Palestrina  

Some of the most beautiful church music of all time was written in the second half of the sixteenth century.  There were great composers in many European countries, but perhaps the greatest of them all was the Italian Palestrina (1525-1594).  He took his name from the small town near Rome in which he was born.  He was a choirboy in a Church in Rome, and later became the organist and choirmaster of the cathedral of his hometown.  When he was 25 the Bishop of Palestrina was made pope, and, realizing his choirmaster genius, he appointed him to be choirmaster at the Sistine Chapel.  At 30 he was made a member of the papal choir, though his appointment was short-lived, as he was married, and a new pope refused to allow married men in his choir.  However, Palestrina spent the rest of his life in Rome, most of the time in the service of the church.  Gradually he became known as Rome's greatest composer.

The famous Council of Trent met in 1562 and advised that church music should be "purged of all sensual and impure elements, all secular forms and unedifying language Palestrina's music kept to the spirit of this recommendation, and it has a sublime beauty which makes it a perfect expression of religious feeling.  There is a great deal of smooth, stepwise movement, and although each melodic part is tuneful in itself, it blends with the others to make a perfect whole.  His music was entirely vocal, and was based on the old modes.  The words were always in Latin.  

Palestrina wrote 93 masses, and about 600 motets and other liturgical music.  His best-known work is the 'Missa Papac Marcelli' Which was dedicated to a pope who had reigned for three weeks when Palestrina was 30 and who had asked for his singers to perform "in a suitable manner, with properly modulated voices, so that everything could be both heard and properly understood". Palestrina took three or four years to write the work, and dedicated it to his memory.