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 [183] 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 [184] 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 [185] 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.
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The genius of Italy was equal to the demand. Usually when any form of art becomes complete a period of degeneracy follows; artists become mere imitators, inspiration and creative power die out, the art becomes a handicraft; new growth appears only in another period or another nation, and under altogether different auspices. Such would perhaps have been the case with church music in Italy if a method diametrically opposed to that which had so long prevailed in the Church had not inaugurated a new school and finally extended its conquest into the venerable precincts of the Church itself. The opera and instrumental music—the two currents into which secular music divided—sprang up, as from hidden fountains, right beside the old forms which were even then just attaining their full glory, as if to show that the Italian musical genius so abounded in energy that it could never undergo decay, but when it had gone to its utmost limits in one direction could instantly strike out in another still more brilliant and productive.

The invention of the opera about the year 1600 is usually looked upon as the event of paramount importance in the transition period of modern music history, yet it was only the most striking symptom of a radical, sweeping tendency. Throughout the greater part of the sixteenth century a search had been in progress after a style of music suited to the solo voice, which could lend itself to the portrayal of the change and development of emotion involved in dramatic representation. The folk-song, which is only suited to the expression of a single simple frame of mind, was of course inadequate. The old church music was admirably adapted to the expression [187] of the consciousness of man in his relations to the divine—what was wanted was a means of expressing the emotions of man in his relations to his fellow-men. Lyric and dramatic poetry flourished, but no proper lyric or dramatic music. The Renaissance had done its mighty work in all other fields of art, but so far as music was concerned in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries a Renaissance did not exist. Many reasons might be given why the spirit of the Renaissance had no appreciable effect in the musical world until late in the sixteenth century. Musical forms are purely subjective in their conception; they find no models or even suggestions in the natural world, and the difficulty of choosing the most satisfactory arrangements of tones out of an almost endless number of possible combinations, together with the necessity of constantly new adjustments of the mind in order to appreciate the value of the very forms which itself creates, makes musical development a matter of peculiar slowness and difficulty. The enthusiasm for the antique, which gave a definite direction to the revival of learning and the new ambitions in painting and sculpture, could have little practical value in musical invention, since the ancient music, which would otherwise have been chosen as a guide, had been completely lost. The craving for a style of solo singing suited to dramatic purposes tried to find satisfaction by means that were childishly insufficient. Imitations of folk-songs, the device of singing one part in a madrigal, while the other parts were played by instruments, were some of the futile efforts to solve the problem. The sense of disappointment broke forth in bitter wrath [188] against the church counterpoint, and a violent conflict raged between the bewildered experimenters and the adherents of the scholastic methods.

The discovery that was to satisfy the longings of a century and create a new art was made in Florence. About the year 1580 a circle of scholars, musicians, and amateurs began to hold meetings at the house of a certain Count Bardi, where they discussed, among other learned questions, the nature of the music of the Greeks, and the possibility of its restoration. Theorizing was supplemented by experiment, and at last Vincenzo Galilei, followed by Giulio Caccini, hit upon a mode of musical declamation, half speech and half song, which was enthusiastically hailed as the long-lost style employed in the Athenian drama. A somewhat freer and more melodious manner was also admitted in alternation with the dry, formless recitation, and these two related methods were employed in the performance of short lyric, half-dramatic monologues. Such were the Monodies of Galilei and the Nuove Musiche of Caccini. More ambitious schemes followed. Mythological masquerades and pastoral comedies, which had held a prominent place in the gorgeous spectacles and pageants of the Italian court festivals ever since the thirteenth century, were provided with settings of the new declamatory music, or stile recitativo, and behold, the opera was born.

The Florentine inventors of dramatic music builded better than they knew. They had no thought of setting music free upon a new and higher flight; they never dreamed of the consequences of releasing melody from [189] the fetters of counterpoint. Their sole intention was to make poetry more expressive and emphatic by the employment of tones that would heighten the natural inflections of speech, and in which there should be no repetition or extension of words (as in the contrapuntal style) involving a subordination of text to musical form. The ideal of recitative was the expression of feeling by a method that permits the text to follow the natural accent of declamatory speech, unrestrained by a particular musical form or tonality, and dependent only upon the support of the simplest kind of instrumental accompaniment. In this style of music, said Caccini, speech is of the first importance, rhythm second, and tone last of all. These pioneers of dramatic music, as they declared over and over again, simply desired a form of music that should allow the words to be distinctly understood. They condemned counterpoint, not on musical grounds, but because it allowed the text to be obscured and the natural rhythm broken. There was no promise of a new musical era in such an anti-musical pronunciamento as this. But a relation between music and poetry in which melody renounces all its inherent rights could not long be maintained. The genius of Italy in the seventeenth century was musical, not poetic. Just so soon as the infinite possibilities of charm that lie in free melody were once perceived, no theories of Platonizing pedants could check its progress. The demands of the new age, reinforced by the special Italian gift of melody, created an art form in which absolute music triumphed over the feebler claims of poetry and rhetoric. The cold, calculated Florentine [190] music-drama gave way to the vivacious, impassioned opera of Venice and Naples. Although the primitive dry recitative survived, the far more expressive accompanied recitative was evolved from it, and the grand aria burst into radiant life out of the brief lyrical sections which the Florentines had allowed to creep into their tedious declamatory scenes. Vocal colorature, which had already appeared in the dramatic pieces of Caccini, became the most beloved means of effect. The little group of simple instruments employed in the first Florentine music-dramas was gradually merged in the modern full orchestra. The original notion of making the poetic and scenic intention paramount was forgotten, and the opera became cultivated solely as a means for the display of all the fascinations of vocalism.

