HISTORY OF MUSIC. 





these men the chief was William Dufay, who was 

 tenor singer and chapel-master in the papal 

 chapel from 1380 to 1432. He is interesting to us 

 more as being the author of the first known speci- 

 men of canon in music, than for any other reason. 

 Canon is a repetition or imitation by one voice 

 or part of a musical phrase previously given out 

 by another. It forms a considerable step forward 

 from the original form of descant, in which one 

 part is of the first importance, and the other 

 merely an accompaniment. In a canon, the parts 

 which contain the ' subject ' and the ' answer ' (as 

 the phrase and its repetition are called) must be 

 treated as of equal importance, and therefore a 

 wider view taken of the whole musical composition 

 than before.* 



A generation later than Dufay came Johannes 

 Ockenheim (about 1425-1513), who was frequently 

 mentioned as the inventor of imitation until 

 Dufay's music was discovered. Ockenheim was 

 the teacher of the foremost musician of his time, 

 a man whose music was as universally performed 

 then as it is neglected now Josquin Depre*s, or 

 des Pro's (about 1450-1515). It was of Josquin 

 that Luther said : 'He masters his notes ; the notes 

 of other musicians master them.' All Europe 

 rang with his praises ; his masses were sung in 

 eveiy chapel ; his style was imitated by every 

 composer anxious to secure public favour. He 

 was a most prolific composer, and in reality a 

 great genius, but greater men came after him, and 

 his music has now dropped totally out of sight, 

 never to be resuscitated. His position has been 

 to a certain extent correctly denned when it was 

 said of him, that he ' closed the list of musical 

 calculators, and opened that of real composers.' 



The influence of the Belgian musicians rapidly 

 made itself felt throughout Europe, and for a 

 hundred and fifty years the Low Countries con- 

 tinued to be the headquarters of musical culture 

 and learning ; while it was not until 1540 that the 

 first music-school was opened in Rome. This 

 school was established by Claude Goudimel, a 

 Frenchman, best known in connection with his 

 music to the psalms of Marot and Beza. Like 

 Ockenheim, his fame rests on his pupils rather 

 than on himself. One of the first of them was 

 the greatest and noblest musician of his time 

 Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, commonly called 

 (after the place in which he was born) Palestrina 

 ' the type and glory of the second period.' 



PALESTRINA. 



During the latter half of the I4th century, 

 after the return of the pope from Avignon, grave 

 abuses had begun to creep into ecclesiastical 

 music ; the simple descant became transformed 

 into elaborate contrapuntal embellishments, under 

 which the plain-song almost disappeared. These 

 embellishments, as time passed on, became more 

 and more outrageous and unsuitable. By the 

 middle of the i6th century it had become quite a 

 common thing for musicians to take popular 

 melodies of the day as the principal themes for 

 their masses and anthems, and to call them by 

 their secular titles, and even, in many cases, to 

 -adopt the whole of the secular words bodily, 



* The canon was afterwards developed into faefugtu, which has 

 been found capable of such varied expression in the hands of Bach 

 and Handel. 



along with the tune, so that while the choir 

 were singing to some solemn Gregorian tone, 

 Who is like unto Thee, O Lord ! ' the singer or 

 singers to whom the descant was given might be 

 singing 'Belle dame, me prie de chanter,' to an 

 air which was sung and whistled outside the 

 church by all the populace. While the musicians 

 had thus devoted time and ingenuity to the intro- 

 duction of unsuitable melodies and profane words 

 into the church service, the proper ecclesiastical 

 music had, as may be supposed, not been devel- 

 oping itself in a very satisfactory way. No atten- 

 tion whatever seems to have been paid to the 

 meaning of the words ; the psalms and hymns 

 had become merely so many syllables to which 

 musical notes might be attached in the way best 

 adapted to shew off the composer's knowledge 

 and the performer's skill. The music of the 

 church had become a purely artificial thing, 

 appealing to the intellect of the few, instead of to 

 the hearts of the many. 



The state to which church music was thus 

 brought by its unworthy professors could at last 

 be tolerated no longer. Bulls and remonstrances 

 seemed to have no effect, nor even the censure 

 of a council (Basel), and at last the celebrated 

 Council of Trent (1562) took the matter up, and 

 resolved to eradicate abuses which no amount of 

 remonstrance had lessened decided virtually that 

 no music should be performed in church except 

 the ancient Gregorian chant A commission of 

 eight cardinals (of whom St Carlo Borromeo was 

 one) was appointed to carry out the decrees of 

 the council. Palestrina's music was already known 

 at Rome, although not beyond it, and the Roman 

 cardinals knew well that they had at least one 

 composer who could adhere to the ancient school 

 in all essential points, and yet not carry its man- 

 nerisms to an extreme ; who could work by the 

 same rules as the rest, and yet produce music so 

 beautiful and (as we should call it) emotional, 

 that it seemed a new thing altogether. These 

 cardinals, and the Emperor Ferdinand I., made 

 repeated protests against this throwing away of 

 the good and the bad together, and reducing of 

 church music to the bare forms of two centuries 

 before. On their representation, it was at last 

 agreed that Palestrina (now in the prime of life) 

 should be commissioned to write masses for the 

 approval of the commission, and that on the result 

 should depend the extent to which the severer 

 wishes of the council should be carried out. 

 Thus the whole future of church music, and 

 with it the very existence of musical art, lay for 

 the time in Palestrina's hands. 



He wrote three six-part masses, of which the 

 first two 'excited an amount of admiration alto- 

 gether without precedent ; the third settled the 

 vexed question, as it would seem, for all time, and 

 at once saved music to the church catholic, and 

 established a type which all the changes, enor- 

 mous as they have been, that the musical art 

 has known since his day, have failed to render less 

 precious and less revered.'* This mass is written 

 for soprano, alto, two tenors, and two basses, and 

 was first performed on the igth June 1565, which 

 thus becomes a memorable date in the history of 

 music. The mass has come down to us under 

 the name of Missa Papa Afarcfllt, given to it 



Hullah, Lecturer. A*, p. 80. 



