Things Fall Together

In the midst of this epistemological turmoil sat the members of the Florentine Camerata, who walked the same streets as Ficino barely 80 years after his death, who were familiar with those paintings of melancholy in the Palazzo Vecchio, and who may well have seen or even owned copies of the Dürer engraving. The renewed study of Greek music (which, as the work of Gaffurio and Zarlino shows, had never really stopped) has a distinctly Hermetic tinge to it. It was, after all, a return to the imagined ancient roots of harmony to extract its purest essence. In this incarnation it concentrated on melopoeia, the tradition of poetic song, and not merely harmonic theory. In so doing it naturally came to deal with melancholy, as the sources under scrutiny derived from Greek tragedy, and it was a Platonist conceit to be fascinated specifically with this genre because the great Euripides had been a contemporary (though just barely) of Plato's. Although the term "Florentine Camerata" has come to denote the whole movement behind the secunda prattica, these were real academies that were founded in Florence between about 1576 and 1582. Among these convenors were Jacopo Corsi and Emilio de Cavalieri, but the most important and influential, indeed the founder, was Giovanni dei Bardi, Count of Vernio. [Pirr, p.218]

Bardi (1534-1612) was the eminence grise of the movement. He would hold court with his fellow theorists and musicians until he left Florence for Rome in 1592. He was a neo-Platonist--one of the last. Bardi's Intermedi of 1589 reveal his passion for the Hermetic system just in their names: The Harmony of the Spheres, The Rivalry of the Muses, The Song of Arion, The Descent of Apollo and Bacchus Together with Rhythm and Harmony. In these pieces he pays homage, magnificently costumed and staged, to the supreme harmony of the cosmos; they constitute a definite linkage, looking both ahead to the conception of opera and behind to the sounds of antiquity. Bardi was philosophically conservative, but hardly fossilized. In his essay On Ancient Music and Good Singing addressed to Caccini, he stated that in the gradual return of music to monodic expression rigid theorizing must give way to sweetness [Pirr, p.230]. And this was the clarion call of the Baroque: the triumph of substance over form, the text over the music. In that seminal essay Bardi charted a new course for music, beginning not with the then-current theorists but with definitions straight from Plato. He went so far as to suggest that the current modal system should be scrapped and replaced with the Ptolemaic one. But then, after much analysis of how that system could be adapted to modern use, he cautioned Caccini that all of these mechanics exist only so that the text can be all the more clear, that he should resist temptations to use counterpoint, to respect the natural flow of the language, and to avoid passagi except on long syllables specifically to enhance their affect.

Bardi is also believed to have written (his intermedi reveal the depth of his interest in theater and staging), sometime between 1581 and 1589, the Discorso come si debba recitar tragedia. In this essay Bardi focuses on the chorus, to which he felt that modern revivals did the least justice. His suggestions for staging invoke highly Hermetic imagery:

"But let us return to speak of the entrance of the chorus... They entered dancing... These ballets represented the movement of the eighth sphere, the sun, the moon, or another planet, or the theory of these movements or other marvelous subjects. For greater understanding we shall adduce an example of how they represented the prime mover leading the celestial spheres. The latter, having come on stage, commenced going around in a circle...and they moved from the left singing and dancing as they made a complete circuit and returned to the original place. Then in another movement they imitated the same steps ...circling back to the first place. Then they stood still, representing the immobility of the earth." [Pal1, p.147]

Here again Bardi stresses that above all, the text must be intelligible: "Let us now come to discuss the performance. It is of great importance to have the most excellent actors who express the action of the poet well, for a beautiful speech not well delivered or music badly sung will seem less worthy than it is; so a tragedy badly played will not make known its excellence and beauty." [Pal1, p.143] And he reinforces this sentiment:

"The ancient musicians were for the most part very fine poets or very great philosophers who did not think so much like the moderns do, about teasing the ears, as much as impressing on the intellect, the most noble part of man, according to the subject, cheerfulness, pain, or other passion. This happened because musicians followed the verses of the poet with respect to rhythm and accompanied them by the sound of the voice and instrument with such dexterity and sweetness that no word of the poem was lost. They thought nothing but to make themselves understood..." [Pal1, p.145]

In these essays Bardi uproots the Platonist episteme and replants it in Mannerist soil. The poetic furor and the transcendent states of melancholy are supreme; thus, it is the emotional character of the composition that reigns. But the musician's job is now representational; the music is the tool to move the listener to the passion expressed by the text. To use this tool correctly the musician must understand the Ptolemaic tonal system, whose rules describe the changing of tones according to the particular feeling to be expressed, and the masterful musician can evoke these passions at will. The dawn of the Baroque era occurred at the dawn of empiricism, so it is important to note that Baroque idiom was decidedly not the scholastic province of an academy. Music had become a tool, in the service of the Nous, and its forms would now evolve through experimentation, not by fiat. This new direction was Bardi's legacy. Into his salon had come Caccini, Peri, Mei, Cavalieri--the great composers of the day--and they greatly admired him. In his forward to Le nuovo musiche (1601) Caccini fondly remembered songs that he composed and performed for those meetings. Perhaps the greatest tribute to Bardi's influence is that when he became involved with the Accademia della Crusca in 1585 the Camerata stopped meeting regularly, and then when he left Florence in 1592, they stopped altogether.