Findings of the Council of Trent?

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Below is an exercpt from Music History 102 (link below). Palestrina was the Vatican's composer during the period immediately following the Council of Trent, and he followed their advice in his compositions.

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina

Born: Palestrina, near Rome, ca. 1525

Died: Rome, February 2, 1594

Palestrina spent much of his career in Rome, serving as organist and choir master at both the Sistine Chapel and at St. Peter's. A productive composer, he wrote over a hundred mass settings and over two hundred motets. At the same time, he managed a very successful furrier business, from which he died a very wealthy man.

In keeping with the strictures of the Council of Trent (1545-1563) to rid the music of the Catholic rite of the "worldly excesses" of the Protestant Reformation, Palestrina composed in a purer, more restrained style. Gone are the vocal lines based on popular melodies. Instead, each voice part resembles a chant melody, each with its own profile and crystalline line. In the opening Kyrie from Palestrina's most famous work, the Pope Marcellus Mass, one can at once hear the classic, pure lines of the text set clearly amidst the various voices of the choir. Palestrina's polyphonic writing is of such quality that many later composers (including Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms) spent their early years studying counterpoint in the "Palestrina style" as set down in a famous textbook by J. J. Fux in 1725.