influences were at work at the same time in Italy,
which greatly stimulated the advance of music. If space permitted, it
would be interesting to enlarge upon the work of Luca Marenzio, the
prince of madrigal-writers, and on the services rendered by Vincenzo
Galileo, father of the greatest man of science in his age, in placing
the practice of stringed instruments on a sound basis. It should also be
remembered that in the society of Filippo Neri at Rome, the Oratorio was
taking shape, and emerging from the simple elements of the Spiritual
Laud and _Aria Divota_. This form, however, would certainly have
perished if the austere party in the Church had prevailed against the
lenient for the exclusion of figured music, from religious exercises.

There was, moreover, an interesting contemporary movement at Florence,
which deserves some detailed mention. A private academy of amateurs and
artists formed itself for the avowed purpose of reviving the musical
declamation of the Greeks. As the new ecclesiastical style created by
Palestrina grew out of the Counter-Reformation embodied in the decrees
of the Tridentine Council, so this movement, which eventually resulted
in the Opera, attached itself to the earlier enthusiasms of the
Classical Revival. The humanists had restored Latin poetry; the
architects had perfected a neo-Latin manner; sculptors and painters had
profited by the study of antique fragments, and had reproduced the
bas-reliefs and arabesques of Roman palaces. It was now, much later in
the day, the turn of the musicians to make a similar attempt. Their
quest was vague and visionary. Nothing remained of Greek or Roman music.
To guide these explorers, there was only a dim instinct that the
ancients had declaimed dramatic verse with musical intonation. But, as
the alchemists sought the philosopher's stone, and founded modern
chemistry; as, according to an ancient proverb, they who search for
silver find gold; so it happened that, from the pedantic and
ill-directed attempts of this academy proceeded the system on which the
modern Oratorio and Opera were based. What is noticeable in these
experiments is, that a new form of musical expression, declamatory and
continuous, therefore dramatic, as opposed to the lyrical and fugal
methods of the contrapuntists, was in process of elaboration. Claudio
Monteverde, who may be termed the pioneer of _recitativo_, in his opera
of _Orfeo_; Giacomo Carissimi, in whose _Jephtha_ the form of