Stylistically, Quagliati's music is clear, elegant, and he generally uses simple
diatonic harmonies. Some of his books of madrigals are in two versions: one for singing by equal voice parts, in the old Renaissance style, and another in what he calls the "empty" style, for single voice with instrumental accompaniment. These were examples of the new Baroque style of
monody, and he states as much in the preface to his 1608 publication: "I have decided to cater to both tastes." Quagliati was probably the first to publish solo madrigals in Rome, though monody in the form of solo madrigals had already existed for more than twenty years in northern Italy. He wrote both sacred and secular vocal music, as well as some instrumental music. In his instrumental music, he makes little or no distinction between the style assigned to pieces with certain labels, such as
ricercars or
canzonas; this was an occasional practice at the time, and quite an annoying one to
musicologists attempting to categorize music during this transitional period. Conventionally, a
canzona around 1600 was a sectional instrumental piece, while a
ricercar was a rather severe
contrapuntal study, one of the ancestors of the
fugue; the work of a few composers such as Quagliati make it necessary to qualify these terms as being of imprecise usage. In 1606 he composed ''Il carro di fedeltà d'amore'', which is considered the first secular 'azione scenica' in Rome. Of his surviving larger-scale works, one of the most interesting is
La sfera armoniosa, which includes no less than 25 separate sections, including vocal solos and duets, all with an accompanying
violin part. Much of it is written in the
stile concertato imported from northern Italy, though it would have seemed tame to a
Venetian composer. He wrote this large work for the wedding of the nephew of the pope to Isabella Gesualdo, daughter of the famously murderous composer
Carlo Gesualdo. ==References==