he letters of Boccio and Saint Gregory as
notes, but they placed them on lines of three different colours. The
imbroglio continued; to learn music badly took twelve years, and then
they could not manage that singers from different towns could read
from the same score. Saint Bernard, dry and austere as his times,
ridiculed this music as not being solemn enough; he was a man
antagonistic to all art; he would have liked to see the churches
dismantled and without any architectural adornments; and the slower
the music was, the better it seemed to him. He was the father of plain
song, and he maintained that the more drawn out the music was, the
more religious it became. But in the thirteenth century Christians
found this chant most wearisome. The cathedrals in those days were the
point of attraction: the theatre, the centre of all life. People went
to the church to pray to God and to amuse themselves, forgetting for
the moment all the wars and the violence and confusion outside. Once
again popular music came into the churches, and you could hear intoned
in the cathedrals all the songs most in vogue, and which were often
obscene. The people took part in the religious music, singing in
different tones, each one as seemed best to him, and these were the
first beginnings of concerted singing. In those days religion was
joyful, popular--democratic as you would say, Gabriel; there was
no Inquisition, nor suspicion of heresy to embitter the soul with
fanaticism and fear. All the coarse wind and stringed instruments that
the artisans had in the towns, or the labourers in the fields, came
into the churches, and the organ was accompanied by violas, violins,
bagpipes, flutes, guitars and lutes. The plain song was the
established liturgy almost throughout Europe; but the people disliked
it, and interspersed it with songs, and at the great festivals,
religious hymns were sung, adapted to the popular melodies then in
fashion, such as 'The song of the armed man,' 'Morencia, give me a
kiss,' 'I know not what confuses me,' 'Weep for me, lady,' 'Bad luck
to him who married you,' and others in the same style. And Rome, you
will ask, and the Church? What did it say about such disorders? The
Church lived without artistic perception: it never had any. What are
the boundaries between religious and profane music? From the sixteenth
to the seventeenth century all critics have asked themselves this
question, but the Church let them talk, accepting ever