the bass (tenor?) gave utterance to an Agnus Dei or a Benedictus, and the soprano (alto?) was engaged upon the verses of a Latin hymn. Baini, who examined hundreds of the masses and motetts in MS., says that the words imported into them from vulgar sources 'make one's flesh creep, and one's hair stand on end.' He does not venture to do more than indicate a few of the more decent of these interloping verses. As an augmentation of this indecency, numbers from a mass which started with the grave rhythm of a Gregorian tone were brought to their conclusion on the dance measure of a popular ballata, so that Incarnatus est or Kyrie eleison went jigging off into suggestions of Masetto and Zerlina at a village ball."[1]
The musicians who composed these masses simply accepted what was customary, and all they did was to endeavour to reduce the hideous discords to harmony. But it was this superposing of folk-songs on Gregorian tones that gave the start to polyphonic singing. The state of confusion into which ecclesiastical music had fallen by this means rendered it necessary that a reformation should be undertaken, and the Council of Trent (Sept. 17, 1562) enjoined on the Ordinaries to "exclude from churches all such music as, whether through the organ or the singing, introduces anything impure or
lascivious, in order that the house of God may truly be seen to answer to its name, A House of Prayer." Indeed, all concerted and part music was like to have been wholly banished from the service of the church, had not Palestrina saved it by the composition of the "Mass of Pope Marcellus."
A visitor to Provence will look almost in vain for churches in the Gothic style. A good many were built after Lombard models. There remained too many
- ↑ Renaissance in Italy: "The Catholic Revival," ii. c. 12.
