ABSTRACT

For music historians, the effects of religious change on music in the Roman Catholic Church in the late sixteenth century have always been somewhat difficult to pin down.1 While much discussion preceded and accompanied the deliberations of the Council of Trent’s twenty-second session in 1562, the ensuing pronouncement was extremely short and dealt only with secular influence on music for the Mass: ‘Let them keep away from the churches compositions in which there is an intermingling of the lascivious or impure, whether on the organ or in the voice.’2 The twenty-fourth session in 1563 laid down that provincial synods should prescribe an established form for the proper direction of the divine offices, including singing and playing on instruments. As Craig Monson has pointed out, although there had been much deliberation surrounding the issue of the intelligibility of the words and an instruction covering this area had been discussed at the Council during the twenty-second session, it did not find its way into the final documents.3 However, the strong views of churchmen such as Cardinals Borromeo and Paleotti, as well as subsequent instructions by provincial synods in Rome and Milan, meant that a need for comprehensibility of religious texts in musical settings quickly became identified in the minds of commentators, composers and their employers as having emanated from the Council.4