=Music Chiefly Choral=.—In the 16th century, Florence was the centre of the enthusiasm for Greek culture. She and her sister-cities in the north of Italy were the arbiters in matters of taste, of learning and erudition. There, toward the end of the century, a small group of scholars and musicians, known as the _Camerata_ (Chamber), meeting at the house of Count Bardi, discussed the possibility of reproducing the musical declamation of Greek tragedy. The time was ripe for such an experiment. The polyphonic school had reached its climax in the intricate works of =di Lasso= (1520-1594) and =Palestrina= (1514-1594). Though admirably suited to the Church, the contrapuntal style of these great composers was manifestly unfit for dramatic purposes; it could voice the aspirations of a body of worshipers swayed by a common belief, but could not express individual feeling. No voice was more important than another, all progressed according to canonic law, their complex intertwining practically destroying the essentially secular elements of accent and rhythm. It was, in short, the embodiment in music of the medievalism which had so long controlled Church and State. Thus far the spirit of emancipation which had produced such great results in the other arts and in politics elsewhere had touched music but lightly. Attempts had been made to break the restraints of contrapuntalism, but there was a total ignorance as to what steps would prove most effective in reaching that end, and nothing definite had been accomplished. Aside from the Folk-song, which was ignored by musicians save only as it served as Cantus Firmus for their counterpoint, there was no music for the solo voice; it was conceived solely from a choral standpoint. =The Recitative=.—Their dissatisfaction with the school of music then in vogue and the impossibility of adapting it to their purpose led to various experiments by this band of enthusiasts to discover the principles upon which the Greeks had founded the musical declamation employed in their tragedies. They argued that it must have followed as closely as possible the _inflections of the voice_ in speaking; therefore they made this their study. Thus originated the Recitative, the distinguishing feature of the lyric drama, which, though using the definite pitches of the musical scale, reproduces in its progressions and cadences the characteristic but intensified effect of an oratorical delivery of the text. It was the exact contrary of the music of the age in which the word counted for almost nothing, the art of combining independent voices and of playing them off one against the other for everything.