PALESTRINA AND THE MUSIC OF MYSTICISM
It has been often pointed out by historians and critics that in their
early stages the arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting were the
servants of religion. Nursed through their infancy by the cherishing
hand of the church, they emerged into the secular world only with
their comparative maturity. Architecture, which in our day and country
embodies itself chiefly in great civic and mercantile buildings, began
with the temples of the pagan Greeks and the cathedrals of the mediæval
Christians. Sculpture for the most part delineated, in antiquity,
Egyptian or Greek gods and goddesses; and in the middle ages, Christian
saints. Even painting, which at the Renaissance became for all time
a secular art, inspired by its own ideals and controlled only by
intrinsic conditions, commenced by picturing on mediæval altar-pieces
and frescoes the heroes of sacred story, with their upturned eyes and
their clasped hands, and by symbolizing the dogmas or illustrating
the narratives of its task-master, religion. J. A. Symonds, in the
third part of his “Renaissance in Italy,” in which he describes at
length this universal dependence of art, in its early stages, on
the church, offers the following plausible explanation of it: “Art
aims at expressing an ideal; and this ideal is the transfiguration
of human elements into something nobler, felt and apprehended by the
imagination. Such an ideal, such an all-embracing glorification of
humanity, exists for simple and unsophisticated societies only in
the forms of religion.”[7] It is not, indeed, until art, nurtured
in cloisters, acquires definite aims, technical methods, and
self-confidence, that it can put off its dependence on ecclesiastical
aid, at first favorable but eventually restrictive, and essay a free
life.
To this general rule music is no exception--mediæval music was the
child, nursling, and hand-maid of the Church. It is true that there did
grow up, in the lyrical songs of troubadours and minstrels, a kind of
popular music that had in many respects more vitality, individuality,
and beauty than the more conventional ecclesiastical art; and that
the latter, at many stages in its development, had to draw fresh
inspiration from the humble popular minstrels. But in the middle ages,
when the common people were entirely illiterate, and all intellectual
concerns were in the hands of priests, who alone could read, write, and
preserve manuscripts and artistic traditions, it was inevitable that
the only recognized music, stamped with the seal of age and authority,
should be that of the ecclesiastical choristers. The student of the
infancy of music has to direct his attention, not to the mediæval world
at large, but to the cathedrals and the monasteries of that intensely
clerical age.
For the modern mind, permeated as it is with the instincts of liberty
and individualism, and perhaps especially for the American mind,
naturally radical and irreverent, it is difficult to conceive the
degree in which all the rites, customs, and beliefs of the mediæval
Catholic Church were matters of traditional authority. There was not
a word of the liturgy, not a tone of the plain chant to which it was
sung, not a gesture of the priest nor a genuflexion of the worshippers,
that was not prescribed by what was considered supreme dictation
and hallowed by immemorial practice.[8] The liturgy, or text of the
Mass, the skeleton and fixed basis, so to speak, of the ritual as a
whole, began to take shape in the hands of the apostles themselves;
was developed by a gradual accretion of prayers, hymns, responses,
and readings from Scripture; was translated into Latin and adopted by
the Roman Church; and became fixed in practically its present form so
early as the end of the sixth century. When we consider the almost
superstitious regard in which its great antiquity caused it to be
held, and when we reflect that the musical setting used with it was
considered a mere appanage to the sacred words, we can understand
the slow development of music in the first eleven centuries of the
Christian era. In taking its first steps music was not merely hampered
by its own uncertainty and infantile feebleness; it was paralyzed by
servile dependence on a text swathed within the bandages of priestly
convention.
The only form of music used in the Church, up to the beginning of
the twelfth century, the only form of music ever given its official
sanction, was the Gregorian chant or plain song, which consists
in a single unaccompanied series of tones set to the liturgic
text, intoned by priest or choristers, and for many centuries used
exclusively throughout the entire service. It has not only no
harmony, but, properly speaking, no meter or rhythm, being dependent
for time-measurement on the prose text it accompanies. “It follows”
says Mr. Dickinson,[9] “the phrasing, the emphasis, and the natural
inflections of the voice in reciting the text, at the same time that it
idealizes them. It is a sort of heightened form of speech, a musical
declamation, having for its object the intensifying of the emotional
powers of ordinary spoken language. It stands to true song or tune
in much the same relation as prose to verse, less impassioned, more
reflective, yet capable of moving the heart like eloquence.” Having
neither harmonic nor metrical relationship, it had, of course, no
proper structure of its own; and so long as it was used in this primary
way, sung in unison or even in two parts at the interval of an octave,
there was little about it that could properly be called musical at all.
