This Italian composer, Giovanni Pierluigi Sante da Palestrina, known by musicians today simply under the name of Palestrina, started his musical career at the Cathedral of Saint Agapita in his hometown Palestrina, a city outside Rome, which he was actually named after. He became a church choirboy there, soon after to join the choir at Santa Maria Maggiore(Saint Mary Major) in Rome, studying music under Firmin le Bel.

After his studies, he came back to his hometown and worked as a choirmaster and organist in the Cathedral of Saint Agapita. He married in 1547. Then, in 1550, his mentor at the time, Cardinal del Monte, was elected pope and appointed Palestrina to be a conductor at the Julian Chapel in St. Peter’s. It was at this time that he wrote his first book of masses printed in 1554. This was unique because it was the first book of masses written by an Italian composer. In Italy at the time, most all of the sacred music came from the France, Spain, or the Netherlands.

Shortly a year after, he became a member of the Papel choir in the Sistine Chapel, whereby the choir unanimously accepted him without the need of an examination. This shows evidence of his great skill and the respect he had gained up to that point in his life. Unfortunately, with the changing of the pope, he was forced to leave this job on account of him being a married man. The new pope namely enforced a celibacy ruling. Although he consecutively had two very important positions following this, being a choirmaster at St. John Lateran, and then at the Santa Maria Maggiore, he ultimately was appointed back to the Julian Chapel. It was during this time that he lost his wife, two children and brother to three separate outbreaks of the black plague. He wanted to become a priest after this, but ended up remarrying; this time to a very wealthy woman. On account of her being rich, he had become very independent and was able to truly dedicate his life to composition. He retained this position up until his death due to pleurisy in 1594.

To truly understand his life, one has to look into the fact that the time he lived, the sixteenth century, the Renaissance, a term which means rebirth. It was this time at which man discovered himself and considered himself to be at the center-stage of the world amongst all things. There is a term which describes this way of thinking, namely Humanism. Many things were happening in the world at this time: Columbus discovered America, Kopernicus, Galileo Galilei among others were shedding light on the natural sciences, Gutenberg developed the printing press.

This was a time at which the church rule was omnipresent and people started to question it. The main invention supporting this movement was newly found “printed word“ and with it the ability to inform. People wanted the church to be different. This came to be known in history as the Reformation and caused the church to retaliate by trying to reform itself from within. The Catholic church formed the Council of Trent, which convened three times between 1541 and 1563. They wanted to go back to ideals of an older day. There was the need to repress the arts, for they believed that through the arts, people were being corrupted. This included music.

At the time, a lot of polyphonic music was being composed, the Council of Trent wanted the spoken word to have a greater importance in the music, largely repressing it. They wanted the music to become purer and wanted its only function to be the celebration of religion. In order to achieve this, it was necessary to increase the amount of text in music, which largely hindered the capacity to make the music polyphonic. The technique used at the time to produce polyphonic music was to employ the use of shorter words or phrases, whereby the music took precedence over the meaning of the words themselves. For example, instead of producing complete sentences, there was the constant repetition of the words (e .g .Sanctus or Amen) in various voices. In addition, the church wanted to cut down the amount of instrumentation in music and hinder the use of compositional abilities during the time, one of them being counter-point used in music. They wanted all the voices in a piece to sing the same text, going back to the ideals of Gregorian Chant.

Palestrina, although a great follower of the church and a very religious man fully agreed with the Council of Trent, with the exception of one thing. The polyphony and the instrumentation was of great importance to him. He wanted to use counter point in his music and did not want all the voices singing the same text, thereby going against the ideals of the council. To do this required the utmost of his creativity. He homophonically combined voices and short motifs corresponding to the text, thus reducing the domination of the music. The words were so clear that he was able to use a great deal of counterpoint to the highest of his abilities; he had formed a new style of music grasping the audience into prayer, but at the same time, not repressing the music. In other words, he found the perfect musical balance to glorify the word. His works and style have been respected by musicians throughout the centuries. Not only did he compose so many pieces that it would be impossible to list them all onto this page, many of which are still performed to this very day, but he was also the developer of the “Palestrina Style,” a great gift to humanity. Even today his works are the basis of counterpoint taught in universities, his style of writing music being the epitomy of renaissance counterpoint. In the 19^th century, romantic period, where a great rebirth of his music took place, he was described as “the savior of church music.”