earned composers in the style developed by the Flemish masters had
grown tired of writing simple music for four voices and a single choir.
They reveled in the opportunity of combining eight vocal parts and
bringing three choirs with accompanying orchestras into play at the same
time. They were proud of proving how by counterpoint the most dissimilar
and mutually-jarring factors could be wrought into a whole, intelligible
to the scientific musician, though unedifying to the public. In the
neglect of their art, considered as an art of interpretation and
expression, they abandoned themselves to intricate problems and to the
presentation of incongruous complexities.

The singers were expert in rendering difficult passages, in developing
unpromising motives, and in embroidering the arras-work of the composer
with fanciful extravagances of vocal execution. The instrumentalists
were trained in the art of copying effects of fugue or madrigal by lutes
and viols in concerted pieces. The people were used to dance and sing
and touch the mandoline together; in every house were found amateurs who
could with voice and string produce the studied compositions of the
masters.

What was really lacking, amid this exuberance of musical resources, in
this thick jungle of technical facilities, was a controlling element of
correct taste, a right sense of the proper function of music as an
interpretative art. On the very threshold of its modern development,
music had fallen into early decay owing to the misapplication of the
means so copiously provided by nature and by exercise. A man of genius
and of substantial intuition into the real ends of vocal music was
demanded at this moment, who should guide the art into its destined
channel. And in order to elicit such a creator of new impulses, such a
Nomothetes of the disordered state, it was requisite that external
pressure should be brought to bear upon the art. An initiator of the
right caliber was found in Palestrina. The pressure from without was
supplied by the Council of Trent.

It may here be parenthetically remarked that music, all through modern
history, has needed such legislators and initiators of new methods.
Considered as an art of expression, she has always tended to elude
control, to create for herself a domain extraneous to her proper
function, and to erect her resources of mere sound into
self-sufficingness. What Palestrina effected in the sixteenth century,
was afterwards acco