Famous composers and their works, Vol. 1

by Unknown

It can hardly be doubted that two intellectual and spiritual movements influenced the development of religious music in the period of Willaert and his contemporaries. The first of these was the reawakening of interest in classical antiquity brought about by the influx of scholars from Constantinople after the fall of Rome's eastern empire in 1453. This reawakening is commonly known as the Renaissance, and its effects were felt in music much later than in other branches of art. "The reason of this," as Dr. Langhans with fine discernment points out, "is to be found proximately in the lack of a musical antique. While the poet, as also the painter, the sculptor and the architect, met at every step the masterpieces of their predecessors in antiquity, and found in them the stimulus and the pattern for their own creations, to the musician the direct connection with the past was denied." Nevertheless the proclamation by the eastern scholars of the chaste and simple beauty of antique art was bound to have an influence upon music, especially when the search for a new and purer style was urged by motives of ecclesiastical expediency. This impetus came from the second movement, the spiritual, namely, the Lutheran reformation.

Through the influence of Luther the rule of the church that the singing should be exclusively in the hands of a choir was abolished, and the practice of congregational singing arose. The elaborate contrapuntal music of the day was obviously impracticable for this kind of singing. Luther, therefore, "selected from the ancient Latin church songs such melodies as were rhythmically like the folk-song and hence especially likely to be caught up by the popular ear." Here we find the origin of the glorious German chorale, of our contemporaneous hymn. The first Lutheran hymn-book was published in 1524, and it is impossible to escape the conviction that the advent of this new and influential form of church music powerfully affected the style of all subsequent composers.

The development of secular music at this time is even more interesting and instructive than that of religious music, but it would require a chapter for its proper treatment; and as it was not long in abandoning the basis of counterpoint and entering: upon the free arioso style of the opera (in 1600), it may be dismissed briefly. The reader must understand that popular music in the form of folk-songs has existed from time immemorial. The Netherlands masters frequently employed the melodies of these songs (and the words, too) in their masses, which gave rise to abuses removed by the Council of Trent in 1565. In the third period of the Netherlands school, however, the masters of scientific music began to compose music for the general public, and the result was the madrigal form, which has survived till to-day. This was a natural result of Josquin's aiming at beauty in music. The next step after euphony was naturally toward expression, and the first attempts at expression were, of course, imitative. In other words the secular composers turned to nature and tried to imitate her sounds in music. These men were the first who practised what we may call tone-photography in contradistinction to tone-coloring, which goes deeper. When Beethoven introduced the cuckoo in the pastoral symphony he practised tone-photography. The works of Gombert and Jannequin abound in skilful writing of this kind. Gombert's "Bird Cantata" is a clever and humorous composition. Jannequin's "Cris de Paris" is a musical imitation of the street cries of a great city, and his "Le Battaille" is a picture of a battle. When we remember that these works were written for voices in four parts, we are astounded at the technical accomplishments of these old masters. This ambition to tell some kind of a story in music affected even the religious compositions of the day, and one of Willaert's motets tells the history of Susannah. This work was plainly the precursor of the oratorio form, which first took recognizable shape in Cavaliere's "L'Anima è Corpo," produced in 1600.

JAN PIETERS SWELINCK.

The fourth and last period of the Netherlands school was distinguished by two features: the production of a master whose genius eclipsed the brilliancy of all his predecessors and whose music was a logical outcome of their labors, and secondly, the completion of the mediæval development of counterpoint. The mission of the Netherland masters was ended, and new art-forms came to supersede the ecclesiastical canon. This now descended from its leadership of the musical army and took that place in the ranks which it maintained till the supremacy of Haydn and the sonata form.

As Orlando di Lasso, the mightiest of all the Netherland masters, is to be treated separately in this work, no outline of his life need be given here and his music will be discussed only in its general relation to the progress of his time. Jan Pieters Swelinck (born at Deventer in 1540, died at Amsterdam, 1621) was a pupil of Cyprian de Rore. Swelinck had already displayed ability as an organist when he set out for Venice to engage in advanced studies. He became one of the most famous organists of his day, but his vocal compositions show that he stood directly in the line of development of the school to which he belonged by birth. His settings of the psalms in four, five, six, seven and eight parts are written in strict a capella style. Swelinck is particularly interesting as being one of the founders of the polyphonic instrumental style, which succeeded the choral counterpoint, and a forerunner of Bach.

Philip de Monte was born either at Mons or at Mechlin about 1521. He was treasurer and canon of the cathedral at Cambrai, and in 1594 he was prefect of the choir in the Court Chapel at Prague. He passed the remainder of his life there, and was held in high esteem. He was a prolific writer and besides masses and motets, nineteen books of his madrigals for five voices and eight books of French songs for six voices are extant. His works show the usual Netherlandic skill in counterpoint, some of them being extremely intricate.

We have seen how influences had begun work which was to destroy the empire of a capella counterpoint, but its reign was to go out in a blaze of glory lit by the torches of genius in the hands of Lasso and Palestrina. The despotism of ecclesiastical counterpoint over all art-music was indeed at the close of its career, yet the writer must not be understood as asserting that the development of counterpoint ended, for in the German fugue it found its highest and most perfect form. But it ceased to be the controlling power in music, giving way to modern melody built on scale and arpeggio passages and to the song-and dance-forms of the people. It may as well be said here that the technical possibilities of counterpoint were exhausted by the Netherland masters, and not even Johann Sebastian Bach, the most profound and original musical thinker the world has ever known, could invent a form of canonic writing which they had not practised. What he was chiefly instrumental in accomplishing (in a technical way) was the extension of canon into the perfect fugue, and the application of the polyphony of the Netherland masters to the organ, the clavichord and the orchestra, thus laying the foundations upon which rest the whole structure of the modern symphony and string quartet.