CHAPTER II
PALESTRINA AND THE MUSIC
OF MYSTICISM
CHAPTER II
PALESTRINA AND THE MUSIC OF MYSTICISM
It has been often pointed out by historians and critics that in their early stages the arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting were the servants of religion. Nursed through their infancy by the cherishing hand of the church, they emerged into the secular world only with their comparative maturity. Architecture, which in our day and country embodies itself chiefly in great civic and mercantile buildings, began with the temples of the pagan Greeks and the cathedrals of the mediæval Christians. Sculpture for the most part delineated, in antiquity, Egyptian or Greek gods and goddesses; and in the middle ages, Christian saints. Even painting, which at the Renaissance became for all time a secular art, inspired by its own ideals and controlled only by intrinsic conditions, commenced by picturing on mediæval altar-pieces and frescoes the heroes of sacred story, with their upturned eyes and their clasped hands, and by symbolizing the dogmas or illustrating the narratives of its task-master, religion. J. A. Symonds, in the third part of his “Renaissance in Italy,” in which he describes at length this universal dependence of art, in its early stages, on the church, offers the following plausible explanation of it: “Art aims at expressing an ideal; and this ideal is the transfiguration of human elements into something nobler, felt and apprehended by the imagination. Such an ideal, such an all-embracing glorification of humanity, exists for simple and unsophisticated societies only in the forms of religion.”[7] It is not, indeed, until art, nurtured in cloisters, acquires definite aims, technical methods, and self-confidence, that it can put off its dependence on ecclesiastical aid, at first favorable but eventually restrictive, and essay a free life.
To this general rule music is no exception—mediæval music was the child, nursling, and hand-maid of the Church. It is true that there did grow up, in the lyrical songs of troubadours and minstrels, a kind of popular music that had in many respects more vitality, individuality, and beauty than the more conventional ecclesiastical art; and that the latter, at many stages in its development, had to draw fresh inspiration from the humble popular minstrels. But in the middle ages, when the common people were entirely illiterate, and all intellectual concerns were in the hands of priests, who alone could read, write, and preserve manuscripts and artistic traditions, it was inevitable that the only recognized music, stamped with the seal of age and authority, should be that of the ecclesiastical choristers. The student of the infancy of music has to direct his attention, not to the mediæval world at large, but to the cathedrals and the monasteries of that intensely clerical age.
For the modern mind, permeated as it is with the instincts of liberty and individualism, and perhaps especially for the American mind, naturally radical and irreverent, it is difficult to conceive the degree in which all the rites, customs, and beliefs of the mediæval Catholic Church were matters of traditional authority. There was not a word of the liturgy, not a tone of the plain chant to which it was sung, not a gesture of the priest nor a genuflexion of the worshippers, that was not prescribed by what was considered supreme dictation and hallowed by immemorial practice.[8] The liturgy, or text of the Mass, the skeleton and fixed basis, so to speak, of the ritual as a whole, began to take shape in the hands of the apostles themselves; was developed by a gradual accretion of prayers, hymns, responses, and readings from Scripture; was translated into Latin and adopted by the Roman Church; and became fixed in practically its present form so early as the end of the sixth century. When we consider the almost superstitious regard in which its great antiquity caused it to be held, and when we reflect that the musical setting used with it was considered a mere appanage to the sacred words, we can understand the slow development of music in the first eleven centuries of the Christian era. In taking its first steps music was not merely hampered by its own uncertainty and infantile feebleness; it was paralyzed by servile dependence on a text swathed within the bandages of priestly convention.
The only form of music used in the Church, up to the beginning of the twelfth century, the only form of music ever given its official sanction, was the Gregorian chant or plain song, which consists in a single unaccompanied series of tones set to the liturgic text, intoned by priest or choristers, and for many centuries used exclusively throughout the entire service. It has not only no harmony, but, properly speaking, no meter or rhythm, being dependent for time-measurement on the prose text it accompanies. “It follows” says Mr. Dickinson,[9] “the phrasing, the emphasis, and the natural inflections of the voice in reciting the text, at the same time that it idealizes them. It is a sort of heightened form of speech, a musical declamation, having for its object the intensifying of the emotional powers of ordinary spoken language. It stands to true song or tune in much the same relation as prose to verse, less impassioned, more reflective, yet capable of moving the heart like eloquence.” Having neither harmonic nor metrical relationship, it had, of course, no proper structure of its own; and so long as it was used in this primary way, sung in unison or even in two parts at the interval of an octave, there was little about it that could properly be called musical at all.