Julius II. in 1513 founded a chapel in the Vatican Basilica called the Cappella Giulia for the maintenance of twelve male singers, twelve boys, and two masters of the choristers.  In doing so it was his object to encourage a Roman school of music and to free the Chapter of S. Peter’s from the inconvenience of being forced to engage foreign choir-men.  His scheme, however, had been only partially successful.  As late as 1540, we find that the principal composers and musicians in Rome were still foreigners.  To three Italians of repute, there were five Flemings, three Frenchmen, three Spaniards, one German, and one Portuguese.[204]

[Footnote 204:  See Baini, Life of Palestrina, vol. ii. p. 20.]

The Flemish style of contrapuntal or figured harmony, which had enchanted Europe by its novelty and grace when Josquin Depres, in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, brought it into universal vogue, was still dominant in Italy.  But this style already showed unmistakable signs of decadence and dissolution.  It had become unfit for ecclesiastical uses, and by the exaggeration of its qualities it was tending to anarchy.  The grand defect of Flemish music, considered as an art of expression, was that it ignored propriety and neglected the libretto.  Instead of exercising original invention, instead of suiting melodies to words by appropriate combinations of sound and sense, the composers chose any musical themes that came to hand, and wrought them up into elaborate contrapuntal structures without regard for their book.  The first words of a passage from the Creed, for instance, were briefly indicated at the outset of the number:  what followed was but a reiteration of the same syllables, and divided in the most arbitrary manner to suit the complicated descant which they had to serve.  The singers could not adapt their melodic phrases to the liturgical text, since sometimes passages of considerable length fell upon a couple of syllables, while on the contrary a long sentence might have no more than a bar or even less assigned to it.  They were consequently in the habit of drawling out or gabbling over the words, regardless of both sense and sentiment.  Nor was this all.  The composers of the Flemish school prided themselves on overloading their work with every kind of intricate and difficult ornament, exhibiting their dexterity by canons of many types, inversions, imitations, contrapuntal devices of divers ingenious and distracting species.  The verbal theme became a mere basis for the utterance of scientific artifices and the display of vocal gymnastics.  The singers, for their part, were allowed innumerable licenses.  While the bass sustained the melody, the other voices indulged in extempore descant (composizione alla mente) and in extravagances of technical execution (rifiorimenti), regardless of the style of the main composition, violating time, and setting even the fundamental tone at defiance.

The composers, to advance another step in the analysis of this strange medley, took particular delight in combining different sets of words, melodies of widely diverse character, antagonistic rhythms and divergent systems of accentuation in a single piece.  They assigned these several ingredients to several parts; and for the further exhibition of their perverse skill, went even to the length of coupling themes in the major and the minor.