Wherever they looked, knowledgeable travelers to Italy around 1600 would have seen music bursting out of its traditional forms, styles, and genres. Freedom was the order of the day. But they might have been puzzled to notice an opposite tendency as well: In some ways musical form was becoming more rigorously controlled and systematic. As composers sought to make music more untrammeled in one respect, it seems they found they had to organize it more strictly in another. Listeners could not be allowed to lose track of what was happening.

The clarity and control composers exercised over Baroque form, in other words, was an appropriate response to Baroque extravagance and emotionality of expression.