friendly rivalry between advocates of the two cities as to which one is more important in the history of the development of music in Italy. Venice justly claims its place as the birthplace of commercial opera; Naples points to its own history of church-sponsored music conservatories, institutions that developed into "feeder-systems," providing composers and performing musicians for much musical life in Italy and, indeed, Europe as a whole. (See also: Music of Venice and Music of Naples.) 17th century The period from about 1600 to 1750 encompasses the Baroque era of music. Many important things happened in this period. One was a return to the melodic complexities of polyphony; however, the melodies ran within a modern, established system of harmony based on chords and major and minor scales. This latter element is an extension of the concept of homophonic music and allowed melodic complexity of any variance to rise to dominance over the importance of text. The struggle for dominance between text and music goes back to the music of the Greeks and is still going on in all forms of European art music and popular music. This new dominance of melody within harmony at the expense of text led to great changes, including the expansion and invention of instrumental resources of the orchestra; the keyboard was extended in both directions; the making of instruments such as those by Stradivarius became a great industry in Cremona; and instrumental music started to develop as a separate "track," quite apart from the traditional role of accompanying the human voice. Instrumental forms include such things as the sonata and fugue. Well-known and influential musical figures from this time period in Italy include Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti, Benedetto Marcello and Antonio Vivaldi, representing the importance of Naples and Venice, respectively, within this period. 18th century From the early 18th century to the end of that century encompasses what historians call "classical music". (Note that this use of the term "classical" does not correspond to what non-historians mean when they say "classical music"—that is, all opera and symphonic music, as opposed to "popular music".) The term "classical" is appropriate for this period of music in that it marks the standardization of musical forms such as the symphony and concerto. Thus the term "classical" is used in the Renaissance sense of classical Greek philosophy—Platonic form, the idea that things such as beauty exist eternally as ideals,