DURING THE FINAL decades of the i6th century and into the i7th, the essential nature of musical style and the very purpose of music itself were being severely questioned. As we know, the experiments of this period, born of humanism and nourished by the thought that "the text is the mistress of the harmony," gave rise to a new era of musical expression, perhaps exemplified best by the products of the Florentine Camerata. The revolutionary attitude of this group was soon felt elsewhere in Europe. But it also gave rise to persistent questioning, to incessant attempts at understanding the nature of the new style and how it related to the old, and to the endless quest for words to express the rationale behind it-for the mind continued to question what the ear had begun to accept. Throughout the large mass of literature that resulted from this revolu-