A similar fondness for this form of art pervaded all European countries. In Italy music was the delight of the common people and the favorite pursuit of the great. In Germany the Reformation and the influence of Luther had set the people singing. The organ had attained an advanced state there, and other instruments of every sort were cultivated. It was the same in France. The love for music was universal. Hence the times were ripe for a great advance in art. There was concentrated upon music an attention which it has rarely enjoyed at any other period of its history, and the advances now to be mentioned were correspondingly abundant and striking. The contrapuntal schools had done more to educate harmonic perception than is commonly supposed. All the devices of counterpoint, as we have them to-day, were invented by the various schools of this period, and brought to a high degree of perfection. But the learning had somewhat overshot its mark. The multiplicity of parts in the compositions of Willaert, and the other masters of the polyphonic schools, served for the cultivation of chord perception just as surely as if they had intentionally written chord successions without troubling themselves with imitative canon in any degree. For, when there were so many voice parts as ten, fifteen or twenty within the limits of the compass of the human organ, that is to say, mainly within the limits of two octaves and a half, the parts had no recourse but to cross continually, and since there was no aid afforded the ear by differences in tone color between one voice part and another, it necessarily followed that they fell upon the ear with the effect not of voice parts, in which the melody of each could be followed independently of the others, but rather as chord masses, in which here and there a prominent melodic phrase occasionally emerged, only to be lost the next moment by the prominence of a bit of the melody of some other voice. The effect of a composition of this kind was no other than that of a succession of chords, and the ear was as thoroughly educated to chord perception by this class of music as if the composer had intended only to write successions of chords. Still the training of these schools, while incidentally affording education to the ear upon the harmonic side, was thoroughly contrapuntal, and the study of every composer was to make something more elaborate than anything that had been written by his predecessors.