THE GOLDEN AGE From this point onwards the history of music is best studied in the masterpieces of the art. Each period has its own art-forms. Articles relevant to the Golden Age are HARMONY, Section 3; INSTRUMENTATION, Section 2 ; CONTRAPUNTAL FORMS ; COUN TERPOINT ; MADRIGAL ; MASS ; MOTET ; with the biographies and critical notes On PALESTRINA ; VICTORIA ; LASSO ; TALLIS ; MOR LEY; BYRD. See also AICHINGER, ALLEGRI, ANERIO (G. and F.); ANIMUCCIA ; ARCADELT ; BATESON ; BENNET (J.) ; BULL ; DES PRES (Josquin) ; ECCARD; FARRANT ; GABRIELI (A. and G.) ; FESTA (Constanzo); GIBBONS (0.) ; GUERRERO; HANDL (Gallus) ; HAS LER; ISAAC (Heinrich) ; MARENZIO ; MORLEY (Thomas); OBRECHT ; OICEGHEM ; SWEELINCK ; TAVERNER; WEELKES, WILBYE.
The external history of music is not so easily brought into true relation with the art as popular legends would have it. Every body is fainiliar with the story of the drying up of polyphony in the foolish ingenuities of Flemish contrapuntists until, at the behest of the Council of Trent, Palestrina wrote the Missa Papae Marcelli in a pure and simple style which convinced the authori ties that polyphonic music could be devout. The facts are not quite so simple. Undoubtedly there was a great deal of barren in genuity in the work of the lesser Flemish masters; and the great Obrecht himself had written masses in which the liturgical text is drowned beneath five other texts which each voice sings to other plain-chants and themes of old songs. The secular tunes thus freely introduced were not always sung as canti fermi too slow to be recognized. Recognition sometimes even led to the singing of the original words. One old song, L'homme arme, became the string round which every possible ingenuity crystallized in the composition of the Mass. There is no reason to doubt that the state of church music both deserved and received the serious attention of the Council of Trent.
On the other hand, not all Flemish music was silly, and many of the quaintest "canonic" devices were really nothing but harm less cryptography applied to music that was composed on purely artistic lines. Burney discovered this when, with his usual flair for good illustrations, he quoted some dry ingenuities from Okeghem (or Okenheim) and followed them by the wonderful Deploration de *khan Okenheim by that master's great pupil Josquin des Pres who is the first unmistakably great composer ' and who has been well named "the Chaucer of music." No listener can fail to recognize, from anything like a competent perform ance, the spontaneous beauty and poetic depth of this music, throughout which, while the other voices sing an elegy in French, the tenor intones in Latin the plain-chant of the Requiem be ginning on a note a semitone lower than the liturgical pitch, and continuing in the wailing melodic mode thus produced. Burney
had the wit to see that the "canon" ung demiton plus bas did not mean that some other part was to answer the tenor in canon, but was merely the "rule" for reading the cryptogram, the tenor being written at the normal pitch.
Many Flemish devices are well calculated to give coherence or climax to a large composition. One voice may wander up and down the scale with a single figure and a single motto-text while the other voices tell their whole story in polyphony. For instance, declaim the words Miserere mei Deus in monotone rising one step just for the first syllable of Deus. Start on the fundamental note of the scale, and at intervals repeat the phrase a step higher each time. After reaching the 5th degree go down again. Jos quin's Miserere is a setting of the whole 51st Psalm, woven round a tenor part entitled Vagans and constructed on this plan. It is one of the first mature masterpieces in the history of music. Palestrina's art is too subtle for rigid Flemish devices; but once, in one of his finest motets, Tribularer si nescirem he uses Jos quin's Miserere burden in exactly Josquin's way. Lasso is thor oughly Flemish in both sacred and secular music ; and in a motet on the resurrection of Lazarus he makes a soprano Vagans cry Lazare, veni foras from the beginning of the narrative until the chorus reaches these words, and joins in with them in triumphant polyphony.
We must not, then, be misled by the ecclesiastical tradition that condemns Flemish music wholesale. In any case the con cern of the church authorities was liturgical rather than artistic. The bishops would have been for the most part glad enough to see Church music restricted to the note-against-note style of Palestrina's litanies, Stabat Mater, Improperia and last book of Lamentations. A very sublime style it is, and Tallis's Responses, in their authentic form, are a noble illustration of it. But, as Dr. Jeppesen (The Style of Palestrina and the Dissonance) has clearly shown, Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli shows special signs of being a deliberate demonstration that a high degree of polyphony can be reconciled with clear choral delivery of the words. Cer tainly the ecclesiastical authorities did not long succeed in pre venting the use of secular themes in church music.
Many great musicians of to-day have a musical culture which ig nores the Golden Age ; and a knowledge of Palestrina is still con sidered, as it was in the days of Bach and of Beethoven, rather an out-of-the-way specialty. This is like a culture based on Latin and sceptical of Greek; good as far as it goes, but limited and cocksure like an 18th century gentleman's artistic impressions of the Grand Tour. An illustration of the most perfect style of the Golden Age is appended to the article MOTET.