But after a while it occurred to some one to let a second set of voices
sing the same chant at an interval of a fifth above the first.[10]
This scheme, which, simple as it was, contained the seeds of wonderful
developments, was probably first recommended by several practical
advantages. When the chant was sung by two choirs, one made up of
the high voices (soprano and tenors) and the other of the low voices
(contraltos and basses) the interval of the octave was practically
inconvenient because the low voices could not use their highest tones
without throwing the high voices out of range, and the high voices
could not use their lowest tones without similarly embarrassing the
low ones. When the interval of the fifth was used, on the contrary,
practically all the tones in both ranges, which are by nature about a
fifth apart,[11] became available. This was a very practical argument
in favor of chanting “at the fifth.” An even stronger one was the fact
that, while fifths, like octaves, are harmonious and pleasant to the
ear, without harshness or discordance, they are richer than octaves,
and their constituents stand out distinct instead of merging into
one impression, as do tones an octave apart; so that the practice of
Organum, or chanting at the fifth, was harmonically sweet and full as
well as melodically interesting. Organum came therefore into general
and wide use in the mediæval church. Hucbald, a monkish writer of the
tenth century, gives the following example of a fragment of plain chant
“organized,” or sung by two voices a fifth apart:
[Music: score]
[Illustration: FIGURE II. EXAMPLE OF ORGANUM.]
_In patris sempiturnus es filius._
The practice of Organum, crude as it may seem to modern ears, was
or immense historical importance, as the first embodiment of that
principle of combining various parts simultaneously which in due
time produced all the resources of polyphony and of harmony. It is
not necessary to examine here, in detail, all the stages of that
long and weary journey which the mediæval composers made from this
starting-point of Organum to the highly developed contrapuntal music
of the sixteenth century. In all its aspects it was essentially a
growth in definiteness, coherence, and heterogeneity. The parts were
combined with more and more freedom, both as to their comparative rate
of movement and as to the purity of the chords they made at prominent
points (less harmonious intervals being gradually tolerated); the
number of parts was increased, in spite of the great difficulties
that each additional part must have meant to writers with inadequate
experience and models; experiments were tried in combining together
tunes already composed, popular songs and the like, trimming and
twisting and compressing or expanding them to make them fit; the device
of imitation, of which more will be said presently, was introduced in
the interests of sense and coherence;[12] one experiment after another
was tried, one resource after another was utilized, until eventually,
in the sixteenth century, the art of ecclesiastical counterpoint[13]
was fully established.
To this sixteenth-century music it is difficult for modern ears to
listen appreciatively. The exact value and significance of chords,
cadences, and melodic phrases, like the exact significance of words in
language, depends so largely upon current usage and the mental habits
it reposes upon, that it is as much an effort for modern listeners to
comprehend mediæval music as it is for the modern reader to understand
the vocabulary of Chaucer or Shakespeare. Just as words, in the course
of long service, gradually take on new associations, new shades of
suggestion, and even, in extreme cases, a significance quite opposite
to their original one, so the material of music, as used to-day, has
hundreds of associations and subtle shades of value, developed only
during the last three hundred years, but nevertheless permeating our
minds so thoroughly that it is almost impossible for us to think them
away.
--Perhaps the most inveterate of these modern habits of musical thought
is the harmonic habit. It is second nature for us to conduct all our
musical thinking in terms of harmonic relations. We think of chords
as related to one another in certain fixed ways, as forming groups
or clusters just as definite as the groups of atoms in a chemical
molecule. It is not more sure, for example, that in a molecule of water
two atoms of hydrogen are engaged or held in combination by one atom
of oxygen, than it is that in any key the dominant and sub-dominant
chords are held in the position of subordinate companions by the tonic
chord, and that the other chords of the key are held in more remote but
still perfectly fixed relations with this Paterfamilias of the harmonic
family. We think of the chords in a phrase, of whatever length and
complexity, as progressing in a coherent series, as intertwined one
with another by manifold relationships, and as embodying, all together,
some one key. For us, every composition is in some particular key as
inevitably as every poem or essay is in some particular language.
