Music in the History of the Western Church

The national love of pomp and ceremonial display was shown in the church festivals hardly less than in the secular pageants, and all that could embellish the externals of the church solemnities was eagerly adopted. All the most distinguished members of the line of Venetian church composers were connected with the church of St. Mark as choir directors and organists, and they imparted to their compositions a breadth of tone and warmth of color fully in keeping with the historic and artistic glory of this superb temple. The founder of the sixteenth-century Venetian school was Adrian Willaert, a Netherlander, who was chapel-master at St. Mark’s from 1527 to 1563. It was he who first employed the method which became a notable feature of the music of St. Mark’s, of dividing the choir and thus obtaining novel effects of contrast and climax by means of antiphonal chorus singing. The hint was given to Willaert by the construction of the church, which contains two music galleries opposite each other, each with its organ. The freer use of dissonances, so characteristic of the adventurous spirit of the Venetian composers, first became a significant trait in the writings of Willaert.

The tendency to lay less stress upon interior intricacy and more upon harmonic strength, striking tone color, and cumulative grandeur is even more apparent in Willaert’s successors at St. Mark’s, – Cyprian de Rore, Claudio Merulo, and the two Gabrielis. Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli carried the splendid tonal art of Venice to unprecedented heights, adding a third choir to the two of Willaert, and employing alternate choir singing, combinations of parts, and massing of voices in still more ingenious profusion. Winterfeld, the chief historian of this epoch, thus describes the performance of a twelve-part psalm by G. Gabrieli: “Three choruses, one of deep voices, one of higher, and the third consisting of the four usual parts, are separated from each other. Like a tender, fervent prayer begins the song in the deeper chorus, ‘God be merciful unto us and bless us.’ Then the middle choir continues with similar expression, ‘And cause his face to shine upon us.’ The higher chorus strikes in with the words, ‘That thy way may be known upon earth.’ In full voice the strain now resounds from all three choirs, ‘Thy saving health among all nations.’ The words, ‘Thy saving health,’ are given with especial earnestness, and it is to be noticed that this utterance comes not from all the choirs together, nor from a single one entire, but from selected voices from each choir in full-toned interwoven parts. We shall not attempt to describe how energetic and fiery the song, ‘Let all the people praise thee, O God,’ pours forth from the choirs in alternation; how tastefully the master proclaims the words, ‘Let the nations be glad and sing for joy,’ through change of measure and limitation to selected voices from all the choirs; how the words, ‘And God shall bless us,’ are uttered in solemn masses of choral song. Language could give but a feeble suggestion of the magnificence of this music.”66

Great as Giovanni Gabrieli was as master of all the secrets of mediaeval counterpoint and also of the special applications devised by the school of Venice, he holds an even more eminent station as the foremost of the founders of modern instrumental art, which properly took its starting point in St. Mark’s church in the sixteenth century. These men conceived that the organ might claim a larger function than merely aiding the voices here and there, and they began to experiment with independent performances where the ritual permitted such innovation. So we see the first upspringing of a lusty growth of instrumental forms, if they may properly be called forms, – canzonas (the modern fugue in embryo), toccatas, ricercare (at first nothing more than vocal counterpoint transferred to the organ), fantasias, etc., – rambling, amorphous, incoherent pieces, but vastly significant as holding the promise and potency of a new art. Of these far-sighted experimenters Giovanni Gabrieli was easily chief. Consummate master of the ancient forms, he laid the first pier of the arch which was to connect two epochs; honoring the old traditions by his achievements in chorus music, and leading his disciples to perceive possibilities of expression which were to respond to the needs of a new age.