Thus a new motive took complete possession of the art of music. By virtue of the new powers revealed to them, composers would now strive to enter all the secret precincts of the soul and give a voice to every emotion, simple or complex, called forth by solitary meditation or by situations of dramatic stress and conflict. Music, like painting and poetry, should now occupy the whole world of human experience. The stupendous achievements of the tonal art of the past two centuries are the outcome of this revolutionary impulse. But not at once could music administer the whole of her new possession. She must pass through a course of training in technic, to a certain extent as she had done in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but under far more favorable conditions and quite different circumstances. The shallowness of the greater part [191] of the music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is partly due to the difficulty that composers found in mastering the new forms. A facility in handling the material must be acquired before there could be any clear consciousness of the possibilities of expression which the new forms contained. The first problem in vocal music was the development of a method of technic; and musical taste, fascinated by the new sensation, ran into an extravagant worship of the human voice. There appeared in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the most brilliant group of singers, of both sexes, that the world has ever seen. The full extent of the morbid, we might almost say the insane, passion for sensuous, nerve-exciting tone is sufficiently indicated by the encouragement in theatre and church of those outrages upon nature, the male soprano and alto. A school of composers of brilliant melodic genius appeared in Italy, France, and Germany, who supplied these singers with showy and pathetic music precisely suited to their peculiar powers. Italian melody and Italian vocalism became the reigning sensation in European society, and the opera easily took the primacy among fashionable amusements. The Italian grand opera, with its solemn travesty of antique characters and scenes, its mock heroics, its stilted conventionalities, its dramatic feebleness and vocal glitter, was a lively reflection of the taste of this age of “gallant” poetry, rococo decoration, and social artificiality. The musical element consisted of a succession of arias and duets stitched together by a loose thread of secco recitative. The costumes were those of contemporary fashion, although the characters [192] were named after worthies of ancient Greece and Rome. The plots were in no sense historic, but consisted of love tales and conspiracies concocted by the playwright. Truth to human nature and to locality was left to the despised comic opera. Yet we must not suppose that the devotees of this music were conscious of its real superficiality. They adored it not wholly because it was sensational, but because they believed it true in expression; and indeed it was true to those light and transient sentiments which the voluptuaries of the theatre mistook for the throbs of nature. Tender and pathetic these airs often were, but it was the affected tenderness and pathos of fashionable eighteenth-century literature which they represented. To the profounder insight of the present they seem to express nothing deeper than the make-believe emotions of children at their play.

Under such sanctions the Italian grand aria became the dominant form of melody. Not the appeal to the intellect and the genuine experiences of the heart was required of the musical performer, but rather brilliancy of technic and seductiveness of tone. Ephemeral nerve excitement, incessant novelty within certain conventional bounds, were the demands laid by the public upon composer and singer. The office of the poet became hardly less mechanical than that of the costumer or the decorator. Composers, with a few exceptions, yielded to the prevailing fashion, and musical dramatic art lent itself chiefly to the portrayal of stereotyped sentiments and the gratification of the sense. I would not be understood as denying the germ of truth that lay in this art element contributed by Italy to the modern [193] world. Its later results were sublime and beneficent, for Italian melody has given direction to well-nigh all the magnificent achievements of secular music in the past two centuries. I am speaking here of the first outcome of the infatuation it produced, in the breaking down of the taste for the severe and elevated, and the production of a transient, often demoralizing intoxication.