We modulate freely, to be sure, from key to key; but this rather
intensifies than obliterates our sense of key, just as the process
of translating from one language to another intensifies our sense of
the peculiar idioms of each. Our whole manner of thought would be as
indescribably shocked by a passage which placed together, cheek by
jowl, chords belonging to different keys, as by a sentence every word
of which was drawn from a different tongue.
Now this habit of thought simply did not exist in Palestrina and his
contemporaries and forerunners; it had not been evolved. The bit of
Organum given in Figure II is hideous to modern ears just because
it violates at every step our harmonic sense; it was pleasant to
its composer, whoever he was, because he had no harmonic sense to
be violated. To us, the sound of a tone with its fifth suggests
immediately and inexorably the whole “triad” founded on that
tone--root, third, fifth, and octave--and the key we consider it to be
in. The sound of the tone and its fifth summons up in our imagination
the whole chord and its key just as automatically as the sight of a
horse’s head arouses in us an image of the trunk, legs, and tail that
accompany it. This being the case, the bit of Organum quoted means for
us a series of abrupt transitions from key to key, without warning,
reason, or coherence. It is musical nonsense, gibberish, delirium. To
its composer, on the contrary, it was merely an agreeable combination
of two pleasing melodies in a harmonious interval. The chords used
had for him no implications, no necessary relations, the observance
of which made sense, the violation nonsense. They were pleasant
combinations of sounds formed by the melodies in their progress; and
that was all. Even more striking becomes the contrast between mediæval
and modern usage in the more mature music of the later contrapuntal
epoch. Palestrina, for example, begins a Stabat Mater as follows:
[Music: score]
[Illustration: FIGURE III.]
_Stabat mater dolorosa,_
Here the first three chords, a modern musician would say, are in as
many keys. The first is the triad of A-major, the second that of
G-major, and the third that of F-major. The coherence of the passage
depends, in fact, entirely on the melodies; the chords they form have
no harmonic cohesiveness. For the old composers, in whose scores
hundreds of such passages may be found, harmony was still a sensuous,
not an intellectual or æsthetic agent.
Another peculiarity of their harmonic style resulted from their
attitude toward dissonances, or chords containing harsh intervals.
Dissonance, as we shall have frequent occasion to see, plays an
important part in modern music, both as an indispensable element in
design and as a means of peculiar emotional expressiveness. In the
sixteenth century, on the contrary, dissonances were admitted in the
harmonic fabric but sparingly, and when admitted were subject to
stringent rules, the purpose of which was to mollify their harshness.
The result was not only still further to preclude the sense of harmonic
sequence and coherence so essential to modern ears, and produced
largely by the skilful use of dissonance merging into consonance, but
also to limit the expressive powers of music to that range of feeling
which is aroused by the purest, clearest, and most mellifluous chords
sounding continuously, without contrast or relief.
But if the music of the sixteenth century was lacking in harmonic
cogency and intensity, it was not for that reason either incoherent
or inexpressive. It had its own sort of coherence, its own type of
eloquence, both depending on melodic rather than on harmonic qualities.
Music was to Palestrina and his fellows entirely a matter of melody,
not of harmony at all. The reader needs only to glance again at Figure
III, attending not to the chords and their sequence, but to the
individual voices, one after another, to see that in their own way the
phrases hang together firmly, and say efficiently what they mean. Each
of the four voices has an intelligible and expressive part, and if
together they sound a little strange, singly they are eminently good.
The more one studies this old music the more one realizes that it is
all melody; from beginning to end, from top to bottom, the mediæval
scores _sing_. They are not, like many modern works, full of inert,
lifeless matter, tones put in to fill out the harmonies, and having no
melodic excuse for being. In the modern monophonic style, in which but
one melody sings, the remaining parts are almost inevitably treated by
the composer as affording rather a logical sequence of harmonies than
a subsidiary tissue of melodic strands. In the sixteenth century, on
the other hand, harmony was the accident, melody the essence; any chord
would do very well in any place, provided it were consonant enough not
to offend the ear; but every tone must have a melodic reason for being;
it must be a point in a line; all the lines must be conducted with
draughtsman-like deftness and economy. Melodic life is accordingly the
supreme trait of the style well named polyphonic.
