s lost
through their intermingling with so many incongruous elements.

II.

The beginnings of contrapuntal and polyphonic music have been traced
to what is now known as the old French school, having its active
period between about 1100 and 1370, or thereabouts. The principal
masters known to us now by name, were all, or nearly all, connected
with the cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris, and several of them with the
university of the Sorbonne. Paris, during the earlier part of this
period, in fact during the greater part of it, was the most advanced
and active intellectual center of the entire civilized world. When the
French school had ceased to advance, as happened some time before the
close of the history in 1370, as above assigned, it found a successor
in what is known as the Gallo-Belgic school, which was active between
1350 and 1432. This, in turn, was succeeded by the Netherland school,
extending from about 1425 to 1625. The removal of the star of progress
from one location to another, as here indicated in the succession of
these great national schools, was probably influenced by corresponding
or slightly antecedent changes in the commercial or political
relations of the countries, rendering the old locality less favorable
to art than the new one. For questions of this sort, however, there is
not now time or space. To return to the old French school--the
recognition of the importance of this school is due to a learned
Belgian savant, M. Coussemaker, who happening to discover in the
medical library at Montpelier, France, an old manuscript of music,
analyzed it, and found that it represented masters previously unknown,
and, for the most part, belonging to the period under present
consideration. In several monographs upon the history of "Harmony in
the Middle Ages," he traced the steps through which polyphony had
arisen, and was able to show that, instead of dating from the
fourteenth or fifteenth century, as previously supposed, it had its
beginnings more than three centuries earlier, and that Paris was the
first center of this form of musical effort.

For convenience of classification the entire duration of the old
French school may be divided into four periods, of which the first may
be taken to extend from 1100 to 1140, the great names being those of
Leonin and Perotin, both organists and deschanteurs at Notre Dame. The
Montpelier manuscript contains several compositions by both these
masters, and in them we fin