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about us | stile antico

The term stile antico, pronounced STEE-lay an-TEE-co, literally means 'old style'. It was coined during the seventeenth century to describe the style of Renaissance church composition epitomised by the music of Palestrina - polyphonic and imitative in texture, even in rhythm, strictly controlled in its use of dissonance - as opposed to the modern developments in the works of Monteverdi and his contemporaries.

During the eighteenth century, musicians came to regard the stile antico as a musical ideal, and revered Palestrina as its principal exponent. J.S. Bach is known to have copied and performed one of his masses, and reinterpreted the style in the 'Credo' and 'Confiteor' choruses of the B Minor Mass. In 1725, J.J. Fux published a textbook, Gradus ad Parnassum, which codified Palestrina's style into a set of rules to train composers in the art of strict polyphony - a method still used in universities nearly three hundred years later. Composers such as Beethoven, Schumann, Liszt and Bruckner all studied Renaissance counterpoint, and employed it as a historicising point of reference in their music. In this way the term stile antico came to refer not only to the Renaissance style, but also to its interpretation in the music of later composers.

The repertoire performed by Stile Antico focuses on the rich legacy of sixteenth and seventeenth-century polyphonic composition. It encompasses the music of Palestrina and his Italian, Flemish and Spanish contemporaries, but also the fascinating and diverse English school, from the dazzling complexity of the Eton Choirbook to the masterpieces of Taverner, Sheppard, Tallis and Byrd, and the Elizabethan madrigalists. Just as no single voice predominates in the polyphonic style, Stile Antico's unique method of rehearsal allows all its members to contribute artistically in creating its performances. The results have been described as 'wonderfully vivid' - a direct, personal interpretative approach to the choral repertory, conveying both the beauty and the drama of the finest polyphonic music of the Renaissance.