=The Organ and its Influence=.—The organ was the third great reformative power in this epoch. All music was vocal and no other conception could be had, for effective instruments and instrumental music were not yet in existence. The organ, because its tones were suited to accompanying the human voice and because its tone color was closely identical with that of the voice, was readily adapted to the vocal forms then in use. This gave a greater resource, for what was often technically impossible with the human voice became easy with the organ. The mechanical improvement of this instrument immediately gave greater freedom and range of technic, and it proved so well suited to polyphonic development that it aided the evolution more than any other one agency. The use of the organ must not be accounted as the beginning of instrumental music, for the organ used only adapted voice-forms, such as the Canon, Fugue, Madrigal, etc.; for this reason it is to be doubted if it aided in emotional development except by making technical resources much less restricted. In this sense, then, the technic of this school was freed from most of its former rules, and Music, previously cramped by narrow vocal restrictions, passed into the comparative freedom of the polyphonic style of the organ. =The Men of this School= are hardly to be separated from the men of the Gallo-Belgic school. The work passes from one school to the next with little or no perceptible pause, and the first men of the later school are pupils or disciples of the last men of the Gallo-Belgic period. Another noteworthy fact is, that so great was the musical growth, of this school and the skill and learning of its followers that the composers of the Netherlands expatriated themselves and settled in all parts of Europe, founding famous schools in Paris, Madrid, Naples, Venice, Munich and Rome; the celebrated _Italian school_ is really an _offshoot_ of that of the _Netherlands_. It is this overflow which marks this school as the greatest of the early polyphonic schools and shows why and how it acquired its emotional supremacy. =Jean de Okeghem= (1430-1512), pupil of Binchois, was the first prominent worker. It is difficult to class him as a composer of the Belgian or Netherlands school, for he has the earmarks of both. He lived during the supremacy of the Netherlands, but worked with the material of the Belgians. He developed the Canon to its highest technical point and took the first step toward the originating of the Fugue. To him is due the credit of introducing the use of retrograde, inverted, diminished and augmented imitation in the Canon. Much of his work was done in France. The tendency of his teaching was toward artificiality, as he delighted in puzzle canons and other exhibitions of ingenuity. =Antonius Brumel= (1460-1520), a pupil of Okeghem, is noteworthy because of a foreshadowing of the use of chords in real harmonic progressions. [Music: 8ve lower]