Antonia Padoani Bembo and Barbara Strozzi both studied music with Francesco Cavalli. Bembo’s career apparently began when she was a young singer in Cavalli’s La Calisto and it lasted into her 70s, when she completed, among other compositions, a five-act opera and motets based on the complete penitential psalms. This chapter lists the pieces from her first book, Produzioni armoniche, that may have been composed during the years that she lived in Venice (c. 1640–77), when perhaps she came under the influence of Barbara Strozzi. All of Bembo’s manuscripts are preserved at the Paris Bibliothèque nationale and date from the years that she lived in France (1677–c.1720). In addition to the aforementioned works, these include sacred and secular music for three- and five-voice choir with accompaniment. In Paris, Bembo received support from King Louis XIV to live in a women’s community known as the “Petite Union Chrétienne.”

This essay reviews some of the music that Barbara Strozzi may have heard in Venetian churches and homes or sung and studied with her teachers, Nicolò Fontei and Francesco Cavalli. It introduces the terms “madrigal,” “aria,” “motet,” and “cantata” and considers the importance of guitar accompaniment in determining changes in aria styles in the 1620s and 1630s. In particular, I trace the use of refrains in both strophic arias and more complex through-composed pieces, a technique that was to prove important in the music of Strozzi’s Op. 1 (1644). Finally, I speculate on the identity of the lover Tirsi in the second of Strozzi’s Madrigali.

Barbara Strozzi’s Sacri musicali affetti of 1655 is part of a vastly larger repertoire of Latin liturgical and nonliturgical sacred texts published and widely disseminated in seventeenth-century Italy. Her print fits within the category of non-liturgical texts, most often referred to as motets, sacri cantiones, or concerti ecclesiastici. Within this category there is a special subgroup of motets exclusively for solo voice and continuo (typically an organ, sometimes with the addition of other instruments), of which at least 163 other examples survive between 1608 and 1715. This subgroup is characterized by diverse aspects of general style, such as melodic typologies (arioso, aria, recitative, syllabic declamation, melismatic ornamentation, vocal virtuosity, ) and approaches to musical structure (ABA, AABB, ABB, strophic, through- composed, refrains, instrumental ritornelli, sectional shifts between duple and triple meters, changes of tempo, motivic patterns treated sequentially, sustained harmonic support of the vocal line or active bass lines in counterpoint with the vocal part, transposition of motives or longer passages, and tonal organization of segmented compositions. Examples of specific solo motet collections serve to highlight changes in style and structure from the first publication to Strozzi’s at mid century.

Musical life in the Czech lands was decisively shaped by the thirty-year presence of musicians employed by the Habsburg Emperor and King of Bohemia, Rudolf II (d. 1612), who established Prague as the imperial capital for the second time in its history. The teaching of imperial instrumentalists influenced performance practice throughout the region. Discerning Bohemian and Moravian music patrons and enthusiasts acquired the polyphony of imperial composers, most of whom were from the Low Countries. Latin sacred texts proved useful for worship, while vernacular partsongs satisfied the desire for fashionable amusement. The interpretation of music and musical practices connected to the Rudolfine court is complicated by its adoption and recontextualization by the linguistically and religiously diverse inhabitants of the Czech crown lands.

This chapter and the next probe genres and subgenres whose formal schemes, whether fully codified or not, afford powerful energetic templates. Chapter 9 focuses on the polyphonic mass, laying out some of the genre’s conventions while wrestling with recent discourses about the idea of musical unity in five-movement mass cycles. A concluding section explores the limitations of a holistic, genre-based approach through the example of the five-voice tenor motet.

Chapter 6 considers the two earliest motets known to have been composed for Venetian ceremony: Ave corpus sanctum gloriosi Stefani (1329–39) and Marce, Marcum imitaris (ca. 1365), both anonymous. Situating these works within Andrea Dandolo’s midcentury chancery, this chapter argues for music’s embeddedness in the chancery’s most significant historiographical enterprises. I show how the same chancellors and scribes who copied and organized legal and diplomatic texts oversaw the production of historiographic, literary, and musical works as well. As readings of these motets bear out, the collapsing of chancery functions had aesthetic consequences; the rhetoric on display in both works straddles the humanist–conservatist divide for which the chancery—the engine of Venetian historiography—was known. My readings of Ave corpus sanctum and Marce, Marcum imitaris reveal them working in tandem with the chancery’s most significant historiographical enterprises. Not only do they bear strong thematic links to the topics most heavily elaborated within the midcentury chancery, but they exemplify an approach to history that matched the explicit charge of the chancery: to make the state sensible through the organization of its sundry items and documents.

The poetry and music of the trouvères in Northern France is the focus of Chapter 5. We explore the lives and music of Chrétien de Troyes, Adam de la Halle, Gautier de Coinci, Rutebeuf, and the female trouvère Gertrude of Dagsburg. We chart the ways in which the trouvères modelled themselves on the Occitan troubadours, translating their concept of courtly love, along with their song forms and genres, into an Old French linguistic context. We also consider some of the key differences between the two spheres, especially the increasingly urban - rather than courtly - environment in which the thirteenth-century trouvères worked, and their greater involvement in literary and musical production beyond songs, such as romances (romans) and other narrative poetry, and the French motet. The emergence of distinctive poetic-musical structures, known as the formes fixes, was another key feature of thirteenth-century French song, as was the phenomenon of refrains, or snippets of song, that were borrowed and quoted across a wide range of musical and literary genres.

Zooming in on a single city, Chapter 4 focuses on Paris in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. As a prime example of the social changes brought about by urbanization, Paris was a commercial hub, the seat of royal administration, and a centre for advanced learning and education through its new university. We explore how this environment fed into the cultivation of polyphonic music at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, looking into the genres of organum, conductus, and motet, and examining the system of rhythmic modes that was developed to notate this music for posterity. Music theorists, writing a generation or more later, provide us with the names of some of those musicians responsible for the musical innovations at Notre-Dame, and thus we can identify the composers of liturgical polyphony for the first time. We learn how Léonin compiled his Magnus Liber Organi, and his successor Pérotin edited and supplemented it, giving us a unique insight into the ways in which medieval musicians preserved and reinvented the music of earlier generations.

Chapter 6 begins in the same geographical area as chapter 5, examining the changes in music and especially in musical notation in the fourteenth century that are termed the Ars Nova. The careers of the musicians Philippe de Vitry and Guillaume de Machaut - both encompassing roles in royal or noble administration, and ecclesiastical positions - contrast markedly with the lives of the thirteenth-century trouvères. New approaches to musical notation both responded to and facilitated greater rhythmic complexity in both Latin polyphony and vernacular song, and these elements were elaborated even further at the end of the century by composers of the Ars Subtilior. The technique of isorhythm offered a way for polyphonic pieces to be structured along primarily musical lines, and composers made the most of the opportunities it provided to create subtle and sophisticated forms. Against a backdrop of climate emergency and a great pandemic (the Black Death), political and religious upheaval in the form of the Hundred Years’ War and the Avignon papacy, musicians used satire and allegory to shine a critical light on their society and its leaders.