Giovanni Pierluigi Sante da Palestrina, named Palestrina from the place of his birth, which was a small town in the Campagna not far from Rome, was born of humble parents about the year 1524. About 1550 he went to Rome as teacher of the boy-singers in the Capella Giulia of the Vatican. All the rest of his life was spent in Rome, in various posts in the service of the church, and in studious and uneventful labor at his great compositions. Although a married man, he was made in 1554 one of the singers in the Papal choir by Pope Julius III, to whom he had dedicated a set of masses; on the accession of Pope Paul IV a year later he was dismissed, and became ill with anxiety as to the support of his growing family; he was nevertheless almost immediately appointed music-director of the Lateran Church, and later he held successively the posts of music-director in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, “Composer to the Pontifical Choir,” leader of the choir of St. Peter’s, and music-director to Cardinal Aldobrandini. Aside from these meagre and arid details, unfortunately, little is known of the man Palestrina. His private life is almost a blank. The one story oftenest told of him, that his Mass of Pope Marcellus, produced in 1565, was written to convince the reforming Council of Trent of the possibility of purging church music of the trivialities and abuses which had crept into it, has been discredited by recent historians. Mythical also seems to be the story of Palestrina’s one great popular triumph, in 1575, a year of jubilee, when fifteen hundred residents of the composer’s native town are said to have entered Rome in three companies, singing his works, and led by himself. The story is a severe tax on the credulity of anyone whose ideas of chorus-singing are based on modern methods.