The Evolution of Music. 393 



cil assigned the duty of preparing a new, more simple, and 

 reverential service. This he accomplished to the satisfaction 

 of church dignitaries and of art as well perhaps the only 

 instance on record where music was successfully composed 

 to order. His Missa Papse Marcelli, or Mass of the Pope 

 Marcellus, his patron, was hailed with delight, and con- 

 formity to its style was made imperative upon all church 

 composers. Palestrina excels in uniting great effectiveness, 

 breadth, and grace of harmony to noble yet simple melodic 

 thought. Character and individuality, which had been lost 

 in the multiplicity of contrapuntal figures, were restored. 

 Much of his music rises to a grandeur not surpassed by that 

 of any subsequent composer, and the " mode Palestrina " has 

 become established as a distinct form of musical art. 



For reasons not wholly discoverable, but dependent upon 

 fluctuations in the art - temperament of different periods 

 among different nations, polyphonic writing ceased almost 

 wholly in Italy, and Germany succeeded to, and has never 

 since lost, that pre-eminence in harmonic invention and 

 profound musical thought and culture which makes her 

 to-day first in the massive forms of symphony and ora- 

 torio. "We should rather say that it returned to the North, 

 since it had been the Netherland school which had so long 

 held sway in Italy. In entering upon this new phase of 

 German art, we enter upon a period which was perfected on 

 its polyphonic side in Bach and Handel and their illustrious 

 successors. 



Not only during this second period was music enlarged 

 by progress in harmonic and melodic invention, through the 

 working out of counterpoint and fugue and the allied forms 

 of the glee and madrigal, but much more by the new meth- 

 ods of representation which were found for it in the Trou- 

 badour music, in oratorio, and in opera. The era of the 

 Troubadour, and his brother of northern France, the Trou- 

 vere, forms a distinct period in musical art. The influence 

 of their compositions differs from that of the volk-song. 

 The latter was a spontaneous emanation from the popular 

 instinct; the former, though free in its development, yet 

 held closely to the requisites of form, even though wholly 

 dedicated to the highly emotional sentiments of love, honor, 

 and arms, and to the winning of the applause of the fairest 

 in courtly contests, in which the universe of nature and the 

 imagination was ransacked and exhausted for metaphors 



