and learn to admire as we ought to admire the declamatory strength and truthfulness so common in Handel's choruses.
Mediæval music.
Madrigals.
There is very little cultivation of choral music of the early ecclesiastical type, and that little is limited to the Church and a few choirs specially organized for its performance, like those that I have mentioned. This music is so foreign to the conceptions of the ordinary amateur, and exacts so much skill in the singing of the intervals, lacking the prop of modern tonality as it does, that it is seldom that an amateur body can be found equal to its performance. Moreover, it is nearly all of a solemn type. Its composers were churchmen, and when it was written nearly all that there was of artistic music was in the service of the Church. The secular music of the time consisted chiefly in Madrigals, which differed from ecclesiastical music only in their texts, they being generally erotic in sentiment. The choristers of to-day, no less than the public, find it difficult to appreciate them, because they are not melodic in the sense that most music is nowadays. In them the melody is not the privileged possession of the soprano voice. All the voices stand on an equal footing, and the composition consists of a weaving together, according to scientific rules, of a number of voices—counterpoint as it is called.
Homophonic hymns.
Calvin's restrictive influence.
Our hymn-tunes are homophonic, based upon a melody sung by one voice, for which the other voices provide the harmony. This style of music came into the Church through the German Reformation. Though Calvin was a lover of music he restricted its practice among his followers to unisonal psalmody, that is, to certain tunes adapted to the versified psalms sung without accompaniment of harmony voices. On the adoption of the Genevan psalter he gave the strictest injunction that neither its text nor its melodies were to be altered.
"Those songs and melodies," said he, "which are composed for the mere pleasure of the ear, and all they call ornamental music, and songs for four parts, do not behoove the majesty of the Church, and cannot fail greatly to displease God."
Luther and the German Church.
Under the influence of the German reformers music was in a very different case. Luther was not only an amateur musician, he was also an ardent lover of scientific music. Josquin des Pres, a contemporary of Columbus, was his greatest admiration; nevertheless, he was anxious from the beginning of his work of Church establishment to have the music of the German Church German in spirit and style. In 1525 he wrote: