VI
Yet some of the very composers who devoted their time to the solution, or construction, of such futile puzzles were themselves pioneers of what we can call modern, as opposed to mediaeval, music. With Josquin the Renaissance in music may be said to begin. His sense of harmony might be compared with the dawning sense of perspective in painting. The true history of the part played by music during the Renaissance has yet to be written. Here only a few salient points can be touched upon. The invention of printing brought music within the reach of a far wider circle. The cultivated amateur comes more and more into notice. The leaders of music in the earlier period were still the Netherlanders. They overran Italy and came into contact with Italian poets. The offspring of this union was the madrigal. The output of secular music from the presses of Italy was enormous, and it was soon imitated in other countries. Music was still to a large extent under the patronage of princes, but instead of being a rare luxury for the enhancement of courtly splendour it became a universal ornament and pleasure of all cultured society. This is especially observable in Elizabethan England. What is important to realize about the secular music of the sixteenth century is that music was no longer the monopoly of a close corporation of professional musicians in which the distinction between composer and performer was very indefinite; it was written very largely with full consciousness of the enjoyment which ordinary people could derive from the actual practice of it. As music becomes more and more one of the normal delights of cultured life, it becomes less and less of a mystery and more of a conscious art. Josquin and his school had laid the firm foundations of the classical language of music. If we take a long view of the history of the art from ancient times to the present day, concentrating our attention mainly on secular music, which obviously expresses the genuine musical feelings of mankind, rather than on church music, which in spite of the natural impulse of composers has always been subject to anti-artistic restrictions of style, we shall be convinced that the revolution associated with the name of Monteverdi and the beginnings of opera was a small matter compared with the establishment of the harmonic system a century and a half earlier.
The ecclesiastical composers had undoubtedly made important contributions to technique. For one thing, the mere length of the works required gave them space in which to work out their technical devices completely. Secular music, with its swifter interplay of emotion, required a more compressed style, an art of vivid suggestion rather than of exhaustive discussion. From the beginning of the sixteenth century onwards music moves gradually faster and faster. Its development assumes in the listener a knowledge of what has gone before. Madrigals were arranged for the lute, just as nowadays operas are arranged for the pianoforte. A good deal had to be left out in the process of arrangement, but some acquaintance with the original might reasonably be presupposed. Music thus develops as an art of associative suggestion. Naturalism plays its part, probably under the influence of naturalistic painting. Often enough the results are ridiculous, but the general effect, viewed at the distance of time, was to enrich the musical language. The intimate association of music with poetry sometimes led the musician into dangerous paths. An interesting contrast is exhibited by Byrd and Marenzio. The Italian is vividly descriptive and illustrative; only his strong sense of key prevents his work from becoming fragmentary and disjointed as he follows every suggestion of his poet. Byrd is never literary; he is perhaps the greatest pure musician of the whole age. He represents the perfect Apollinian type, Marenzio the Dionysiac, and it is odd to find the Mediterranean romantic and the Northerner classical.