A HISTOKY OF VOCAL MUSIC. 587 



aucl so deeply was the Holy Father impressed by its beaut}' 

 that on leaving the chapel he said, ' This must surely have 

 been the harmony of the " new song" which the Apostle Saint 

 John heard sung in the heavenly Jerusalem, and of which 

 this other John has given us a foretaste in the Jerusalem on 

 earth.' It is difficult to form a just idea of the beauty of this 

 most perfect music without hearing it actually sung as Pales- 

 trina himself intended it to be sung, by a tolerably numeroas 

 choir of unaccompanied voices. The amount of learning dis- 

 played in its construction is almost incredible, yet the eifect 

 produced upon the hearer is that of extreme shnplicity. And 

 the reason of this is obvious. Ingenuity and learning are 

 everywhere made subservient to beauty of expression, and 

 beauty of expression to devotional feeling. And herein it is 

 that the music of Palestrina differs not merely in technical 

 construction, but in its inmost essence, from that produced by 

 the very greatest of his predecessors." 



The immediate result of the production of this mass, in- 

 augurating what is known as the Golden Age of ecclesias- 

 tical music, and which was formally recognised by the Church 

 of Eome as the type of what ecclesiastical music should be, 

 was that the whole system and style of music, secular as well 

 as sacred, underwent a change. The dry, though ingenious 

 and clever, mathematical forms which had been the pride of 

 the schools previous to Palestrina were now supplanted by a 

 style in which, although ingenuity of invention was retained 

 to an extraordinary extent, the chief aim of the composer was 

 to make music appeal directly to the hearts of the people, to 

 convert it from dry bones into a living power of such beauty 

 and strength that it was to become a model for all time, and 

 to be the foundation-stone of all modern music. From hence- 

 forth the major and minor scales were also to be used as the 

 material with which composers would work, instead of those 

 plain-song scales or modes which had created so little sym- 

 pathetic interest in the world generaTIy before the time of 

 Palestrina. 



Although this great change in musical art was not consum- 

 mated until some two or three decades after Luther, yet it is 

 an aid to memory if we think of the reformation as effected 

 by Palestrina in connection with the greater Eeformation as 

 effected by Luther. 



Palestrina was rewarded by being appointed composer to 

 the Sistine Chapel, a post he retained, together with that of 

 Choirmaster at the Vatican, till his death. He expired in the 

 arms of his friend St. Philip Neri in the year 1594, beloved 

 and revered by all who knew him. 



I should have liked you to have heard a selection from this 

 great mass of Palestrina's ; for, although you could not, perhaps. 



