Palestrina attempted to compose music for the Church that was homophonic.
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was an Italian composer of the Renaissance. He was the most famous 16th century representative of the Roman School of musical composition. Palestrina had a vast influence on the development of Roman Catholic church music, and his work can be seen as a summation of Renaissance polyphony. A polyphony consists of two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody, as opposed to a musical texture with just one voice, monophony, or a texture with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords, which is called homophony.