Le Poème Harmonique - Vincent Dumestre

From 1565, the compulsory demands of the Council of Trent regarding simplicity, purity and devotion and the rejection of any profane element in culture were actively applied to music. In Milan, Archbishop Carlo Borromeo was particularly successful in the reformation of church music: all instruments except the organ were banned from the church; it was essential that the music be performed intelligibly, rather than delight the ear. Vincenzo Ruffo (1508-1587), who until that point had been primarily known as a writer of madrigals, wrote his 'Missa Quarti Toni' in the new Counter-Reformation style with this intelligibility in mind. The polyphony was kept very simple, hardly any counterpoint was used; a monophonic character prevailed. Nonetheless, in time this reformation proved to be a failure because there was no control over the musical praxis that was passed on orally and that developed pre-eminently amongst instrumentalists. Masses, motets and 'falso bordoni', which the Council of Trent had aimed to simplify, evolved at the beginning of the seventeenth century into complex works based on improvised ornamentations of the cantus firmus, such as Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) illustrated in his 1610 'Vespers'. In the spring of 2004, Le Poème Harmonique received the Caecilia Award for their recording of 'Nova Metamorfosi'.