And yet, here we encounter still another difficulty introduced by
modern habits of thought. To us nowadays melody means, not merely
a series of tones having that sort of elementary consecutiveness
which we find in Palestrina, for example, but a series of tones
divided up into several definite segments which in someway balance,
complement, and complete one another. The first phrase of “Yankee
Doodle” has “elementary consecutiveness,” but it does not satisfy
our melodic sense. We must add the second phrase, equal to it in
length, which echoes and reinforces it, and the third phrase, twice
as long as either, which rounds out the whole tune to a complete
period. In short, just as harmony involves for us chord structure and
inter-relation, melody involves for us metrical balance, response,
symmetry--that recognizable recurrence, to use the most general term
possible, which we call “rhythm.” Mere eloquent intoning, without
repetition and balance of phrases, is to us no more “tune” than prose
is verse. Here again we are in danger of letting our own habits of
thought confuse our understanding of an unfamiliar type of art. The
truth is, Palestrina does not write “tunes,” in the modern sense of the
word. He lived and wrote before musical evolution had given the world
that principle of metrical structure so essential to modern music; and
his style, therefore, lacks definite meter, lacks all rhythm save that
vague one superposed upon it by his Latin prose text. His music, devoid
of any regular segmental division, is indeed a sort of tonal prose, as
massive and majestic as the “Religio Medici.”
One other technical peculiarity of the music of the polyphonic period
deserves notice here, as it involved a principle destined to assume
great importance in later stages of art. The polyphonic writers often
introduced successive voices with an identical formula of notes,
which by repetition came to have somewhat the virtue of a motif or
subject in giving to the music rationality and sequence. They had not
as yet, to be sure, enough experience in composing definite themes
strictly measured in time to make these embryonic motifs either very
long or very distinct, but they did make and utilize subjects striking
enough to be remembered and recognized. In this way they introduced
the important device of “Imitation.” This imitating of one part by
another, even when crudely carried out, gave a certain air of intention
and fore-thought to what without it would have been a haphazard
utterance of tones, and in later times, when developed to a high
pitch of perfection in the fugue and allied forms, became a powerful
agent for securing intelligibility. Meanwhile, as we have seen, the
intelligibility of the sixteenth-century music depended chiefly on the
fine melodic cogency and expressiveness of its individual voice parts.
Although time-measurement was well understood, melody was without
metrical structure and rhythmic organization. Harmony was the art of
making pleasant sounds by bringing the voices together, at prominent
moments, on consonant chords; it took no heed of chord relation,
of tonality, or of orderly modulation; and it used dissonance with
extreme conservatism. Such, in sum, were the most notable technical
peculiarities of that polyphonic period which Palestrina brought to its
culmination.
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.
In character Palestrina was devout, pious, frugal, and industrious.
Though so few records exist, we can guess his industry from the mass
of the work he achieved, and his honor and sense of responsibility
from his anxiety when the support of his family seemed in danger. As
to his piety, all his music is one eloquent demonstration of it. Nor
is it without verbal testimony in the dedications and inscriptions on
his manuscripts. In dedicating his first book of motets to Cardinal
d’Este he expressed his artistic convictions as follows: “Music exerts
a great influence on the minds of mankind, and is intended not only to
cheer these, but also to guide and control them, a statement which has
not only been made by the ancients, but which is found equally true
to-day. The sharper blame, therefore, do those deserve who misemploy
so great and splendid a gift of God in light or unworthy things, and
thereby excite men, who of themselves are inclined to all evil, to sin
and misdoing. As regards myself, I have from youth been affrighted at
such misuse, and anxiously have I avoided giving forth anything which
could lead anyone to become more wicked or godless. All the more should
I, now that I have attained to riper years, and am not far removed from
old age, place my entire thoughts on lofty, earnest things, such as
are worthy of a Christian.” When, in 1594, Palestrina died, almost his
last words, whispered to his son Igino, directed the publication of his
latest manuscript works, “to the glory of the most high God, and the
worship of his holy temple.”
