Throughout the sixteenth century France looked towards Italy with an intensity rarely matched before or since. Generations of French kings pursued dreams of conquest on the peninsula; during their Italian campaigns French noblemen and their retinues spent extensive periods south of the Alps, gaining firsthand experience of Italian language and culture. Dynastic marriages linked leading French families with different Italian states: the Retz with the Florentine Gondi, the Nevers with the Mantuan Gonzaga and the Guise with the Este of Ferrara, among many others.

Two traits distinguishing the music of the Renaissance may be singled out as relevant to this study: a spirit of emulation leading to appropriation by composers of various aspects of the music of their peers and the development, to a degree not previously seen, of a historical sense. Both in my opinion play a role in the choices made by Palestrina in approaching the L'homme armé theme.

The first of an uninterrupted series of piano works to follow the orchestral Prometheus, op. 60 (1908–10), Scriabin's Sixth Sonata, op. 62 (1911), is a striking example of what may be termed an ‘octatonic sonata’. Indeed, the Sixth Sonata shows Scriabin experimenting with the octatonic at its most rigid and is unique in containing long spans of pure octatonic writing where not a single extraneous note is invoked. In contrast to the Fifth Sonata, op. 53 (1907), which is closely associated with the Poem of Ecstasy, op. 54 (1905–8), the Sixth Sonata has only loose ties with Prometheus.

In 1913 Milhaud set passages of André Gide's La porte étroite as a song-cycle, Alissa. However, he subsequently left the youthful work unpublished, although it was performed by Jane Bathori and Milhaud at the Sorbonne on 11 February 1920. 18 years after its composition he returned to it, and the revised score was published in 1931 as op. 9. It was rare for him to revise earlier works (and, indeed, he seldom made sketches for any compositions). However, he did return to some other works from the same period, the First String Quartet, op. 5 (1912), and the Suite for Piano, op. 8 (1913), simply indicating sections to be cut from the published score of the quartet, and removing a movement from the suite. That Milhaud chose to intervene more extensively in Alissa indicates his attachment to the work and reveals, within the context of one work, the process of compositional growth more generally discernible in his output between these dates.