THE MONODIC REVOLUTION AND ITS RESULTS Until Palestrina's art attained its height, the path of progress in music for the best part of two centuries was that of purity. It was not the free and bold spirits but the idlers and dullards who broke rules and disliked contrapuntal forms. The Hispano-Roman style of Victoria and Palestrina was not everything. It was not secular (though Palestrina's madrigals make him as supreme in that form as in church music), and it was not, like our glorious English polyphony, experimental or racy of the soil. But it was metropolitan, and the boldest of our Tudor composers would have been no such fool as not to hold it supreme. But already before the death of Palestrina a new music was groping towards the light; and for this music the path of progress was no more that of purity than the path of omelette-making is that of the con servation of egg-shells.
Eve's apple was not more fatal to man's earthly paradise than the rise of instrumental music and dramatic solo declamation was to the hope of continuing the Golden Age of music into the 17th century. The revolution did not consist in this detail or that. To say that Monteverdi "invented" the dominant 7th, or that anyone else invented it, or that any such invention could revolutionize music, is like saying that Shakespeare revolutionized drama by inventing strange oaths. The important point is not the technical names of the details but their meaning. When Lasso was young some experiments in chromatic music had been made by Cipriano de Rore, and were eagerly imitated by Lasso. But what is Lasso's object in being the first person to write such an out-of the-way note as Alt? Simply to express the words "novum melos." Very different from such intellectual playthings is the purpose of the powerful discords of Monteverdi's madrigal Crude Amarilli and of the monodic lament of Ariadne which drew tears from the spectators of his opera Arianna.
The article MONTEVERDI contains further remarks on his im portance and on his coincidence in place and time with the cre ators of the violin. (See also OPERA.) The Palestrina style hence forth became the rightful privilege only of those composers who, either having mastered it before monody arose, or, like our own Orlando Gibbons, living in regions too remote for it to pene trate, could still compose polyphonically from impulse and not from asceticism. Orlando Gibbons did, in fact, try some monodic
experiments which are poor enough.
An impulsively eclectic composer is another matter; and in uncouth, illogical Germany a giant such as Schutz could almost fill the century before the birth of Bach and Handel, with a life's work ranging from the pure polyphony of his Venetian master Gabrieli to the exploitation of all his "astute friend" (scharfsinniger Freund) Monteverdi's new principles in most gi gantic efforts in mixed vocal and instrumental polyphony. From Schutz we can extract no such system as that which makes Monte verdi a favourite subject in musical history; but in Schiitz's chaos the elements may at any moment come together in some strange work of art that fits into no historical or technical scheme but speaks clearly to us through its own coherence. Schutz's "astute friend" always knows what he is doing and whither his work is leading; but, except in a madrigal here and there, which was not his proper business, he does not produce a convincing work of art so often as Schutz who seems to have no proper busi ness at all. It is to the astute, logical Italians that we must look for the progress and consolidation of musical art in general during the 17th century; but we must not let the enthusiasm of his torians make us think that such a century of progress was a period of great music. The historians themselves are apt to neglect the intrinsic values of the 17th century compositions and to estimate them merely for their tendency towards something that was to take convincing shape later. The-early 17th century was, in fact, musically not unlike what we have so far experienced of the loth; the eyes of musicians and music-lovers were at the ends of the earth prophesying Wagner, when all that the whole century could finally achieve was the da capo form of aria.