A much greater reformer than Hucbald came upon the scene about 1000 A.D. Guido, an excel lent monk of Arezzo, founded the system of sight-reading, by establishing a vocal scale on the syllables still in use. He noticed that the hymn to Saint John (patron saint of singers) rose step by step from C to the following words: causing his choir-boys to memorize the syllables from the melody of their chief hymn, he soon taught them intervals by this simple means, and his treatise "De ignoto cantu" was the first practical mode of singing gan unknown song" (that is, a song unknown before to the singer), in short, the birth of sight-singing. It must be confessed, however, that Guido's claims to this tremendous discovery have been contested, and that every point connected with the rise of the science of music is more or less wrapped in vagueness and doubt.
We come to somewhat firmer ground a little later when notes of definite length are intro duced. Franco of Cologne may be credited with the first clear treatise upon such a sys tem (he calls it °Ars Cantus Mensurabilis") in the first half of the 13th century.
And now there came a recession from the evil-sounding fourths and fifths that had ex isted in the 10th century, and from some equally harsh progressions that were countenanced long after this. The troubadours in France and the minnesingers in Germany had brought forth secular music that broke many of the old rules yet sounded infinitely better than the more 'regular" music. The musical canons of the ecclesiastics began to broaden. Marchettus of Padua and Jean de Muris, both in the middle of the 14th century, began to urge new progres sions and the consecutive fifths were tabooed, only to reapper copiously in the most modern works of the 20th century.
It will be impossible in an outline sketch to give all the attempts that were made in evolving the new science, from the Ilth to the 14th cen tulles. Suffice it to say that out of these. ef forts there grew the first real school of compo sition, and instead of its having birth in Rome, it was born in the Netherlands and in Flanders. Yet the Flemish school at, once gave its serv ices to the Church, and many of its greatest representatives in its earliest stages went to Rome as servants of the Catholic cause. The Flemish school may be called the true begin ning of the science of music, since now, for the first time, a race of composers existed who worked according to definite rules in the pro duction of intricate counterpoint, and were able to impart their knowledge to their pupils. William Dufay was the first of this line of composers. His epoch is mistakenly given in
many histories as falling in the 14th century, but the researches of F. X. Haberl have proved that he was born shortly after 1400. He died 27 Nov. 1474. The chief of his contemporaries were Hobrecht, Eloy, Brasart and Binchois, who have, however, left little more than their names, and even of Dufay very little music is extant.
The first great teacher of the school was John Ockeghem or Ockenheim (about 1430 1513), and among his pupils was the first great contrapuntist of that time, practically the first great composer that the world had ever pos sessed,— Josquin Des Pres,— whose music Martin Luther delighted in. Des Pres was born about 1440 and died either in 1515 or 1521. Other pupils of Ockeghem were De la Rue, Brumel and Agricola. All the music of the foregoing composers was purely intellectual, but with Des Pres we find the first glimmer ings of emotion mingled with the musical mathematics, and he taught that dissonances could be used to express passionate feeling.
The greatest figure in the Flemish school, however, is Orlando Di Lasso (1520-94), whu composed works which are beautiful even to modern ears. The Flemish school ended with this culmination. It had existed about two cen turies and in that time it had brought forth the science of composition and some 300 composers.
There was, however, another country which helped greatly in this result. The first musical dictionary ever written, by John Tinctor (1476), gives the credit of the invention of counterpoint to the English, and a manuscript of a canon for six voices, in the British Museum, would seem to show that there were very skilful composers in England as early as in the 13th century. This canon °Sumer is icumen in") ascribed by some to John of Read ing„ in 1250, by others to a much earlier date is a surprisingly advanced work for its epoch: A mysterious figure looms up as an English contemporary of Dufay, in John Dunstable, but of the music of this Englishman (who died about 1458) very little is known, only a few fragments remaining.
Contemporaneous with the later Flemish writers one finds a few Italian composers form-. ing a school of their own. The first of the old Italian school was Costanza Festa, a Florentine, who died in 1545. But the one great master in this field was Palestrina (born probably in 1524 — there is much doubt about the date of birth,--and died 1594), who was without doubt the greatest composer up to that time. He cum• bined the Flemish ingenuity with a lofty dig nity and sometimes (as in his (Improperia9 with emotional power.