(1) Term applied to music consisting of a single line; see Monophony. Historians and ethnomusicologists have variously applied it to ancient musics, chant and monophonic (e.g. troubadour) song. Some modern composers have also used it in titles or as a generic label, usually with archaizing intent and to indicate a set of technical and structural constraints applied more or less loosely.
(2) Accompanied Italian solo song, especially secular, of the period c1600–40. The term can either denote an individual song or define the entire body of such songs (and solo recitatives in operas and other works can also be described as monodic). Its use in these senses is a product of modern scholarship; the word was certainly never used by the composers themselves, although there are precedents in 17th-century theory of a more humanist bent (e.g. G.B. Doni). The songs that it embraces are those for solo voice and continuo dating from the inception of the medium at the close of the 16th century to the emergence of the chamber cantata. The accompanying instruments most frequently used were the lute, chitarrone, theorbo, harpsichord and, for lighter songs, guitar. Obbligato instruments occasionally appear, but there is no evidence that a bass viol or similar instrument doubled the continuo bass.
The medium to some extent grew out of late 16th-century solo arrangements of ensemble music, but the vast majority of monodies were composed as such. The main forms are broadly the madrigal and the aria: the distinction is primarily one of poetic structure. Monodic settings of lyric madrigals (or sonnets etc.) essentially continued the tradition of ensemble madrigals in a new guise (see Madrigal, §III, 3). There is a marked polarity between the bass and the vocal line, which is often embellished with quite elaborate ornamentation, some of it written out, some of it improvised according to tried formulae. The arias, which are to stanzaic poetic texts, are more varied in form and style (see Aria, §2). They include examples of strophic bass (see Strophic variations), with the earliest pieces called ‘cantata’, by composers such as Alessandro Grandi (i) and G.P. Berti, which are distinct from later chamber cantatas (see Cantata, §I, 1). Most arias, however, are strophic songs, usually in triple time and with very little ornamentation, ranging from trifling canzonettas to longer, more serious pieces out of which grew the arias of chamber cantatas. Strophic arias gradually became more popular and began to supplant madrigals from about 1618; by the early 1630s the madrigal was virtually dead. Some monodies also include passages of recitative. Many favourite poems of the past were set, particularly as madrigals, but much contemporary verse was used too, especially for arias; much of this verse is anonymous, and a good deal of it must have been written for musical setting.
The terms ‘madrigal’ and ‘aria’ were established for monodies by Caccini in his Le nuove musiche (Florence, 1601/2/R), an epoch-making collection from which it is plausible and convenient to date the inception of genuine monody. The success of Caccini’s songs was undoubtedly a major factor in establishing the popularity of monodies, through which in turn – possibly more than through any other medium – the new Baroque style based on the continuo was quickly disseminated throughout Italy; it took several years longer to become accepted in other countries. Florence was the main centre of monody up to about 1620, after which the initiative passed to Venetian composers; but monodies were written in many other places, especially in Rome and at courts and cathedral cities in northern Italy, by both professional and amateur composers. A high proportion were published. Volumes of monodies, some including one or two by other composers as well as pieces for two or more voices, were produced by over 100 composers, of whom Caccini, Grandi, Berti, Peri, Marco da Gagliano, Sigismondo D’India and Claudio Saracini are among the most interesting and important; some produced single volumes, others as many as half a dozen in the space of a few years. Monodies are relatively unimportant in the work of the two greatest Italian composers of the period, Monteverdi and Frescobaldi. Nevertheless the quality of their finest examples and of the best songs of the other composers named, together with the sheer quantity of songs written over a comparatively short period, makes Italian monody the most important body of solo song of its time and established the fruitful tradition of solo vocal chamber music that lasted throughout the Baroque period in Italy.
The term may also be applied to Italian solo motets of the same period (see Motet, §III, 2(i)). They were less assiduously cultivated than were secular songs, but there are a few fine examples by Monteverdi, and composers such as Barbarino and Ignazio Donati published collections of them that show that such pieces were prompted and influenced by the popularity of secular monodies, many of whose most characteristic features inform them also.
FortuneISS
MGG2 (C.V. Palisca)
N. Fortune: ‘Italian Secular Monody from 1600 to 1635: an Introductory Survey’, MQ, xxxix (1953), 171–95
C.V. Palisca: ‘Vincenzo Galilei and some Links between “Pseudo-Monody” and Monody’, MQ, xlvi (1960), 344–60; repr. in Studies in the History of Italian Music and Music Theory (Oxford, 1994), 346–63
N. Fortune: ‘A Handlist of Printed Italian Secular Monody Books, 1602–1635’, RMARC, no.3 (1963), 27–50, no.4 (1964), 98
J. Racek: Stilprobleme der italienischen Monodie (Prague, 1965)
N. Fortune: ‘Solo Song and Cantata’, NOHM, iv (1968), 140–80
J.W. Hill: Roman Monody, Cantata, and Opera from the Circles around Cardinal Montalto (Oxford, 1997)
NIGEL FORTUNE/TIM CARTER