e northern schools, moved steadily toward its
destination, the solo melody, yet the end was not reached till the
madrigal had worked itself to its logical conclusion, to wit,
a demonstration of its own inherent weakness. We must not be blind to
the fact that while the Netherland art at first powerfully affected that
of Italy, the latter in the end reacted on the former, and these two
influences crossed and recrossed in ways that demand the closest
scrutiny of the analytical historian. But at this particular period that
which immediately concerns us is the manner in which Italian musical art
defined itself. The secret of the differentiation already mentioned must
be sought in the powerful feeling of Gothic art for organization. Gothic
architecture is above all things organic and Teutonic music has the same
character. Its most Gothic form, the North German fugue, which is the
instrumental descendant of the Netherlands church music, is the most
closely organized of musical types. The Italian architecture, on the
other hand, displayed an aversion for the infinite detail of Gothic
methods and found its individual expression in the grand and patent
relations of noble mass effects. This same feeling speedily found its
way into Italian music, even that composed by the Netherland masters who
had settled in Italy.

Adrian Willaert, who is often called the father of the madrigal (despite
the fact that madrigals were written before he was born), became chapel
master of St. Mark's, Venice, in 1527. He seized with avidity the
suggestion offered by the existence of two organs in the cathedral and
wrote great works "for two choruses of four voices each, so that the
choruses could answer each other across the church. He paid much less
attention to rigid canonic style than his predecessors had done because
it was not suited to the kind of music which he felt was fitting for his
church. He sought for grand, broad mass effects, which he learned could
be obtained only by the employment of frequent passages in chords. So he
began trying to write his counterpoint in such a way that the voice
parts should often come together in successions of chords. In order to
do this he was compelled to adopt the kind of formations still in use
and the fundamental chord relations of modern music--the tonic, dominant
and subdominant."[30]

[Footnote 30: From the present author's "How Music Developed." New
York, 1898.]

In music of this kind there