The singers were expert in rendering difficult passages, in developing unpromising motives, and in embroidering the arras-work of the composer with fanciful extravagances of vocal execution.  The instrumentalists were trained in the art of copying effects of fugue or madrigal by lutes and viols in concerted pieces.  The people were used to dance and sing and touch the mandoline together; in every house were found amateurs who could with voice and string produce the studied compositions of the masters.

What was really lacking, amid this exuberance of musical resources, in this thick jungle of technical facilities, was a controlling element of correct taste, a right sense of the proper function of music as an interpretative art.  On the very threshold of its modern development, music had fallen into early decay owing to the misapplication of the means so copiously provided by nature and by exercise.  A man of genius and of substantial intuition into the real ends of vocal music was demanded at this moment, who should guide the art into its destined channel.  And in order to elicit such a creator of new impulses, such a Nomothetes of the disordered state, it was requisite that external pressure should be brought to bear upon the art.  An initiator of the right caliber was found in Palestrina.  The pressure from without was supplied by the Council of Trent.

It may here be parenthetically remarked that music, all through modern history, has needed such legislators and initiators of new methods.  Considered as an art of expression, she has always tended to elude control, to create for herself a domain extraneous to her proper function, and to erect her resources of mere sound into self-sufficingness.  What Palestrina effected in the sixteenth century, was afterwards accomplished on a wider platform by Gluck in the eighteenth, and in our own days the same deliverance has been attempted by Wagner.  The efforts of all these epoch-making musicians have been directed toward restraining the tendencies of music to assert an independence, which for herself becomes the source of weakness by reducing her to co-operation with insignificant words, and which renders her subservient to merely technical dexterities.

Giovanni Pier Luigi, called Palestrina from his birthplace in one of the Colonna fiefs near Rome, the ancient Praeneste, was born of poor parents, in the year 1524, He went to Rome about 1540, and began his musical career probably as a choir-boy in one of the Basilicas.  Claude Goudimel, the Besancon composer, who subsequently met a tragic death at Lyons in a massacre of Huguenots, had opened a school of harmony in Rome, where Palestrina learned the first rudiments of that science.  What Palestrina owed to Goudimel, is not clear.  But we have the right to assume that the Protestant part-songs of the French people which Goudimel transferred to the hymn-books of the Huguenots, had a potent influence upon the formation of his style.  They may have