A Complete History of Music: for Schools, Clubs, and Private ReadingBaltzell, W. J. (Winton James)
History
A Complete History of Music: for Schools, Clubs, and Private Reading
Baltzell, W. J. (Winton James)
Music -- History and criticism
=Palestrina=.—It remained for his pupil =Palestrina=, (Giovanni
Pierlugi Sante, 1514-1594) an Italian, to reach the highest point of
emotional expression and technical freedom; we must, however, rank
Orlando di Lasso with him. He carried to the highest fruition the
teachings of the Netherlands, tempered by the romantic and melodic
tendency of the Italian nature. His writings were so free technically
that they have been called simple in form; this they are, but the
simplicity is the simplicity of genius. His style is melodic, and has
a clearness never attained by any writer before his time, and yet his
music is written in the most severe forms. He founded a school of
music in Rome which, however, never produced any great masters, for
it was the time when the reformation of Opera began and carried the
development of music into other channels.
[Music: SOP. ALTO TENOR BASS]
The end of a composition by Palestrina, showing the melody in the upper
voice instead of the tenor, as was usually the case in polyphonic
compositions, and the use of our modern Minor mode. This composition,
at least this last part of it taken alone, might be by a modern writer,
so familiar do its progressions sound; indeed, the melody of the first
two measures is strikingly similar to a progression used by Beethoven
in one of his string quartets. The entire example with words may be
seen in Naumann, History of Music, Vol. I, page 510.
=Summary=.—The Polyphonic Era has many important characteristics and
results which make it worth while to sum it up. Its development is
largely the history of the _development of vocal music_ to its highest
point, and the consequent failure of it to provide accurate expression
for human needs. It marks the development of scales, intervals, forms,
instruments and emotion. In scales we find the trend to be always
toward the natural; in intervals, toward freedom, using only the ear as
a criterion; in instruments we note the development of the organ, but
the lack of others which would have changed music entirely; in emotion,
we note the evolution from crudeness to the highest and most polished
forms of impersonal expression. The lack of the Polyphonic school
was not in the intrinsic value of the music, nor in any lack of the
desire to express emotion; the failure to provide a suitable means of
musical expression was due to the idea of church relation to God rather
than to the personal individualistic relations established by Luther.
_After the Reformation_ music takes up this new idea and immediately
a _secular music_, vocal and instrumental, begins to _develop_,
culminating in an emotional school of a totally different and truer
style than the Polyphonic. Polyphonic music expressed the old monkish
ideas of religion perfectly, but monophonic music expresses the emotion
of the people, a universal emotion. Polyphonic music must always be
appreciated for its value, but it must be examined for its fundamental
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