Caccini also showed that he was not averse to the lascivious allurements of two female voices moving in elementary harmonies. Here is a passage from a scene between two nymphs upon which rest many hundreds of pages in later Italian operas.
This was the immediate predecessor of the well-known "Saliam cantando" in Monteverde's "Orfeo."
The innovations of the Florentine reformers included also the invention of thorough bass, or the basso continuo, as the Italians call it. Ludovico Grossi, called Viadana from the place of his birth, seems to have been the first to use the term basso continuo and on the authority of Prætorius and other writers was long credited with the invention of the thing itself. But it was in 1602 that he published his "Cento concerti ecclesiastici a 1, a 2, a 3, e a 4 voci, con il basso continuo per sonar nell' organo." The basso continuo had been in use for some time before this. It appears in the score of Peri's Euridice as well as in the "Nuove Musiche" of Caccini. It was employed in Cavaliere's "Anima e Corpo" and was doubtless utilized in some of the camerata's earlier attempts which have not come down to us.
Just which one of the Florentines devised this method of noting the chords arranged for the support of the voice in the new style matters little. The fact remains that the fundamental principle of related chord harmonies, as distinguished from incidental accords arising in the interweavings of voice parts melodic in themselves, had been recognized and the basis of modern melodic composition established. This, indeed, was not the achievement of the young innovators, but the result of a slow and steady development in the art of composition. The introduction of thorough bass shows us that the reformers had found it essential to the success of their experiments that, in their effort to pack away in solid chords the tangle of parts which had so offended them in the old counterpoint, they should codify to some extent the relations of fundamental chords and contrive a simple method of indicating their sequence in the new and elementary kind of accompaniments. They at any rate perceived that the vital fact concerning the new monophonic style was that the melody alone demanded individual independence, while the other parts could not, as in polyphony, ask for equal suffrage, but must sink themselves in the solid and concrete structure of the supporting chord. Thorough bass was in later periods utilized in such music as Bach's and Handel's, but its original nature always stood forth most clearly when it was employed in the support of vocal music approaching the recitative type.
Here, then, we may permit the entire matter to rest. It ought now to be manifest that in their experiments at the resuscitation of the Greek manner of declamation the ardent young Florentines were impelled first of all by the feeling that the obliteration of the text by musical device was a crying evil and that by it dramatic expression was rendered impossible. Doubtless they felt that their art lacked a medium for the publication of the individual, but it is by no means likely that they realized the full significance of this deficiency or of their own efforts to supply it. Nevertheless, what they did under the incentive of a genuine artistic impulse was in direct line with the whole intellectual progress of the Renaissance. The thing that was patent to them was the importance of studying the models of antiquity to find out how dramatic delineation was to be accomplished; but in doing so they discovered the one element which had been wanting in the Italian lyric drama since its birth in the Mantuan court, namely, the way to set speeches for one actor to music having communicative potency and capable of preserving the intelligibility of the text.
So they completed a cycle of the art of dramatic music, and, having found the link that was missing in the musical chain of Poliziano's "Orfeo," reincarnated Italy's Arcadian prophet, and built the gates through which Monteverde ushered lyric composition to the broad highway of modern opera.