“The singers were allowed innumerable licences. Whilst the tenor sustained the Gregorian melody, the other voices indulged in extempore descant, regardless of the style of the main composition, violating time, and setting even the fundamental tone at defiance. The composers, to advance another step in the analysis of this strange medley, took particular delight in combining different sets of words, melodies of widely diverse character, antagonistic rhythms, and divergent systems of accentuation, in a single piece. They assigned these several ingredients to several parts, and for the further exhibition of their perverse skill, went even to the length of coupling themes in the major and the minor. The most obvious result of such practice was that it became impossible to understand what was being sung, and that instead of concord and order in the choir, a confused discord and anarchy of dinning sounds prevailed. What made the matter, from an ecclesiastical point of view, still worse, was that these scholastically artificial compositions were frequently based on trivial and vulgar tunes, suggesting the tavern, the dancing-room, or even worse places, to worshippers assembled for the celebration of a Sacrament. Masses bore titles adopted from the popular airs on which they were founded; such, for example, as _Adieu, mes amours_, _À l’ombre d’un buissonnet_, _Baise moi_, _Le vilain jaloux_. Even the words of love ditties and obscene ballads were being squalled out by the tenor (treble?) while the bass (tenor?) gave utterance to an _Agnus Dei_ or a _Benedictus_, and the soprano (alto?) was engaged upon the verses of a Latin hymn. Baini, who examined hundreds of the masses and motetts in MS., says that the words imported into them from vulgar sources ‘make one’s flesh creep, and one’s hair stand on end.’ He does not venture to do more than indicate a few of the more decent of these interloping verses. As an augmentation of this indecency, numbers from a mass which started with the grave rhythm of a Gregorian tone were brought to their conclusion on the dance measure of a popular _ballata_, so that _Incarnatus est_ or _Kyrie eleison_ went jigging off into suggestions of Masetto and Zerlina at a village ball.”[3]