The composers of Southern Italy introduced a new type of instrumental writing eminently suited for dramatic recitation; thus, the earliest operas consisted almost entirely of monody. True or False?

True

Explanation:

At the end of the 16th century Italy was the musical centre of Europe. Almost all the innovations that would define the transition to Baroque music originated in northern Italy in the last decades of the century.

However, it was in Florence where the Florentine chamber music developed the monody, important precursor of the opera, which first appeared around 1600.

This style then contrasted with polyphony, in which each part is equally important, and with homophony, in which the accompaniment is not rhythmically independent.

This meaning is used both to designate the style and for individual songs (so that one can speak both of the monody as a whole and of a particular monody). While the term itself is a recent invention of scholars, no seventeenth-century composer called any of his monody works.

The monody developed out of the attempt by the Florentine Camerata to recover the ideas of Ancient Greece about melody and declamation in the theatre of Ancient Greece. In it a solo voice sings a melodic voice, usually with considerable ornamentation, over a rhythmically independent bass line. The bass line was actually a continuous bass.