How did Italian get to be the standard language for music scores (dynamics, tempo, etc.)? And who was the first non-Italian composer to use it?
Bump (*urtare, *in italiano)
From what I remember from music theory class, it’s just that most of the important composers of the Renaissance were Italian, and that’s when modern notation was developed.
There’s probably a more complex answer, but I hate seeing questions left unanswered if I know even a little bit about it.
Yeah, I was going to let someone more knowledgeable answer it, but, since no one yet has (besides BigT just now): it’s because Italy (or, the Italian-speaking world) was the center of music at the time such things were standardized. Opera especially was for a long time an Italian-centered art form (possibly partly because the vowelly Italian language lends itself well to that style of singing), and even non-Italian composers like Handel and Mozart wrote Italian operas.