The modernity of Josquin’s art, his ability to interest us by intensity of expression in depicting the meaning of the words, is finely illustrated in his two motets _Planxit autem David_ and _Absolon fili mi_. In the latter especially he attains an expression of pathos, an effect of extreme sadness, which at times becomes poignant. In the closing measures there occurs a remarkably daring use of the augmented fifth, a dissonance whose introduction is ‘terribly effective.’ His psalm _Laudate pueri_, in contrasting mood, is pervaded by a persistent feeling of joy. The music, which moves happily along through a chain of pure concords without a disturbing dissonance, exhibits tranquillity and joyful confidence throughout. By a strange perversion the mass, although the most solemn and sacred portion of the Roman service, was treated by church composers in their musical settings of it up to the middle of the sixteenth century as the proper parade-ground for all conceivable forms of musical riddles and extravagances that would display their technical learning and ingenuity. But these aberrations are found much less frequently in the motets and madrigals. Here the composer was governed by no such fancied necessity; he felt a much greater sense of freedom to follow musical impulses. Hence these forms were the first to profit from the remarkable awakening of the musical understanding that took place at the close of the fifteenth century and to be enriched with the accompanying first flashes of the dawning sense of harmonic propriety and characterization. III The motet[24] occupies a place in ecclesiastical music next in importance to the mass. It has always been extra-liturgical; the words, though not prescribed, are generally selected from the Bible (the Psalms, antiphons, etc.) or the office-books. In the Roman Church service it is intended to be sung at high mass, usually after or in place of the plain-song offertorium for the day to fill out the time while the priest is preparing the oblations and presenting them at the altar. The great antiquity of the motet is attested by the fact that Franco of Cologne in his epochal work on Measured Music gives it place in one of the three classes[25] of choral compositions in use in his time. The characteristic features of the early motet were separate texts for each voice and a subject (_tenor_) made up of some short phrase or group of motives repeated several or many times, according to the length of the composition.