I have alluded, were supplied by artists whom long training in this kind of music enabled to perform their separate sallies and to execute their several antics within certain limits of recognized license.  But since each vied with the other to produce striking effects, the choir rivaling the orchestra, the tenor competing with the bass, the organ with the viol, it followed that the din of their accumulated efforts was not unjustly compared to that made by a ’sty of grunting pigs,’ the builders of the Tower of Babel, or the ’squalling of cats in January.’[206] ‘All their happiness,’ writes a contemporary critic, ’consisted in keeping the bass singer to the fugue, while at the same time one voice was shouting out Sanctus, another Sabaoth, a third gloria tua, with howlings, bellowings and squealings that cannot be described.’

[Footnote 205:  While the choir was singing, the orchestra was playing concerted pieces called ricercari, in which the vocal parts were reproduced.]

[Footnote 206:  See the original passages from contemporary writers quoted by Baini, vol. i. pp. 102-104.  Savonarola went so far as to affirm:  ‘Che questo canto figurato l’ha trovato Satanasso,’ a phrase quite in the style of a Puritan abusing choirs and organs.]

It must not be thought that this almost unimaginable state of things indicated a defect either of intellectual capacity or of artistic skill.  It was due rather to the abuse of science and of virtuosity, both of which had attained to a high degree of development.  It manifested the decadence of music in its immaturity, through over-confident employment of exuberant resources on an end inadequate for the fulfillment of the art.  Music, it must be remembered, unlike literature and plastic art, had no antique tradition to assimilate, no masterpieces of accomplished form to study.  In the modern world it was an art without connecting links to bind it to the past.  And this circumstance rendered it liable to negligent treatment by a society that prided itself upon the recovery of the classics.  The cultivated classes abandoned it in practice to popular creators of melody upon the one hand, and to grotesque scholastic pedants on the other.  And from the blending of those ill-accorded elements arose the chaos which I have attempted to describe.

Learned composers in the style developed by the Flemish masters had grown tired of writing simple music for four voices and a single choir.  They reveled in the opportunity of combining eight vocal parts and bringing three choirs with accompanying orchestras into play at the same time.  They were proud of proving how by counterpoint the most dissimilar and mutually-jarring factors could be wrought into a whole, intelligible to the scientific musician, though unedifying to the public.  In the neglect of their art, considered as an art of interpretation and expression, they abandoned themselves to intricate problems and to the presentation of incongruous complexities.