Palestrina: Volume 4 – Christophers

   in Early Music Today (Dec, 2014)
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s career as a composer was marked by the religious politics of 16th-century Europe. Following the deaths of two sympathetic popes in the course of 1555, Paul IV ejected him from the choir of the Sistine Chapel for being married; Palestrina had only been employed there for seven months. The effect of the Counter-Reformation on his compositional style and the history of European sacred music was more far reaching than a severance notice, however. In the course of the 18-year deliberations of the Council of Trent, a periodical gathering that considered the Catholic Church’s response to Protestantism, a sub- committee addressed the subject of music at mass. In …