The labor of the Netherlanders, from Dufay to the death of Josquin, offers a spectacle of almost unparalleled activity and painstaking research. It was, for the art of polyphony, the period of youth and adolescence, with its enormous energy, its too great reliance upon intellect, and its comparative lack of mellowness and heart. Dufay was a singer in the papal chapel exactly one hundred years before Josquin held the same position. He, with other Gallo-Belgians and the English Dunstable, added to the body of technical knowledge, established the principles of design in composition, and brought sacred music into closer touch with folk-song. Okeghem and his immediate followers were intoxicated, not with the wine of poetry or passion, but with a desire for intellectual artifice and refinement. They expended their genius on technique as an end, and produced compositions beside which even the most intricate contrapuntal efforts of later days seem almost like child’s play. Such work carries within itself, however, the seeds of its own destruction, and, so far as it rested upon puzzling subtleties, it was doomed to die. Nevertheless, the schools of Dufay and Okeghem prepared the way and the materials for the third and greatest of the indigenous Netherland schools, that of Josquin. To him the resources of counterpoint were merely the means to obtain beauty of expression. It is for this reason that we regard him as the first great composer. F. B. FOOTNOTES: [84] Strict or plain counterpoint is divided into several species: (1) note against note, there being one note in the accompanying melody or melodies to one note of the cantus firmus; (2) two notes against one; (3) three, four, or more notes against one; (4) syncopated; (5) florid or figured, in which the added parts are free. Counterpoint is single, or simple, when the added part is uniformly above or below the cantus; _double_ when the added part is so constructed as to be usable either above or below the cantus by a uniform transposition of an octave, a tenth, or some other interval; and _triple_, or _quadruple_, when three or four melodies are so fitted as to be mutually interchangeable with one another by transposition.