A sentence in the dedication by Palestrina just cited affords us as
serviceable a key as we could desire to the fundamental temper or mood
of mind which underlay the type of art he represents. The technical
peculiarities of this art already traced in the foregoing pages, do
not in themselves explain it; they are, indeed, but manifestations of
a deeper spirit underneath, a spirit that was as characteristic of the
mediæval mind as idealism is of the modern mind. Incommensurate as were
the technical resources of the mediæval composer with ours, their whole
mental temper and outlook upon life was in even more striking contrast
with the modern attitude. We have, therefore, next to ask: What was
the most characteristic peculiarity of this age? What was its most
pervasive general trait? What was the one dominant quality in which
most of Palestrina’s contemporaries, for all their minor differences,
were alike?
Palestrina himself suggests the answer to such questions. “The sharper
blame, therefore,” he writes, “do those deserve who misemploy so great
and splendid a gift of God in light or unworthy things, and thereby
excite men, who of themselves are inclined to all evil, to sin and
misdoing.” This setting in antithesis of “men, who of themselves are
inclined to all evil,” with the attribution of a “great and splendid
gift” to a God conceived as remote from men though beneficent to
them, exemplifies the essence of that mediæval view of life which we
wish to understand, and for which perhaps the best single name is
mysticism. The mystic begins his philosophy with a sharp sundering of
himself, considered as an individual existing in time and space, with
earthly body, finite mind, and human passions, from what he considers
supreme, formless, and eternal good. In common with other men, he has
his instinctive perceptions of the divine; but unlike other men he
cuts off very sharply the divine thus perceived from the real world
in which he eats and drinks, works and plays, lives and dies. His is
a world of strong contrasts, of extreme antithesis--the world that
mystical terminology divides into “apparent and real,” “divine and
carnal,” “temporal and eternal.” His intuition of what is beyond the
veil of mortality, absolute, permanent, serves only to emphasize more
poignantly his own frailty, partiality, and transience. He not only
hypostatizes his own ideal, his dream and aspiration of what ought to
be, making of it, as all men do, a real objective existence, but he
then cuts it off from himself, makes it a touchstone of all the dross
that in him exists alongside the pure gold, and while he attributes
all virtue to this “other” or “beyond” projected by his unconscious
imagination, reserves to his present actual self, as directly known,
all wickedness, sin, and failure. God is perfect, but remote; man is
near--and base.
This was the characteristic attitude of religious-minded men in
the middle ages. If to us it may seem pathetically childish and
superstitious, we should not judge it without remembering the epoch of
which it was a part. When we reconstruct in imagination that historic
moment, that peculiar inheritance and environment of the sixteenth
century Europeans, it is hard to conceive how else they could have
interpreted the world. Theirs was an age, we must remind ourselves, of
violence and bloodshed, of greed, hypocrisy, lust, and faithlessness.
Craft and cruelty reigned in places of power, and the minds of the
common people groped in the obscurity of gross ignorance, made even
darker by fitful flashes of superstition. The poor were ground down by
tyrannies and oppressions, the powerful were tormented by constant
dread of treachery and assassination. Plagues and pestilence, war and
famine and drought, made physical existence miserable; priestly bigotry
and dogmatism crushed all mental initiative. It is not surprising that
humanity, in the midst of such conditions, failed to recognize, as the
source of its beliefs, its own latent virtue; the wonder is rather that
it succeeded in rising at all to the intuition of a holiness which, by
a natural error, it conceived as entirely severed from itself. It was
much to arrive at this point. The object of the present analysis is not
to discredit the mediæval conception of the world, but, by pointing out
its peculiarities, to throw light on the music which was one of its
profoundest utterances.
The most familiar, and in some respects the most characteristic,
element of mysticism is its ecstatic, devout attitude towards the
deity or Absolute it worships. The mystic throws himself on the ground
before his God, so to speak, in an ecstasy of complete self-abandonment
and surrender. He is utterly prone, passive, will-less. His worship
is the most complete, the most devoted worship of which there is
record. The Greek pagans might sacrifice a lamb or an ox at the
altars of their gods, the mystic sacrifices nothing less than himself,
his very personality. He desires no reciprocal relations with his
deity, makes no reservations in his commerce with it, retains no
claim to independence, seeks no special favors; what he longs for,
whole-heartedly and with a passionate fervor, is complete absorption,
utter annihilation. In the trances of the devotees, consciousness
dwindles to a point, all sense of individuality lapses, perception,
sensation, thought even, flag and cease, and there remains only a vast,
vague sense of the infinite self in which the human self is dissolved
and obliterated.