Another composer of the foremost rank demands attention before we take leave of the mediaeval contrapuntal school. Orlandus Lassus (original Flemish Roland de Lattre, Italianized Orlando di Lasso) was a musician whose genius entitles him to a place in the same inner circle with Palestrina and Gabrieli. He lived from 1520 to 1594. His most important field of labor was Munich. In force, variety, and range of subject and treatment he surpasses Palestrina, but is inferior to the great Roman in pathos, nobility, and spiritual fervor. His music is remarkable in view of its period for energy, sharp contrasts, and bold experiments in chromatic alteration. “Orlando,” says Ambros, “is a Janus who looks back toward the great past of music in which he arose, but also forward toward the approaching epoch.” An unsurpassed master of counterpoint, he yet depended much upon simpler and more condensed harmonic movements. The number of his works reaches 2337, of which 765 are secular. His motets hold a more important place than his masses, and in many of the former are to be found elements that are so direct and forceful in expression as almost to be called dramatic. His madrigals and choral songs are especially notable for their lavish use of chromatics, and also for a lusty sometimes rough humor, which shows his keen sympathy with the popular currents that were running strongly in the learned music of his time. Lassus has more significance in the development of music than Palestrina, for the latter’s absorption in liturgic duties kept him within much narrower boundaries. Palestrina’s music is permeated with the spirit of the liturgic chant; that of Lassus with the racier quality of the folk-song. Lassus, although his religious devotion cannot be questioned, had the temper of a citizen of the world; Palestrina that of a man of the cloister. Palestrina’s music reaches a height of ecstasy which Lassus never approached; the latter is more instructive in respect to the tendencies of the time.

Turning again to the analysis of the sixteenth-century chorus and striving to penetrate still further the secret of its charm, we are obliged to admit that it is not its purely musical qualities or the learning and cleverness displayed in its fabrication that will account for its long supremacy or for the enthusiasm which it has often excited in an age so remote as our own. Its aesthetic effect can never be quite disentangled from the impressions drawn from its religious and historic associations. Only the devout Catholic call feel its full import, for to him it shares the sanctity of the liturgy, – it is not simply ear-pleasing harmony, but prayer; not merely a decoration of the holy ceremony, but an integral part of the sacrifice of praise and supplication. And among Protestants those who eulogize it most warmly are those whose opinions on church music are liturgical and austere. Given in a concert hall, in implied competition with modern chorus music, its effect is feeble. It is as religious music – ritualistic religious music – identified with what is most solemn and suggestive in the traditions and ordinances of an ancient faith, that this antiquated form of art makes its appeal to modern taste. No other phase of music is so dependent upon its setting.

There can be no question that the Catholic Church has always endeavored, albeit with a great deal of wavering and inconsistency, to maintain a certain ideal or standard in respect to those forms of art which she employs in her work of education. The frequent injunctions of popes, prelates, councils, and synods for century after century have always held the same tone upon this question. They have earnestly reminded their followers that the Church recognizes a positive norm or canon in ecclesiastical art, that there is a practical distinction between ecclesiastic art and secular art, and that it is a pious duty on the part of churchmen to preserve this distinction inviolate. The Church, however, has never had the courage of this conviction. As J. A. Symonds says, she has always compromised; and so has every church compromised. The inroads of secular styles and modes of expression have always been irresistible except here and there in very limited times and localities. The history of church art, particularly of church music, is the history of the conflict between the sacerdotal conception of art and the popular taste.

What, then, is the theory of ecclesiastical art which the heads of the Catholic Church have maintained in precept and so often permitted to be ignored in practice? What have been the causes and the results of the secularization of religious art, particularly music? These questions are of the greatest practical interest to the student of church music, and the answers to them will form the centre around which all that I have to say from this point about Catholic music will mainly turn.

