sult of a
slow and steady development in the art of composition. The introduction
of thorough bass shows us that the reformers had found it essential to
the success of their experiments that, in their effort to pack away in
solid chords the tangle of parts which had so offended them in the old
counterpoint, they should codify to some extent the relations of
fundamental chords and contrive a simple method of indicating their
sequence in the new and elementary kind of accompaniments. They at any
rate perceived that the vital fact concerning the new monophonic style
was that the melody alone demanded individual independence, while the
other parts could not, as in polyphony, ask for equal suffrage, but must
sink themselves in the solid and concrete structure of the supporting
chord. Thorough bass was in later periods utilized in such music as
Bach's and Handel's, but its original nature always stood forth most
clearly when it was employed in the support of vocal music approaching
the recitative type.

Here, then, we may permit the entire matter to rest. It ought now to be
manifest that in their experiments at the resuscitation of the Greek
manner of declamation the ardent young Florentines were impelled first
of all by the feeling that the obliteration of the text by musical
device was a crying evil and that by it dramatic expression was rendered
impossible. Doubtless they felt that their art lacked a medium for the
publication of the individual, but it is by no means likely that they
realized the full significance of this deficiency or of their own
efforts to supply it. Nevertheless, what they did under the incentive
of a genuine artistic impulse was in direct line with the whole
intellectual progress of the Renaissance. The thing that was patent to
them was the importance of studying the models of antiquity to find out
how dramatic delineation was to be accomplished; but in doing so they
discovered the one element which had been wanting in the Italian lyric
drama since its birth in the Mantuan court, namely, the way to set
speeches for one actor to music having communicative potency and capable
of preserving the intelligibility of the text.

So they completed a cycle of the art of dramatic music, and, having
found the link that was missing in the musical chain of Poliziano's
"Orfeo," reincarnated Italy's Arcadian prophet, and built the gates
through which Monteverde ushered lyric composition to the broad highway
of mode