A Pavan called “La Bataille,” full of vigorous trumpet-signals and horn-echoes, was inserted by Tielman Sufato in his collection of 1551. Shortly before that date a Zürich lute book included dance-songs, “mitsampt dem Vogelgesang und einer Feldschlacht.” The song of birds, the imitation of animals, and all kinds of confused shrieking--a comic counterpoint--offers rich material to the programme-music of the sixteenth century. Even before an Italian had written the famous fugal chorus, in which the scholars, with a comical employment of the dismembered canonic voice-exercise, declined _qui_, _quæ_, _quod_, in the ears of the raging schoolmaster--even before this, contrapuntal janglings were well known. Jannequin, the Frenchman, depicted in _chansons_ with many parts the battle of Marignano, the capture of Boulogne, war, jealousy, women’s gossip, the hare and hounds; or, on the other hand, the song of birds, the lark or the nightingale. We hear in the music of this time the thirds of the cuckoo, the clucking dactyls of the hen, the chromatic mewings of the cat, the trills of song-birds. The boldest of these pieces--an earlier Howleglass--was perhaps Eckard’s representation of the turmoil in St Mark’s Place at Venice (1589), in which noblemen, beggars, hawkers, soldiers, appear with all the artistic counterpoint appropriate to their respective classes. Thus programme-music, in the sixteenth century, enjoyed an international repute. It must not, however, be regarded as an achievement of modern music, but rather as something as old as music itself. The tempest which the Greek Timotheus represented on the kithara, and the fight of Apollo with the Python, which Timosthenes depicted on the flute and kithara, in all its stages--the challenge, the struggle, the hissing, the victory--had a renown in very ancient times. Programme-music belongs to all ages of musical development, and appears always as a natural phenomenon, never as a revolutionary movement. It marks the _ne plus ultra_ of the need of musical expression, which cannot find satisfaction in pure musical forms, and seeks to justify itself by extra-musical titles. Thus on the extreme limit of ancient hymn-music stood a Timosthenes, on that of mediæval choral-music a Jannequin, on that of modern instrumental music a Berlioz.