So prominent a feature in this longing or absorption in the infinite,
however, was the characteristic mystical condemnation of the finite,
that an account of the relations of mystical belief and practice to
the affairs of actual life reduces itself largely to a series of
negative statements. Closely connected with the dogma of the supreme
worth of the absolute, and producing even more conspicuous effects than
that, was the obverse dogma of the worthlessness of the immediate,
of whatever could be called “this,” “now,” or “here.” Love of God
was considered to involve contempt of man, and since man was nearer,
more immediate in experience, than God, mysticism expressed itself,
historically, very largely in negations. It acted, in all departments
of life, and on all planes--the physical, the intellectual, and the
emotional or spiritual--as an anti-naturalistic force, for which,
perhaps, the best general name is asceticism.
On the physical plane, asceticism took the form of abstinence and
mortification of the flesh. In its milder phases it prompted merely
the refusal of all the natural calls of instinct and appetite. Because
it was natural to hunger, asceticism required men to fast; because to
sleep was natural, it counselled vigils; because men naturally enjoy
women’s love, material well-being, and personal initiative, monastic
orders imposed the triple oath of celibacy, poverty, and obedience.
Of course it is true that there were positive benefits to be derived
from all these modes of discipline, and that much could be argued in
their favor by mere common-sense; but over and above their positive
virtues there was about them an opposition to nature, a violence
to human instincts, that even more irresistibly commended them to
true ascetics. A still further application of the same principle was
mortification of the flesh. Indian Jogis, Mohammedan dervishes and
fakirs, Christian cenobites and anchorites, all, in a word, who held
the mystical doctrine of the absolute opposition of body and spirit,
believed that to mortify the flesh was to vivify the soul, and carried
out their belief with the help of a thousand engines of penance.
On the intellectual plane, the same distrust of man and of nature
prompted an agelong opposition to science, to independent metaphysical
or religious thinking, and indeed to all forms of free mental
activity. The story of Galileo summoned before the seven cardinals
at Rome and forced to deny his belief in the heretical doctrine that
the earth revolved round the sun is typical of the experiences of
almost all venturesome thinkers in the middle age. The application
of human intellect to the unravelling of the august mysteries of God
was zealously punished as a blasphemy; the only authorized channel
of knowledge was revelation. The rational and systematic questioning
of nature that has given us modern science was by the true mystical
mind held in horror, first because the intelligence is a human and
therefore corrupt instrument, and secondly because nature itself is an
illusion, a pitfall for unwary feet that falter in their search for
heaven.
An asceticism which saw in the physical and intellectual activities
of the natural man more evil than good, could hardly be expected to
look more leniently on his emotional life, which is, perhaps, the most
intensely human and natural part of him, and of which the organized
expression is art. Ordinary human feelings, exercised spontaneously in
the present world, and not as mere offerings to the beyond, seemed to
the ascetic as unworthy of a God-fearing man as sensuous pleasures and
intellectual quests. And especially abhorrent to him was their free
embodiment in art. As religion is the expression of man’s consciousness
of the supernatural, so art is the expression of his delight and joy
in the natural. Its work is to build, out of primitive sensations,
utterances of feeling and monuments of beauty. But these sensations are
all ultimately physical. These feelings are the simple, instinctive
feelings of humanity, and this beauty is one that is apprehended by no
metaphysical faculty, but by ordinary human powers--by the senses,
the heart, and the mind. Art is the most radically and inexorably
human of all man’s interests. And since the whole bias of asceticism
was against the free development or expression of merely human powers,
it was inevitable that mysticism, in which the ascetic element is so
considerable, should be even more restrictive than helpful in its
influence on art. While it did indeed foster the purely devout and
adoring element in artistic expression, it discouraged that full appeal
to the whole man by which alone art attains its maturity.
The music of Palestrina’s age is probably the most consummate
expression in the whole history of art of this peculiar type of
feeling, with all its characteristic qualities and limitations.
