he
Mass of Pope Marcello--Palestrina Satisfies the Cardinals with his
New Style of Sacred Music--Pius IV. and his Partiality for
Music--Palestrina and Filippo Neri--His Motetts--The Song of
Solomon set to Melody--Palestrina, the Saviour of Music--The
Founder of the Modern Style--Florentine Essays in the Oratorio.

It is a singular fact that while Italy led all the European races in
scholarship and literature, in the arts of sculpture and painting, in
commerce and the sciences of life, she had developed no national school
of music in the middle of the sixteenth century. Native melody might
indeed be heard in abundance along her shores and hillsides, in city
streets and on the squares where men and girls danced together at
evening. But such melody was popular; it could not be called artistic or
scientific. The music which resounded through the Sistine Chapel,
beneath the Prophets of Michel Angelo, on high days and festivals, was
not Italian. The composers of it came for the most part from Flemish or
French provinces, bearing the names of Josquin Depres, of Andrew
Willaert, of Eleazar Genet, of James Arkadelt, of Claude Gondimel; and
the performers were in like manner chiefly ultramontanes. Julius II. in
1513 founded a chapel in the Vatican Basilica called the Cappella Giulia
for the maintenance of twelve male singers, twelve boys, and two masters
of the choristers. In doing so it was his object to encourage a Roman
school of music and to free the Chapter of S. Peter's from the
inconvenience of being forced to engage foreign choir-men. His scheme,
however, had been only partially successful. As late as 1540, we find
that the principal composers and musicians in Rome were still
foreigners. To three Italians of repute, there were five Flemings, three
Frenchmen, three Spaniards, one German, and one Portuguese.[204]

[Footnote 204: See Baini, _Life of Palestrina_, vol. ii. p. 20.]

The Flemish style of contrapuntal or figured harmony, which had
enchanted Europe by its novelty and grace when Josquin Depres, in the
last quarter of the fifteenth century, brought it into universal vogue,
was still dominant in Italy. But this style already showed unmistakable
signs of decadence and dissolution. It had become unfit for
ecclesiastical uses, and by the exaggeration of its qualities it was
tending to anarchy. The grand defect of Flemish music, considered as an
art of expression, was that it ignored propriety