Music and Its Masters

by O. B. Boise

This earnestness of character and high culture were congenial elements to the growth of music, and there is abundant evidence that their complement, a distinct sense for sound expression, was not wanting, for Taine, in his "Art in the Netherlands," says, "Other people cultivate music; to them it seems an instinct." It is not strange that this instinct, coupled with the perpetuated spirit of Huchbold, should have produced a formulated art at that propitious stage in music's evolution. Music itself had become a ripe impulse, ready and waiting for just such conditions. The Flanders school adjusted tone relationships and invented counterpoint and canon. John Osteghem and his pupil Despres were the greatest masters of that initial school, which for nearly two centuries, beginning with the middle of the fourteenth, furnished all the European courts with singers, instrumentalists, and composers.

Their more elaborate music was written for the Church, and a damper was consequently put upon production by the Reformation, which greatly simplified religious observances and closed choir doors to the composers of ambitious works.

Before the development of opera and the institution of the concert orchestra and chorus, the Church was the sole patron of high musical endeavor. Fortunately, the Netherlands musicians had forestalled the calamitous results of this religious revolution through the establishment of conservatories of music in Venice and Naples. They transplanted their knowledge and high aspirations into sunny and Catholic Italy, where they flourished and bore fruit after their native land had ceased to be musically supreme.

A new art is unavoidably over-conservative. The natural laws, upon which it is founded, hold its devotees to literal conformity until experience has evolved a sense of their broader meaning.

They are in reality but rigid outlines, drawn in accordance with fundamental art adjustments, the recognition of which saves the curved lines of our fancy's pictures from abnormity and chaos. They are quite analogous to the anatomical knowledge which is essential to the artist, who conforms to its general requirements and still endows his figures with individual character.

The Netherland music of that period was more intellectual than emotional; therefore, taking the comparative characteristics of the two peoples into account, we can but regard the migration of the focus of musical activity to Italy as an extremely fortunate event; beside the fact that this change of base avoided delay in evolution, or possible decadence.

The emotional Italians would not have made music's foundation as deep or as broad, but they were well fitted to contribute grace and beauty to its superstructure. The sensuous element in music is almost wholly a reflex of Italian temperament. We northern peoples, recognizing the power inherent in this quality, cultivate it with more or less success, but it is an exotic in our colder natures.

Under the influence of Italian character music soon began to assume more graceful lines, purer euphony, and richer significance. Science was further developed, but it was treated as a means, subject to individual conceptions. The success of this school transplanted from the Netherlands to Italy culminated in the production of Palestrina (1524-1594), the first high-priest of our finally clarified art.

The inherent qualities of music, which were considered at some length in Chapters I. and II., make our art exclusive. They wall it about, forming an outer temple, an inner temple, and a holiest of holies. The first is accessible to all sincere and responsive adherents of the musical faith. The second is for those who minister, priests dedicated to the service. To the innermost sanctuary, which holds the presence of our musical goddess, Aaron-like high-priests alone are admitted, but the song incense which they bring forth diffuses itself, filling the inner and the outer temples to their farthermost recesses. It is primarily to the ministrations of these high-priests that we owe the widely diffused musical culture of to-day. It shall therefore be one of my tasks to trace the characteristic influence of each one of this line, whose creations will endure throughout time. In the course of music's refining she had necessarily become more and more exclusive, less accessible in her ever higher estate to coarse and uncultivated mankind. This exclusiveness had from the first step in evolution been raising the walls of our now finished temple.