f the
fifteenth century. The first writer of compositions under this title
whose name is known to us was Busnois, and in the same collection are
compositions of the same class by many other composers of the
Netherlandish schools. A madrigal was a secular composition, generally
devoted to love, but in polyphonic style, and in one of the
ecclesiastical modes. They were always vocal down to the seventeenth
century, but from that time forward they were generally marked for
voices and instruments. One of the best composers of madrigals was
Arkadelt, of the Netherlandish school. The success of the great
Orlando Lassus in this school has already been mentioned, together
with the name of one of the best known of his compositions in this
line (p. 167).

The strange modulations, like that from F to E flat in one of
Arkadelt's madrigals, are current incidents of the ecclesiastical mode
in which they are written. Many of the secular works of this class are
hardly to be distinguished from those intended for the Church, and
some are to be met with, having two sets of words, one secular,
occasionally almost profane; the other sacred, some hymn or other from
the offices of divine service.

In England this school had a great currency, and the madrigals of the
British writers of the seventeenth century are every whit as free and
melodious as the best of those of the Italian school. The number of
writers of this class of works was innumerable, so much so that we
might well class it as the ruling art form of the century, just as the
dramatic song was in the eighteenth century, the fugue in the last
half of it, and the sonata in the beginning of the nineteenth.
Everybody wrote madrigals who ever wrote music at all. According to
the dates of collections published, the English followed the Italian
composers. The earliest Italian compositions of this class are
contained in three collections printed by Ottaviano di Petrucci, the
inventor of the process of printing music from movable type. These
collections were published in Venice, 1501-1503, and copies are still
retained in the library at Bologna and at Vienna. The English
cultivation of this form of composition became general toward the last
of this century, and in the first part of the next ensuing, and it is
but just to say that the English composers finally surpassed the
continental in this school, and developed out of it a beautiful art
genre of their own, the glee. Toward the latter p