The strict idea of religious art, as it has always stood more or less distinctly in the thought of the Catholic Church, is that it exists not for the decoration of the offices of worship (although the gratification of the senses is not considered unworthy as an incidental end), but rather for edification, instruction, and inspiration. As stated by an authoritative Catholic writer: “No branch of art exists for its own sake alone. Art is a servant, and it serves either God or the world, the eternal or the temporal, the spirit or the flesh. Ecclesiastical art must derive its rule and form solely from the Church.” “These rules and determinations [in respect to church art] are by no means arbitrary, no external accretion; they have grown up organically from within outward, from the spirit which guides the Church, out of her views and out of the needs of her worship. And herein lies the justification of her symbolism and emblematic expression in ecclesiastical art so long as this holds itself within the limits of tradition. The church of stone must be a speaking manifestation of the living Church and her mysteries. The pictures on the walls and on the altars are not mere adornment for the pleasure of the eye, but for the heart a book full of instruction, a sermon full of truth. And hereby art is raised to be an instrument of edification to the believer, it becomes a profound expositor for thousands, a transmitter and preserver of great ideas for all the centuries.”67 The Catholic Church in her art would subject the literal to the ideal, the particular to the general, the definitive to the symbolic. “The phrase ‘emancipation of the individual,’” says Jakob again, “is not heard in the Church. Art history teaches that the Church does not oppose the individual conception, but simply restrains that false freedom which would make art the servant of personal caprice or of fashion.”

The truth of this principle as a fundamental canon of ecclesiastical art is not essentially affected by the fact that it is only in certain periods and under favorable conditions that it has been strictly enforced. Whenever art reaches a certain point in development, individual determination invariably succeeds in breaking away from tradition. The attainment of technic, attended by the inevitable pride in technic, liberates its possessors. The spirit of the Italian religious painters of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, content to submit their skill to further the educational purposes of the Church, could no longer persist in connection with the growing delight in new technical problems and the vision of the new fields open to art when face to face with reality. The conventional treatment of the Memmis and Fra Angelicos was followed by the naturalistic representation of the Raphaels, the Da Vincis, and the Titians. The same result has followed where pure art has decayed, or where no real appreciation of art ever existed. The stage of church art in its purest and most edifying form is, therefore, only temporary. It exists in the adolescent period of an art, before the achievement of technical skill arouses desire for its unhampered exercise, and when religious ideas are at the same time dominant and pervasive. Neither is doubt to be cast upon the sincerity of the religious motive in this phase of art growth when we discover that its technical methods are identical with those of secular art at the same period. In fact, this general and conventional style which the Church finds suited to her ends is most truly characteristic when the artists have virtually no choice in their methods. The motive of the Gothic cathedral builders was no less religious because their modes of construction and decoration were also common to the civic and domestic architecture of the time. A distinctive ecclesiastical style has never developed in rivalry with contemporary tendencies in secular art, but only in unison with them. The historic church styles are also secular styles, carried to the highest practicable degree of refinement and splendor. These styles persist in the Church after they have disappeared in the mutations of secular art; they become sanctified by time and by the awe which the claim of supernatural commission inspires, and the world at last comes to think of them as inherently rather than conventionally religious.

All these principles must be applied to the sixteenth-century a capella music. In fact, there is no better illustration; its meaning and effect cannot be otherwise understood. Growing up under what seem perfectly natural conditions, patronized by the laity as well as by the clergy, this highly organized, severe, and impersonal style was seen, even before the period of its maturity, to conform to the ideal of liturgic art cherished by the Church; and now that it has become completely isolated in the march of musical progress, this conformity appears even more obvious under contrast. No other form of chorus music has existed so objective and impersonal, so free from the stress and stir of passion, so plainly reflecting an exalted spiritualized state of feeling. This music is singularly adapted to reinforce the impression of the Catholic mysteries by reason of its technical form and its peculiar emotional appeal. The devotional mood that is especially nurtured by the Catholic religious exercises is absorbed and mystical; the devotee strives to withdraw into a retreat within the inner shrine of religious contemplation, where no echoes of the world reverberate, and where the soul may be thrilled by the tremulous ecstasy of half-unveiled heavenly glory. It is the consciousness of the nearness and reality of the unseen world that lends such a delicate and reserved beauty to those creations of Catholic genius in which this ideal has been most directly symbolized. Of this cloistral mood the church music of the Palestrina age is the most subtle and suggestive embodiment ever realized in art. It is as far as possible removed from profane suggestion; in its ineffable calmness, and an indescribable tone of chastened exultation, pure from every trace of struggle, with which it vibrates, it is the most adequate emblem of that eternal repose toward which the believer yearns.

