ground-sketch of his plan, without troubling himself to distribute
written parts to the executants. The efflorescences, excursuses and
episodes to which I have alluded, were supplied by artists whom long
training in this kind of music enabled to perform their separate sallies
and to execute their several antics within certain limits of recognized
license. But since each vied with the other to produce striking effects,
the choir rivaling the orchestra, the tenor competing with the bass, the
organ with the viol, it followed that the din of their accumulated
efforts was not unjustly compared to that made by a 'sty of grunting
pigs,' the builders of the Tower of Babel, or the 'squalling of cats in
January.'[206] 'All their happiness,' writes a contemporary critic,
'consisted in keeping the bass singer to the fugue, while at the same
time one voice was shouting out _Sanctus_, another _Sabaoth_, a third
_gloria tua_, with howlings, bellowings and squealings that cannot be
described.'

[Footnote 205: While the choir was singing, the orchestra was playing
concerted pieces called _ricercari_, in which the vocal parts were
reproduced.]

[Footnote 206: See the original passages from contemporary writers
quoted by Baini, vol. i. pp. 102-104. Savonarola went so far as to
affirm: 'Che questo canto figurato l'ha trovato Satanasso,' a phrase
quite in the style of a Puritan abusing choirs and organs.]

It must not be thought that this almost unimaginable state of things
indicated a defect either of intellectual capacity or of artistic skill.
It was due rather to the abuse of science and of virtuosity, both of
which had attained to a high degree of development. It manifested the
decadence of music in its immaturity, through over-confident employment
of exuberant resources on an end inadequate for the fulfillment of the
art. Music, it must be remembered, unlike literature and plastic art,
had no antique tradition to assimilate, no masterpieces of accomplished
form to study. In the modern world it was an art without connecting
links to bind it to the past. And this circumstance rendered it liable
to negligent treatment by a society that prided itself upon the recovery
of the classics. The cultivated classes abandoned it in practice to
popular creators of melody upon the one hand, and to grotesque
scholastic pedants on the other. And from the blending of those
ill-accorded elements arose the chaos which I have attempted to
describe.

L