appeared; and, although no
name went with them, all of his townsfolk knew that it was their own
Troubadour of the Nativity who made them so excellent a gift just as the
nougat bells began to ring. The organ of St. Pierre, touched by his
master hand, taught the gay airs to which the new noels were cast. And
all Avignon presently would be singing them, and soon the chorus would
swell throughout the Comtat and Provence. The inimitable Troubadour of
Bethlehem died just as he had tied together the eighth of his little
sheaves.... His noels have been reprinted many times; and, thanks be to
God, they will be printed again and again forever!"[3]

In addition to being a genius, Saboly had the good fortune to live in
one of the periods of fusing and recasting which give to genius its
opportunity. He was born at the very time when Claude Monteverde was
taking those audacious liberties with harmony which cleared the way for
the transition from the old tonality to the new; and he died before the
great modern masters had set up those standards which composers of our
time must either accept or defy. He certainly was influenced by the then
new Italian school; indeed, from the fourteenth century, when music
began to be cultivated in Avignon, the relations between that city and
Italy were so close that the first echoes of Italian musical innovators
naturally would be heard there. Everywhere his work shows, as theirs
does, a searching for new methods in the domain of modulation, and a
defiance of the laws of transformation reverenced by the formal
composers of his time. Yet he did his searching always on his own lines
and in his own way.

Nor was his original genius lessened by his willingness at times to lay
hands on the desirable property of other people--since his unlawful
acquisitions received always a subtle touch which really made them his
own. He knew well how to take the popular airs of the moment--the
gavotte or minuet or vaudeville which every one was singing: the good
old airs, as we call them now, which then were the newest of the
new--and how to infuse into them his own personality and so to fit them
like a glove to his own noels. Thus, his Twelfth noel is set to an air
composed by Lulli for the drinking song, "Qu'ils sont doux, bouteille
jolie," in Moliere's "Medecin malgre lui"; and those who are familiar
with the music of his time will be both scandalized and set a-laughing
by finding the uses to which he has put airs wh