It is not true, however, as often alleged, that this form of music altogether lacks characterization, and that the style of Kyrie, Gloria, Crucifixus, Resurrexit, and of the motets and hymns whatever their subject, is always the same. The old masters were artists as well as churchmen, and knew how to adapt their somewhat unresponsive material to the more obvious contrasts of the text; and in actual performance a much wider latitude in respect to nuance and change of speed was permitted than could be indicated in the score. We know, also, that the choristers were allowed great license in the use of embellishments, more or less florid, upon the written notes, sometimes improvised, sometimes carefully invented, taught and handed down as a prescribed code, the tradition of which, in all but a few instances, has been lost. But the very laws of the Gregorian modes and the strict contrapuntal system kept such excursions after expression within narrow bounds, and the traditional view of ecclesiastical art forbade anything like a drastic descriptive literalism.

This mediaeval polyphonic music, although the most complete example in art of the perfect adaptation of means to a particular end, could not long maintain its exclusive prestige. It must be supplanted by a new style as soon as the transformed secular music was strong enough to react upon the Church. It was found that a devotional experience that was not far removed from spiritual trance, which was all that the old music could express, was not the only mental attitude admissible in worship. The new-born art strove to give more apt and detailed expression to the words, and why should not this permission be granted to church music? The musical revolution of the seventeenth century involved the development of an art of solo singing and its supremacy over the chorus, the substitution of the modern major and minor transposing scales for the Gregorian modal system, a homophonic method of harmony for the mediaeval polyphony, accompanied music for the a capella, secular and dramatic for religious music, the rise of instrumental music as an independent art, the transfer of patronage from the Church to the aristocracy and ultimately to the common people. All the modern forms, both vocal and instrumental, which have come to maturity in recent times suddenly appeared in embryo at the close of the sixteenth or early in the seventeenth century. The ancient style of ecclesiastical music did not indeed come to a standstill. The grand old forms continued to be cultivated by men who were proud to wear the mantle of Palestrina; and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the traditions of the Roman and Venetian schools of church music have had sufficient vitality to inspire works not unworthy of comparison with their venerable models. The strains of these later disciples, however, are but scanty reverberations of the multitudinous voices of the past. The instrumental mass and motet, embellished with all the newly discovered appliances of melody, harmony, rhythm, and tone color, led the art of the Church with flying banners into wider regions of conquest, and the a capella contrapuntal chorus was left behind, a stately monument upon the receding shores of the Middle Age.

[Note. A very important agent in stimulating a revival of interest in the mediaeval polyphonic school is the St. Cecilia Society, which was founded at Regensburg in 1868 by Dr. Franz Xaver Witt, a devoted priest and learned musician, for the purpose of restoring a more perfect relation between music and the liturgy and erecting a barrier against the intrusion of dramatic and virtuoso tendencies. Flourishing branches of this society exist in many of the chief church centres of Europe and America. It is the patron of schools of music, it has issued periodicals, books, and musical compositions, and has shown much vigor in making propaganda for its views.

Not less intelligent and earnest is the Schola Cantorum of Paris, which is exerting a strong influence upon church music in the French capital and thence throughout the world by means of musical performances, editions of musical works, lectures, and publications of books and essays.]

