarlino\u27s ideas about two-, three- and four-voice cadences, which are thoroughly examined in a preliminary chapter. In subsequent chapters I demonstrate that recognizable musical conventions developed for certain texts after 1560. Stronger conventions can be associated with texts that were suited to several different liturgical occasions, while comparatively weak conventions developed for texts sung only once per year. For certain texts distinctive regional conventions sometimes emerged in Rome, Venice, or the vicinity of Mantua. My research clearly shows that Counter-Reformation musicians frequently modeled new settings of a popular text on older settings of the same text and used techniques that were described by sixteenth-century music theorists or in contemporaneous pedagogical and rhetorical treatises that explain how to imitate a Ciceronian oration. This study also provides new information about the development of the stile antico. I have found that motets did not become conservative or uniform in style after the Council of Trent. Nevertheless, by 1600 text-specific compositional conventions had become widely disseminated throughout Italy as younger composers continued to imitate motets by men born in the 1530s. The second volume of this dissertation contains new transcriptions of 24 motets that are not available in modern edition, including several by the influential Marc\u27Antonio Ingegneri and Andrea Gabrieli. Also included are bibliographic data and tables of contents for the sixteen motet prints by north-Italian composers from which the transcriptions were made