In response to the Protestant Reformation, Pope Paul III convened an ecumenical council of church officials in Northern Italy to address contentious issues and reform Catholic doctrine. This meeting, known as the Council of Trent, was held between 1545 and 1563.
The Counter-Reformation was launched in an attempt to affirm the Church’s vision of Christianity and to stem the tide of Protestantism. In a series of councils, cardinals were charged with institutional reform, addressing contentious matters like corrupt bishops and priests, indulgences, and other financial abuses.
During the Counter-Reformation, composers responded to the council’s sweeping changes in Church practice with some of their most important works of sacred music. While many composers responded to the reforms by reworking existing compositions, others created new works inspired by the council’s agenda.
Jacobus de Kerle, a Franco-Flemish composer who lived during the time of the Council of Trent, was one such composer. In 1913, Otto Ursprung published his dissertation Jacobus de Kerle, Leben und Werke in Munich and a year later issued a complete edition of Kerle’s polyphonic devotional responsoria entitled Preces speciales, both bringing to light this important and neglected composer of the Renaissance period.
While Kerle’s compositions were not particularly popular, they helped to keep sacred polyphony from being banned by the Council of Trent reforms. In addition, Kerle’s musical settings of mass and his music for the mass cycle were both influenced by the reforms that took place at the council.
There were numerous composers who contributed to the Catholic Counter-Reformation, including Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Antonio Praetorius, and Girolamo Porpora. Some of these composers even wrote pieces specifically for the Council of Trent. Would you like to learn more about how composers responded to the Trent Reforms? Visit this website.
The musical setting of the mass was a topic of discussion during the Council of Trent and was an area where many composers concentrated their efforts. This is most evident in the music that Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina composed for his Pope Marcellus mass.
This particular mass was a large, complex work that required several choirs to perform and involved an extensive amount of vocal parts. Some of the most famous composers of the Renaissance responded to the changes that were made at the Council of Trent by composing their own musical settings for the mass.
These composers used different genres of vocal music for their musical settings of mass, including Gregorian chant and polyphony. Gregorian chant is performed without accompaniment and was the most common form of vocal music during the Renaissance period, while polyphony is a type of vocal composition that consists of more than one voice part, usually with one text.
In addition to the musical settings of the mass, composers often created choral compositions for the council’s meetings. The most common form of choral music during the Renaissance was the motet, which was a polyphonic composition that consisted of one text sung by four or five voices. Motets were a genre that was especially popular during the Council of Trent and was a key part of the Renaissance’s musical culture.