History of Music will show on the one hand the astonishing
way in which early polyphonic composers learnt to “dance
in fetters,” and, on the other hand, the expressive power that
they attained by that discipline. Burney quotes from the
venerable 15th-century master Okeghem, or Okenheim, some
canons so designed as to be singable in all modes. They are
by no means extreme cases of the ingenuity which Okenheim
and his pupils often employed; but though they are not very
valuable artistically (and are not even correctly deciphered
by Burney)[1] they prove that mechanical principles may be a
help rather than a hindrance to the attainment of a smooth
and plastic style. Burney most appropriately follows them
with Josquin Des Près’s wonderful Deploration de Jehan Okenheim,
in which the tenor sings the plain chant of the Requiem a degree
below its proper pitch, while the other voices sing a pastoral
dirge in French. The device of transposing the plain chant a
note lower, and making the tenor sing it in that position throughout
the whole piece, is obviously as mechanical as any form of
acrostic: but it is happily calculated to impress our ears, even
though, unlike Josquin’s contemporaries, most of us are not
familiar with the plain chant in its normal position; because
it alters the position of all the semitones and gives the chant
a plaintive minor character which is no less impressive in itself
than as a contrast to the orthodox form. And the harmonic
superstructure is as fine an instance of the expressive possibilities
of the church modes at their apogee from modern tonality as
could be found anywhere. A still nobler example, which we
may perhaps acclaim as the earliest really sublime masterpiece
in music, is Josquin’s Miserere, which is accessible in a modern
edition. In this monumental work one of the tenor parts is
called Vagans, because it sings the burden Miserere mei Deus
at regular intervals, in an almost monotonous wailing figure,
wandering through each successive degree of the scale throughout
the composition. The effect, aided as it is by consummate
rhetorical power in every detail of the surrounding mass of
harmony and counterpoint, is extremely expressive; and the
device lends itself to every shade of feeling in the works of the
greatest of all Netherland masters, Orlando di Lasso. Palestrina
is less fond of it. Like all more obvious formal devices it is
crowded out of his Roman art by the exquisite subtlety of his
sense of proportion, and the exalted spirituality of his style
which, while it allows him to set the letters of the Hebrew alphabet
in the Lamentations of Jeremiah in much the same spirit as
that in which they would be treated in an illuminated Bible,
forbids him to stimulate a sense of form that might distract
the mind from the sense of mystery and awe proper to objects
of devout contemplation. Yet in one of his greatest motets,
Tribularer si nescirem, the burden of Josquin’s Miserere appears
with the same treatment and purpose as in its prototype.
But with the lesser Flemish masters, and sometimes with the greatest, such mechanical principles often became not only inexpressive but absolutely destructive to musical effect. The ingenuity necessary to make the stubborn material of music plastic was not so easily attainable as the ingenuity necessary to turn music into a mathematical game; and when Palestrina was in his prime the inferior composers so outnumbered the masters to whom music was a devout language, and so degraded the art, not only by ousting genuine musical expression but by foisting secular tunes and words into the church services, that one of the minor questions with which the Council of Trent was concerned was whether polyphonic church music should be totally abolished with other abuses, or whether it was capable of reform. Legendary history relates that Palestrina submitted for judgment three masses of which the Missa papae Marcelli proved to be so sublime that it was henceforth accepted as the ideal church music (see Palestrina). This tale is difficult to reconcile with the chronology of Palestrina’s works, but there is no doubt that Palestrina was officially recognized by the Church as a bulwark against bad taste. But we must not allow this to mislead us as to the value of church music before Palestrina. Nor must we follow the example of Baini, who, in his detestation of what he is pleased to call fiammingo squalore, views with uncritical suspicion any work in which Palestrina does not confine himself to strictly Italian methods of expression. A notion still prevails that Josquin represents counterpoint in an anatomical perfection into which Palestrina was the first to breathe life and soul. This gives an altogether inadequate idea of 16th-century music. Palestrina brought the century to a glorious close and is undoubtedly its greatest master, but he is primus inter pares; and in every part of Europe music was represented, even before the middle of the century, by masters who have every claim to immortality that sincerity of aim, completeness of range, and depth and perfection of style can give. It has been rightly called the golden age of music, and our chronological table at the end of this article gives but an inadequate idea of the number of its masters whom no lover of music ought to neglect. It is not exclusively an age of church music. It is also the age of madrigals, both secular and spiritual; and, small as was its range of expression, there has been no period in musical art when the distinctions between secular and ecclesiastical style were more accurately maintained by the great masters, as is abundantly shown by the test cases in which masses of the best period have been based on secular themes. (See Madrigal.)
5. The Monodic Revolution and its Results.—Like all golden ages, that of music vanished at the first appearance of a knowledge beyond its limitations. The first and simplest realization of mature art is widespread and nourishes a veritable army of great men; its masterpieces are innumerable, and its organization is so complete that no narrowness or specialization can be felt in the nature of its limitations. Yet these are exceedingly close, and the most modest attempt to widen them may have disastrous results. Many experiments were tried before Palestrina’s death and throughout the century, notably by the elder and younger Gabrieli. Perhaps Palestrina himself is the only great composer of the time who never violates the principles of his art. Orlando di Lasso, unlike Palestrina, wrote almost as much secular as sacred music, and in his youth indulged in many eccentricities in a chromatic style which he afterwards learnt to detest. But if experiments are to revolutionize art it is necessary that their novelty shall already embody some artistic principle of coherence. No such principle will avail to connect the Phrygian mode with a chord containing A♯; and, however proud the youthful Orlando di Lasso may be at being the first to write A♯, neither his early chromatic experiments nor those of Cipriano di Rore, which he admired so much, left a mark on musical history. They appealed to nothing deeper than a desire for sensational variety of harmony; and, while they carried the successions of chords far beyond the limits of the modes, they brought no new elements into the chords themselves.
By the beginning of the 17th century the true revolutionary principles were vigorously at work, and the powerful genius of Monteverde speedily made it impossible for men of impressionable artistic temper to continue to work in the old style when such vast new regions of thought lay open to them. In the year of Palestrina’s death, 1594, Monteverde published, in his third book of madrigals, works in which without going irrevocably beyond the letter of 16th-century law he showed far more zeal for emotional expression than sense of euphony. In 1599 he published madrigals in which his means of expression involve harmonic principles altogether incompatible with 16th-century ideas. But he soon ceased to place confidence in the madrigal as an adequate art-form for his new ideals of expression, and he found an unlimited field in musical drama. Dramatic music received its first stimulus from a group of Florentine dilettanti, who aspired amongst other things to revive the ideals of Greek tragedy. Under their auspices the first true opera ever performed in public, Jacopo Peri’s Euridice, appeared in 1600. Monteverde found the conditions of dramatic music more favourable to his experiments than those of choral music, in which both voices and ears are at their highest sensibility
- ↑ The correct version will be found in The Oxford History of Music, ii. 215.
