was no longer a field for the intricate
working of canonically constructed voice parts. It must seek its chief
results in the opposition of one choir against the other, not in
multiplicity of voice parts, but in imposing contrasts as of "deep
answering unto deep." The development of fundamental chord harmonies was
inevitable and from them in the fullness of time was bound to spring the
pure harmonic style. Chord successions without any melodic union cannot
be long sustained, and the Italians, with the tentative achievements of
the frottolists before them, were not long blind to this fact. Leone
Battista Alberti, father of Renaissance architecture, in writing of his
church of St. Francis at Rimini uses the expression "tutta questa
musica." One understands him to mean the harmonious disposition of the
parts of his design so that all "sound" together, as it were, for the
artistic perception.

It was feeling of this same kind that led the apostles of the
Netherlands school and their Italian pupils to follow the physical trend
of all Italian art rather than struggle to impose upon it the shackles
of an uncongenial intellectuality forged in the canonic shops of
Ockeghem and his disciples. The seed of beauty had been sown by the
mighty Josquin des Pres what time he was a Roman singer and a Mantuan
composer. The fruit blossomed in the Renaissance music of Willaert,
Cyprian de Rore and others and came to its perfection in the later works
of Palestrina and Lasso. The resistless operation of the tendencies of
the school was such that at the close of the sixteenth century we are
suddenly confronted with the knowledge that all the details of polyphony
so studiously cultivated by the northern schools have in Italy suddenly
been packed away in a thorough bass supporting one voice which is
permitted to proclaim itself in a proud individuality.

Yet if we permit ourselves to believe that the lyric solo made but a
single spasmodic appearance in the "Orfeo" and had to be born again in
the artistic conversion brought about by the labors of Galilei and
Caccini, we shall be deceived. The fashion set by Poliziano's production
was not wholly abandoned and throughout the remainder of the fifteenth
and the whole of the sixteenth centuries there were productions closely
related to it in style and construction. Not only is the slow
assimilation of the mass of heterogeneous elements thrown together in
these dramas not astonishing, but to the thoug