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.