secular composer.

One spirit, the secular, pagan spirit, breathes in every bar of
Purcell's music. Mid-Victorian critics and historians deplored the
resemblance between the profane style of the stage pieces and the sacred
style of the anthems and services. Not resemblance, but identity, is the
word to use. There is no distinguishing between the two styles. There
are not two styles: there is one style--the secular style, Purcell's
style. Let us pause a moment, and ask ourselves if any great composer
has ever had more than one style. Put aside the fifth-rate imitators who
now copied Mozart, and now Palestrina, and could therefore write in as
many styles as there were styles to copy, and not one of them their own.
There is no difference between the sacred motets and the secular
madrigals of the early polyphonists. Bach did not use dance-measures in
his Church music, but in the absence of these lies the entire
distinction between his Church and his secular compositions; the
structure, manner and outlines of his songs are precisely alike--indeed,
he dished up secular airs for sacred cantatas. The style of Handel's
"Semele" and that of his "Samson" are the same; there is no
dissimilarity between Haydn's symphonies and the "Creation"; Mozart's
symphonies and his masses (though the masses are a little breezier, on
the whole); Schubert's symphonies or songs and his masses or "The Song
of Miriam"; Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and the great Mass in D.

Purcell's style is largely a sort of fusion of all the styles in vogue
in his lifetime. The old polyphonic music he knew, and he was a master
of polyphonic writing; but with him it was only a means to the carrying
out of a scheme very unlike any the old writers ever thought of--the
interest of each separate part is not greater than the general harmonic
interest. Then, as he admitted, he learnt a great deal from the
Italians. From Lulli, through Humphries, he got declamatory freedom in
the bonds of definite forms, not letting the poet's or the Bible words
warp his music out of all reasonable shape. The outlines of his tunes
show unmistakably the influence of English folk-song and folk-dance.
There was an immense amount of household music in those days--catches,
ballads, songs and dances. The folk-songs, even if they were invented
before the birth of the modern key-sense, were soon modified by it: very
few indications can be found of their having originated in the epoch
when the modes