CHAPTER VI

THE MODERN MUSICAL MASS

To one who is accustomed to study the history of art in the light of the law of evolution, the contrast between the reigning modern style of Catholic church music and that of the Middle Age seems at first sight very difficult of explanation. The growth of the a capella chorus, which reached its perfection in the sixteenth century, may be traced through a steady process of development, every step of which was a logical consequence of some prior invention. But as we pass onward into the succeeding age and look for a form of Catholic music which may be taken as the natural offspring and successor of the venerable mediaeval style, we find what appears to be a break in the line of continuity. The ancient form maintains its existence throughout the seventeenth century and a portion of the eighteenth, but it is slowly crowded to one side and at last driven from the field altogether by a style which, if we search in the field of church art alone, appears to have no antecedent. The new style is opposed to the old in every particular. Instead of forms that are polyphonic in structure, vague and indefinite in plan, based on an antique key system, the new compositions are homophonic, definite, and sectional in plan, revealing an entirely novel principle of tonality, containing vocal solos as well as choruses, and supported by a free instrumental accompaniment. These two contrasted phases of religious music seem to have nothing in common so far as technical organization is concerned, and it is perfectly evident that the younger style could not have been evolved out of the elder. Hardly less divergent are they in respect to ideal of expression, the ancient style never departing from a moderate, unimpassioned uniformity, the modern abounding in variety and contrast, and continually striving after a sort of dramatic portrayal of moods. To a representative of the old school, this florid accompanied style would seem like an intruder from quite an alien sphere of experience, and the wonder grows when we discover that it sprung from the same national soil as that in which its predecessor ripened, and was likewise cherished by an institution that has made immutability in all essentials a cardinal principle. Whence came the impulse that effected so sweeping a change in a great historic form of art, where we might expect that liturgic necessities and ecclesiastical tradition would decree a tenacious conservatism? What new conception had seized upon the human mind so powerful that it could even revolutionize a large share of the musical system of the Catholic Church? Had there been a long preparation for a change that seems so sudden? Were there causes working under the surface, antecedent stages, such that the violation of the law of continuity is apparent only, and not real? These questions are easily answered if we abandon the useless attempt to find the parentage of the modern church style in the ritual music of the previous period; and by surveying all the musical conditions of the age we shall quickly discover that it was an intrusion into the Church of musical methods that were fostered under purely secular auspices. The Gregorian chant and the mediaeval a capella chorus were born and nurtured within the fold of the Church, growing directly out of the necessity of adapting musical cadences to the rhythmical phrases of the liturgy. The modern sectional and florid style, on the contrary, was an addition from without, and was not introduced in response to any liturgic demands whatever. In origin and affiliations it was a secular style, adopted by the Church under a necessity which she eventually strove to turn into a virtue.

This violent reversal of the traditions of Catholic music was simply a detail of that universal revolution in musical practice and ideal which marked the passage from the sixteenth century to the seventeenth. The learned music of Europe had been for centuries almost exclusively in the care of ecclesiastical and princely chapels, and its practitioners held offices that were primarily clerical. The professional musicians, absorbed in churchly functions, had gone on adding masses to masses, motets to motets, and hymns to hymns, until the Church had accumulated a store of sacred song so vast that it remains the admiration and despair of modern scholars. These works, although exhibiting every stage of construction from the simplest to the most intricate, were all framed in accordance with principles derived from the mediaeval conception of melodic combination. The secular songs which these same composers produced in great numbers, notwithstanding their greater flexibility and lightness of touch, were also written for chorus, usually unaccompanied, and were theoretically constructed according to the same system as the church pieces. Nothing like operas or symphonies existed; there were no orchestras worthy of the name; pianoforte, violin, and organ playing, in the modern sense, had not been dreamed of; solo singing was in its helpless infancy. When we consider, in the light of our present experience, how large a range of emotion that naturally utters itself in tone was left unrepresented through this lack of a proper secular art of music, we can understand the urgency of the demand which, at the close of the sixteenth century, broke down the barriers that hemmed in the currents of musical production and swept music out into the vast area of universal human interests. The spirit of the Renaissance had led forth all other art forms to share in the multifarious activities and joys of modern life at a time when music was still the satisfied inmate of the cloister. But it was impossible that music also should not sooner or later feel the transfiguring touch of the new human impulse. The placid, austere expression of the clerical style, the indefinite forms, the Gregorian modes precluding free dissonance and regulated chromatic change, were incapable of rendering more than one order of ideas. A completely novel system must be forthcoming, or music must confess its impotence to enter into the fuller emotional life which had lately been revealed to mankind.