hey
broke up the monotony of life when events were few. As modern music
rests on the two pillars of the Gregorian chant and the folk-song, so
the opera rests on the two pillars of the religious drama and the
people's play.

During the high tide of the revival of Greek learning in Italy, late in
the sixteenth century, a group of the aspiring young nobility of
Florence, gentlemen and gentlewomen, adopting the dignified name of the
"Academy," resolved to recover the much discussed music of the Greek
drama. The place of rendezvous was the palace of Count Bardi, a member
of one of the oldest patrician families in Tuscany. Edifying discourse
and laudable exercises were indulged in by the guests, among whom were
several persons of genius and learning. The meetings were presided over
by the host, himself a poet and composer, as well as a patron of the
fine arts.

The culture of the times demanded a higher gratification for man's
dramatic cravings than either rude religious or secular plays afforded.
Other music was required to depict the emotions than that of the
contrapuntist, with its puzzling intricacies. So thought these ardent
Hellenists, and a burning zeal possessed them to mate dramatic poetry
with a music that would heighten and intensify its expression and
effect. They who seek are sure to find, even if it be not always the
object of their search. In the earnest quest of these reformers for
dramatic truth an unexpected treasure was disclosed.

Vincenzo Galilei, father of Galileo Galilei, opened the way. He was the
active champion of monody, in which a principal melody was intoned or
sung to the accompaniment of subordinate harmonies, believing that in
music designed to arouse personal feeling individualism should
predominate. 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