The story of what followed the recognition of these influences by the fathers of the Church has been very prettily told, but unfortunately it has been of late discredited. The story is that two parties arose in the Church, one of them demanding the abolition of all the extant church music and a return to the plain chant of Gregory, and the other that the music of the time be preserved, but its style simplified. The Council of Trent (1562) discussed the matter, and in 1563 Pope Pius IX. appointed a commission of eight cardinals to take measures of reform. Cardinals Borromeo and Vitellozzi, appointed as a sub-committee, went to Palestrina, whose music had already attracted attention, and asked him to write a mass demonstrating that the church music of the time could be preserved. He entered upon his task with such enthusiasm that he wrote three masses, of which that called the Marcellus mass was performed with enormous success.
This story has been proved to be a myth. The Council of Trent did pass a resolution that a complete reform of church music was necessary, but the demand was based, not on the character of the music, but on the fact that it made the text of the liturgy unintelligible. The Council furthermore issued a mandate to bishops to banish improper music from their churches. This was, of course, aimed at the secular airs, or those which resembled them. The mass of Marcellus was not written to order, and there was nothing new in its style. The mass is simply a model of all that was best in Palestrina's day. It embodied all that was noblest in the polyphonic style developed by the Netherlands school. Its melody is pure, sweet, and fluent, and its expressive capacity perfectly adapted to the devotional spirit of the text. Palestrina's contemporaries, such as Lasso, and some of his predecessors, wrote in the same style. Lasso's "Penitential Psalms" are much simpler in style than this mass. Its apparent simplicity lies in the fact that its profound mastery of technical resources conceals its superb art. The polyphonic writing is matchless in its evenness; every part is as good as every other part. The harmonies are beautiful, yet there is apparently no direct attempt to produce them. They seem just to happen. But above all other qualities stands the innate power of expression in this music. It is, as Ambros has hinted, as if the composer had brought the angelic host to earth.
With Palestrina church polyphony reached its highest and its final development. The search after simplicity led composers in a path diverging widely from the old contrapuntal highway. New developments in secular music were soon to come about, and still more powerfully to influence church composition. The harvest and the glory of vocal counterpoint had come, and thenceforth musical art was to develop along new and hitherto unexpected lines. A few words should be written here concerning the career of so great a man as Palestrina, who has been universally accorded a seat among the Titans of music. His full name was Giovanni Pierluigi Sante, and he was called Palestrina from the place of his nativity. The date of his birth is uncertain, but it was probably 1514. The portrait of him in the pontifical chapel at Rome has an inscription to the effect that he died in 1594, aged eighty. He was the son of poor peasants and got his first musical instruction as a choir singer. In 1540 he went to Rome and became a student in Claude Goudimel's conservatory. At the age of thirty he published his first compositions, and some of them are still heard in the Sistine Chapel occasionally. [6.1] He had previously served a short period as organist and choir master in his native town, and in 1548 he married. In 1551 he succeeded Arcadelt as choir master of St. Peter's, Rome, and the Pope made him one of the singers of the Papal Chapel. In 1571 he was made chapel master of St. Peter's, and later, in conjunction with his younger contemporary Nanini, he founded a music school in Rome. The influence of this school was very great, and it kept the "Palestrina style" alive in Europe for nearly a century. Palestrina died on Feb. 2, 1594, and the Supreme Council of the Church had his body laid in the basilica of the Vatican with the honors usually shown to a cardinal.
[6.1] At the time of writing (October, 1897) Palestrina's works are not performed as often as they used to be in the Papal Chapel, and there is a determined movement on the part of some of the clergy for their restoration and a more frequent use of the Gregorian chant. The movement is a healthful one, and I wish it success.
Before leaving the subject of Palestrina, let me endeavor to make clear to the reader wherein his style is so fine. Composers before him had begun to aim at the simplification of church music. They sought to accomplish their purpose by breaking the shackles of canonic law. The canon had demanded the most exact imitation in the different voice parts. The new style allowed the greatest freedom. The result was that free polyphony took the place of rigid canon. Consequently, composers were able to devote more attention to the development of fluent, beautiful, and expressive melody. The merit of Palestrina's work was that it carried this style to perfection. His compositions became the models for succeeding composers, and indeed they remain to this day unequalled as examples of pure church music. In Palestrina's music one must note the absence of rhythmic effects, of modern tonality, and of the note of passion. Palestrina paid little attention to folk-music, but sought to attain simplicity of style by preserving the old church scales, avoiding chromatic harmonies, and by generally preserving purity and contemplative feeling. His writing is marvellous in its contrapuntal skill, which makes the apparently independent melodies of the different voice parts constantly combine in simple and lovely chords. The lack of contrast in his music has often been quoted as a fault; but it was in accordance with Palestrina's own theory that church music should always be dignified, and should never contain anything exciting.
