that he sacrificed
the melody rather than the meaning of the poem. This is significant.
The Puritans are held to have damaged church music less by burning the
choir-books and pawning the organ-pipes than by insisting (as we may
say) on One word one note. As a matter of fact, this was not
exclusively a plank in the political platform of the Puritans. The
Loyalist Campion, the Loyalist Lawes, and many another Loyalist
insisted on it. Even when they did not write a note to each word, they
took care not to have long roulades (divisions) on unimportant words,
but to derive the accent of the music from that of the poem. This
showed mainly two tendencies: first, one towards expression of poetic
feeling and towards definiteness of that expression, the other towards
the entirely new technique which was to supersede the contrapuntal
technique of Byrde and Palestrina. In making a mass or an anthem or
secular composition, the practice of these old masters was to start
with a fragment of church or secular melody which we will call A;
after (say) the trebles had sung it or a portion of it, the altos took
it up and the trebles went on to a new phrase B, which dovetailed with
A. Then the tenors took up A, the altos went on to B, the trebles went
on to a new phrase C, until ultimately, if we lettered each
successive phrase that appeared, we should get clear away from the
beginning of the alphabet to X, Y, and Z. This, of course, is a crude
and stiff way of describing the process of weaving and interweaving by
which the old music was spun, for often the phrase A would come up
again and again in one section of a composition and sometimes
throughout the whole, and strict canon was comparatively rare in music
which was not called by that name; but the description will serve.
This technique proved admirable for vocal polyphony--how admirable we
have all the Flemish and Italian and English contrapuntal music to
show. But it was no longer available when music was wanted for the
single voice, unless that voice was treated as one of several real
parts, the others being placed in the accompaniment. A new technique
was therefore wanted. For that new technique the new composers went
back to the oldest technique of all. The old minstrels used music as a
means of giving accent and force to their poems; and now, as a means
of spinning a web of tone which should not only be beautiful, but also
give utterance to the feeling of the poem, composers went ba