Bubblecar said:
I don’t think any single composer “invented” SATB. It became a common choral convention during the baroque era.
Apparently Palestrina’s settings were quite varied, depending on liturgical context:
>Performing editions and recordings of Palestrina have tended to favour his works in the more familiar modes and standard (SATB) voicings, under-representing the expressive variety of his settings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Pierluigi_da_Palestrina#Music
Voices are quite variable in for example in the works of William Byrd who has at least one SATB piece (unknown date) but many others with AATB and other variants. Byrd was writing circa 1589.
I’ve gone back to Domenico Ferrabosco, who wrote a large collection of 45 madrigals for four voices in the year 1542. Looking at the score of one of these, “Io mi son giovinette”, the pitches for the four voices certainly look like SATB, but the score I saw doesn’t explicitly say so.
Jacques Arcadelt, was a Franco-Flemish composer.
In the early 1540s he wrote a madrigal for four voices “Io dico che fra voi”. His several hundred madrigals, “composed over a span of at least two decades” were usually for four voices. “Arcadelt alternates homophonic and polyphonic textures in a state of of delicate labile equilibrium”. Many of Arcadelt’s pieces are now available in score for SATB.
Philippe Verdelot was the father of the Italian Madrigal.
His early madrigals are from the late 1520s but most of his pieces are for five or six voices.
Costanzo Festa.
Festa wrote for three or four voices.
I found an original SATB score here. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Costanzo_festa.jpg. The four headings specifically say “Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass”. The original was published in ca.1538, in Cappella Sistina 18 fols. 3 verso-4 recto. In other words written to be performed in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. “Polyphonic hymns and magnificats of Costanzo Festa”. “ This is the earliest surviving such collection by a single composer in the Vatican archive”.