“No other form of chorus music has existed,” writes Mr. Edward
Dickinson,[14] “so objective and impersonal, so free from the stress
and stir of passion, so plainly reflecting an exalted, spiritualized
state of feeling. This music is singularly adapted to reinforce the
impression of the Catholic mysteries by reason of its technical
form and its peculiar emotional appeal.... It is as far as possible
removed from profane suggestion; in its ineffable calmness, and an
indescribable tone of chastened exultation, pure from every trace of
struggle, with which it vibrates, it is the most adequate emblem of
that eternal repose toward which the believer yearns.”
It was, we must now once more insist, these peculiar qualities of
feeling to be expressed in mystical art, that reacted to determine
the peculiarities of the technique in which they had to be embodied,
just as a man’s spirit reacts to determine the nature of the body in
which its purposes have to be wrought out. That “ineffable calmness,”
that “chastened exultation,” of the mystical temper, could be voiced
in sound only through the medium of clear, ethereal vocal tones,
combined in chords prevailingly consonant and void of harshness.
Such a translucent fabric of tones as was produced by human voices,
singing, without instrumental accompaniment, the purest consonances,
was best fitted to merge with the vast, cool arch of the cathedral,
with the unlocalized murmur and reverberation that stirred in it, and
with the somnolent fumes of incense, to form a background apt for
mystical contemplation. And then, against this background, the phrases
of aspiring but unimpassioned melody which one by one sounded above
the general murmur, traced, as it were, arabesques of more definite
human feeling. One by one they rose into momentary prominence, to hover
above the other voices as prayers hover among the tranquil thoughts of
simple and devout minds. There was about them a celestial clarity, an
unearthly plangency of accent, but no turmoil or confusion, no hint of
mortal pain.
Complete impersonality was attained by the exclusion of dissonance and
of meter. The emotional function of dissonance is to suggest, by its
harshness, and by its sharp contrast with the consonances by which
it is surrounded, the struggle and the fragmentariness of all finite
existence. Like a cry of incompleteness yearning to be completed, it
is eloquent to us of our loneliness and bitter self-consciousness.
Meter similarly insists on reminding us of our petty human selves by
stimulating us to make those gestures and motions that bring into full
activity our muscular expression, with all its mental consequents.
To hear a strong rhythm is to be irresistibly reminded of all those
active impulses in us which underlie our sense of finite personality.
It was, then, by its negative peculiarities, by its avoidance of all
harmonic mordancy and definition, and of all rhythmic vigor, that
Palestrina’s music secured its impersonality, its freedom from “profane
suggestion,” and from “every trace of struggle.” Its positive and
negative qualities thus cooperated so efficiently as to make it an
incomparable exponent of the mystical mood. It not only could induce
that rapt attitude of worship which was the kernel of mysticism, but it
also skilfully avoided all disturbing hints of personal, finite, and
secular activities. It comes to our modern ears like a voice from some
grey mediæval cloister, tremulous with a divine passion, but utterly
void of all those earthly passions in which the sweet is subtly mingled
with the bitter, and human pathos is more audible than heavenly peace.
Palestrina marked the culmination of his school; the pure polyphonic
style ended with him. Was this merely because his younger
contemporaries, overawed by his perfect skill, dared not enter the
lists in rivalry with such a master? Or was it rather that men’s minds
had arrived at the period of a fresh insight, and that the time was
ripe for an obliteration of hard and fast distinctions between sacred
and secular, spiritual and carnal, eternal and temporal, and for a
proclamation of the native dignity and worth of man himself, in the
fullness of his sensuous, intellectual, and emotional life?
FOOTNOTES:
[7] “Renaissance in Italy.” Part III. The Fine Arts, p. 6.
[8] See, for a complete description of the Church ritual, Mr. Edward
Dickinson’s “History of Music in the Western Church,” Chapters III and
IV.
[9] Op. cit., p. 96.
[10] See Chapter I, p. 25.
[11]
[Music: score]
[Illustration: FIGURE I. RANGE OF SOPRANOS AND TENORS. (D to G.)]
[Illustration: RANGE OF CONTRALTOS AND BASSES. (G to C.)]
[12] See page 61.
[13] The word counterpoint, from the Latin “punctus contra punctum,”
meaning note (or point) against note, describes that mode of writing in
which various melodies progress simultaneously, or one against another.
[14] Op. cit., p. 178.