Music of the Pre-Classical Period

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1514-1594) may be considered the first to attain relative perfection in culmination of some centuries of musical evolution. Since his works are among the oldest that still carry charm to modern ears, and because they represent the beauty, the polish and the spirit usually associated with classic art, Palestrina is seen to stand on a fine vantage ground connecting the two or three centuries which preceded, and the nearly four centuries which have elapsed since his time.

It is not the rule in world history that great events stand entirely isolated, either as to time or as to conditions prevailing about the earth. The succession of musical influences which could finally produce a Palestrina had been certainly at work since the twelfth century era of the Provence singers, those troubadours whose art continued into the time and artistic consciousness of the poet Petrarch. It was a long time after the arrival of the troubadours and the minnesingers before the art of musical notation had become exact enough to indicate rhythm at all. Yet is was through the life they led, particularly in supplying moods not germane to the Church, that the masses, motets and chansons of the Church were liberalized to the entertaining type of the Flemish and Italian frottole and to the madrigal, which became the dominating pastime of the very century in which Palestrina lived.

Continuing for awhile the process of association as against isolation, one observes what was the nature of other enterprises going on all over the world, from the time of the troubadours to the birth of Palestrina. Probably earliest of all, the mid era of Provencal song, on themes of heroism and the love of woman, was surely covered by the remarkable military ascendancy of the Mongol Tartars under Genghis Khan (1162-1227). And at the time of the Tartar crossing of the Caucasus into Russia, in 1225, England had evolved the round and was soon to produce the true four part canon which is still preserved in the British Museum. Another half century found Dante helping to fix the Italian language, just as the Koran, centuries before, had fixed classic Arabic, as Chaucer contributed to the English language a century after Dante, and as Luther organized the German, still a century after Chaucer. By the year 1400, musical polyphony had been mastered, and in 1416 and 1419 Dufay was already writing polyphony for wedding celebrations. Just then the painters Hubert and Jan van Eyck were in their prime. Meantime Dante, Chaucer and Petrarch were dead, yet their works were contributing powerfully to that changed attitude toward intellectual activity, the Renaissance, that Revival of Learning which came to full power about 1450, and which still holds place as one of the most significant of all cultural eras.

Returning to the musicians, from 1400 there had been a very voluminous output of masses, motets and chansons. Dunstable, Binchois and Dufay were employing musical imitation, even strictly canonic, yet not in regular periods in the sense of modern "form." During this century the explorers Columbus and da Gama, the painters Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Raphael, Titian and Albrecht Durer were born. These men were well in their prime when Petrucci published, from 1502 to 1508, some 900 of the Flemish and Italian frottole which were the immediate predecessors of the madrigal. In 1507 came the first publishing of music for the lute. At about the time Palestrina was born, 1520, the first of the Amati violin makers also was born, Luther was already protesting against indulgences and was soon to issue the first hymn book, while still a little later Orlando de Lassus and the violin maker Gasparo da Salo were born. Before the year 1600, and during the life of Palestrina, Shakespeare and Maggini were born, Gabrielli was already writing music for voices and orchestral instruments, and on the very year of Palestrina's death came the first music drama. By 1600, the first year of oratorio, there were already two thousand madrigals in print.

In view of the all dominating position occupied by the madrigal during the entire sixteenth and part of the seventeenth centuries, it is well to follow this art form in great detail of its history. Then if the madrigal had come to its importance largely in differentiating an entertaining polyphony from the staid polyphony of the Church, so the same art form became the turning point where on instrumental music began to assert its independence from the vocal. The composers first learned what advantage there was in having instruments play along with the voices of the madrigal, and soon they composed their works to be performed either by voices or by instruments. It was Palestrina's contemporary, Giovanni Gabrielli (1557-1612), who first gave much attention to such instrumental procedure with the voices. And when the instrumental madrigal once arrived, ti perpetuated itself for a while in the newly discovered divertissement called opera.

After the invention of music drama in 1594, the very strong representative composer it soon found in Claudio Monteverde was but a new fruit from an old stock, for when Monteverde wrote his first opera, "Orfeo," in 1607, he was already a famed madrigalist. His publishing of madrigals, beginning in 1583, continued long after the face of his great success as opera composer, even to the year 1638. As one who helped to establish the importance of the orchestra, Monteverde was one of the first to feel the need of preponderating stringed instruments, and in this the newly perfected instruments of the Amatis furnished to varied tone color of violins, violas and cellos, to which string corps Monteverde added only the harp. In Movteverde's madrigal writing he had aroused criticism and controversy earlier because of his practice of having the first voice carry most of the melody, the other voices carrying the harmonic burden. Notwithstanding his critics, the innovation became a strong influence toward the declamatroy style shown in his early operas.

Summarizing the attainments and the tendencies of the sixteenth century, aside from the strictly classical influence of Palestrina, one may observe that the liberalization of instrumental treatment was already in evidence at St. Mark's Cathedral, where Willaert, as organist from 1527 to 1562, obtained new effects with the two choirs and two organs. And though he is not thought to have been one of the first to grasp the possibilities of the madrigal, he maintained his position as one of the strongest writers in that form. This he was able to do for the period in which madrigal composition was at its highest and its greatest.

The composers who contributed to the four or five centuries of musical evolution, to the time when the advent of opera suddenly changed the trend, were many in number and worthy of great praise for their accomplishments and their industry. It was a long way, through the music of the troubadours, the Provence singers, the minnesingers, the meistersingers, the mass, motet, chanson, frottole and the madrigal. The position of the Netherlanders remains incontestably strong during the consolidation of the various forces, because they not only accomplished much on their own ground, but their influence was a very tenacious on during the first decades after the transfer of activity to Italy. The proximity of England to the Netherlands gave the former country easy opportunity to distinguish itself for a long period on the devious way, from North and South France, to Italy. If Germany does not seem to have had an organic part in this particular succession, it is probably because the mass and the madrigal had busy substitutes in the meistersong and the Protestant chorale, neither of which was polyphonic. It was still too soon to anticipate the polyphonic supremacy that Germany was destined to attain in the eighteenth century, through the imposing genius of Johann Sebastian Bach.