As we have now reached the period at which artistic music began to develop in all its branches, it will be most convenient to narrate the progress of Roman Catholic church music subsequent to Palestrina's time before passing to other topics. The reader must bear in mind that this music was still designed to be sung without accompaniment, in order that the tone-quality of pure vocal sound might be untainted. When the organ was first used it simply doubled the voice parts, and when independent accompaniments began to be written they considerably altered the character of church music. There were now two distinct schools of Catholic composition,—that of Rome, and that of Venice. The former followed the pure diatonic style of Palestrina; the latter was influenced by the style of Willaert and the chromatic music of Di Rore. The chief masters of the Roman school were Nanini, Vittoria, Anerio, and Allegri. Giovanni Maria Nanini was born in 1540 and died in 1607. He was a coworker with Palestrina, and was the teacher of many of the succeeding composers. His "Hodie nobis cœlorum Rex" is still sung at Christmas in the Papal Chapel. Tommaso Ludovico da Vittoria was born about 1540, and died about 1604. He is regarded as one of the greatest of Palestrina's successors. A goodly number of his works has been preserved. His Requiem, written for the funeral of the Empress Maria (1603), is conceded to be his greatest production, and is one of the most notable compositions of that period. "Technically considered, it is a marvellous blending of old independent movement of parts with modern dissonances and progressions. Spiritually considered, it is a wonderful expression of poignant personal sorrow, chastened by religious contemplation and devotion." The marks of change here are the use of the dissonance and the expression of personal feeling. The dissonance in music embraces all those harmonies which sound harsh to persons accustomed only to elementary chords like the tonic, dominant, and subdominant. They are used most freely in modern operatic music, especially that of Wagner, and have always been employed to express passion of some kind. Palestrina avoided them. Felice Anerio (1560-1630) wrote many admirable masses. Gregorio Allegri (1586-1652) is best known as the composer of very fine "Misere" now sung in Holy Week in the Sistine Chapel. This work is regarded as equal to some of Palestrina's.
The Venetian school, after its earliest period produced two great composers from one family. These were Andrea Gabrieli (1510-1586) and his nephew Giovanni Gabrieli (1557-1613). The former followed Willaert's plan of writing for antiphonal choruses, but he employed most frequently three instead of two. The latter was more of an instrumental composer than his uncle, and hence conceived the idea of writing instrumental accompaniments. In his "Surrexit Christus" he used an orchestral accompaniment of first and second violins, two cornets, and four trombones. This work of Giovanni Gabrieli's fairly marks the termination of the era of a capella (unaccompanied) polyphonic church music. The opera had been born, and so had the oratorio, and church music began to borrow ideas from them. Giovanni Legrenzi (1625-1690) increased Gabrieli's orchestra to nineteen violins, two violas, three viole da gamba, four theorboes (lutes of large size), two cornets, one bassoon, and three trombones. Antonio Lotti (1667-1740) was an opera writer as well as a church composer, and he wrote masses full of passionate feeling. His later works are full of passages in which the voices alternate with the instruments and there are accompanied solos and choruses. With Lotti, who used unaccompanied choruses occasionally, we bid a final farewell to the great period of a capella church music, and enter upon the era in which music for the church was made in the same way as other kinds. The masses of Mozart, Beethoven, Cherubini, and other modern writers are all richly instrumented.
England had fairly kept pace with the Continent in her mastery of polyphony, which so early produced the remarkable canon "Sumer is icumen in." Thomas Tallys (born about 1520, died Nov. 23, 1585) was one of the greatest of the English masters, and is regarded as the father of English cathedral music. His works do not equal those of his contemporaries in inspiration,—he was neither a Lasso nor a Palestrina,—but he had a large command of polyphonic technic. One of his notable works was a motet, entitled "Spem in alium non habui," written for eight choirs of five voices each, in antiphonal style. His best known work, however, is a Litany and Responses. His pupil, William Byrd (born about 1538, died July 4, 1623), wrote many admirable church works notable for the majesty of their style. Orlando Gibbons (died 1625, at the end of the Netherlands period) was the last great light of the English school.
During the whole period of church counterpoint, which never lost the radical elements of its character until after Legrenzi's day, music felt the influence of the old chant and the early study of the canonic style. In concluding the account of this period, I cannot do better than to quote a few luminous sentences from the admirable "Evolution of the Art of Music" by Dr. C. H. H. Parry: "Of definite principles of design beyond this elementary device [the canon] these composers had but few. Their treatment of musical figures and melodic material is singularly vague. The familiar modern practice of using a definite subject [part of a distinct tune] throughout a considerable portion of a movement, or at certain definite points which have a structural importance, was hardly employed at all. The voices, which entered one after another, naturally commenced singing the same words to phrases of melody which resembled each other. But composers' ideas of identity of subject matter were singularly elastic, and even if the first half-dozen notes presented similar contours in each voice part successively, the melodic forms soon melted into something else, and from that point the movement wandered on its devious way without further reference to its initial phrases." This points to one of the fundamental differences between the music of the polyphonic era and that of the monophonic, in which one voice or instrumental part (as the treble of a piano) uttered a melody full of periodical repetitions of the germinal tune-thought, and the other parts supplied an accompaniment of chords. This style of composition was developed first in the opera and afterward by instruments. It will be more convenient to take up the progress of instrumental music first, and at the outset let us review the evolution of the piano.