Choral timeline

One of the most prolific composers of the late 16th century, Palestrina wrote 104 settings of the Mass, more than 250 motets, Magnificats, other sacred music, and some secular madrigals, and his ultra-refined, carefully controlled and well-ordered musical language style made him a model for other composers from his own time to the present day.

J S Bach arranged one of Palestrina's mass-settings for voices and instruments in order to learn more about his techniques, and today's music students are still taught to compose in the Palestrina style as a valuable musical discipline.

One of the great musical debates of Palestrina's own day concerned the relationship of music to word in sacred compositions. From 1545 the Council of Trent set out to renew and reform the Catholic Church in the face of the perceived threat posed by the spread of Protestantism. Over the next eighteen years it addressed many aspects of Catholic theology and religious practice - and church music was one of them, the Council setting down some fairly broad 'guidelines' which suggested that in sacred compositions clarity of the scriptural words should be the first priority.

In the polyphonic, or 'many voiced' style of Palestrina's time, where music was constructed of simultaneously sung independent lines, the intelligibility of the words could be a problem. And for a time, it appeared as if the Council of Trent's reforming principles might therefore proscribe anything but the simplest musical styles. Palestrina's 'Pope Marcellus' Mass was one of the first examples of a new, more structured and direct style, making the text clearly audible, despite the fact that up to six lines of music are sounding at the same time - proving that complexity and audibility of words were not incompatible.

The popular debate today centres around exactly when this Mass was composed, and when the Commission - which the Council of Trent set up to investigate the question of polyphonic sacred music - was formed. Many people agree that Palestrina's Mass predates the Commission by some years, in which case Palestrina's new style was the product purely of his own inspiration. Either way his music was accepted, and has thus spawned the myth that, in the Missa Papae Marcelli, he 'saved Western sacred music' from the reformers.