It was not long before the charming Italian melody undertook the conquest of the Church. The popular demand for melody and solo singing overcame the austere traditions of ecclesiastical song. The dramatic and concert style invaded the choir gallery. The personnel of the choirs was altered, and women, sometimes male sopranos and altos, took the place of boys. The prima donna, with her trills and runs, made the choir gallery the parade ground for her arts of fascination. The chorus declined in favor of the solo, and the church aria vied with the opera aria in bravura and languishing pathos. Where the chorus was retained in mass, motet, or hymn, it abandoned the close-knit contrapuntal texture in favor of a simple homophonic structure, with strongly marked rhythmical movement. The orchestral accompaniment also lent to the composition a vivid dramatic coloring, and brilliant solos for violins and flutes seemed often to convert the sanctuary into a concert hall. All this was inevitable, for the Catholic musicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were artists as well as churchmen; they shared the aesthetic convictions of their time, and could not be expected to forego the opportunities for effect which the new methods put into their hands. They were [194] no longer dependent upon the Church for commissions; the opera house and the salon gave them sure means of subsistence and fame. The functions of church and theatre composers were often united in a single man. The convents and cathedral chapels were made training-schools for the choir and the opera stage on equal terms. It was in a monk’s cell that Bernacchi and other world-famous opera singers of the eighteenth century were educated. Ecclesiastics united with aristocratic laymen in the patronage of the opera; cardinals and archbishops owned theatre boxes, and it was not considered in the least out of character for monks and priests to write operas and superintend their performance. Under such conditions it is not strange that church and theatre reacted upon each other, and that the sentimental style, beloved in opera house and salon, should at last be accepted as the proper vehicle of devotional feeling.

In this adornment of the liturgy in theatrical costume we find a singular parallel between the history of church music in the transition period and that of religious painting in the period of the Renaissance. Pictorial art had first to give concrete expression to the conceptions evolved under the influence of Christianity, and since the whole intent of the pious discipline was to turn the thought away from actual mundane experience, art avoided the representation of ideal physical loveliness on the one hand and a scientific historical correctness on the other. Hence arose the na?ve, emblematic pictures of the fourteenth century, whose main endeavor was to attract and indoctrinate with delineations that were [195] symbolic and intended mainly for edification. Painting was one of the chief means employed by the Church to impart instruction to a constituency to whom writing was almost inaccessible. Art, therefore, even when emancipated from Byzantine formalism, was still essentially hieratic, and the painter willingly assumed a semi-sacerdotal office as the efficient coadjutor of the preacher and the confessor. With the fifteenth century came the inrush of the antique culture, uniting with native Italian tendencies to sweep art away into a passionate quest of beauty wherever it might be found. The conventional religious subjects and the traditional modes of treatment could no longer satisfy those whose eyes had been opened to the magnificent materials for artistic treatment that lay in the human form, draped and undraped, in landscape, atmosphere, color, and light and shade, and who had been taught by the individualistic trend of the age that the painter is true to his genius only as be frees himself from formulas and follows the leadings of his own instincts. But art could not wholly renounce its original pious mission. The age was at least nominally Christian, sincerely so in many of its elements, and the patronage of the arts was still to a very large extent in the hands of the clergy. And here the Church prudently consented to a modification of the established ideals of treatment of sacred themes. The native Italian love of elegance of outline, harmony of form, and splendor of color, directed by the study of the antique, overcame the earlier austerity and effected a combination of Christian tradition and pagan sensuousness which, in such work as that of Correggio and the [196] great Venetians, and even at times in the pure Raphael and the stern Michael Angelo, quite belied the purpose of ecclesiastical art, aiming not to fortify dogma and elevate the spirit, but to gratify the desire of the eye and the delight in the display of technical skill. Painting no longer conformed to a traditional religious type; it followed its genius, and that genius was really inspired by the splendors of earth, however much it might persuade itself that it ministered to holiness.

A noted example of this self-deception, although an extreme one, is the picture entitled “The Marriage at Cana,” by Paolo Veronese. Christ is the central figure, but his presence has no vital significance. He is simply an imposing Venetian grandee, and the enormous canvas, with its crowd of figures elegantly attired in fashionable sixteenth-century costume, its profusion of sumptuous dishes and gorgeous tapestries, is nothing more or less than a representation of a Venetian state banquet. Signorelli and Michael Angelo introduced naked young men into pictures of the Madonna and infant Christ. Others, such as Titian, lavished all the resources of their art with apparently equal enthusiasm upon Madonnas and nude Venuses. The other direction which was followed by painting, aiming at historical verity and rigid accuracy in anatomy and expression, may be illustrated by comparing Rubens’s “Crucifixion” in the Antwerp Museum with a crucifixion, for example, by Fra Angelico. Each motive was sincere, but the harsh realism of the Fleming shows how far art, even in reverent treatment of religious themes, had departed from the unhistoric symbolism formerly imposed by the [197] Church. In all this there was no disloyal intention; art had simply issued its declaration of independence; its sole aim was henceforth beauty and reality; the body as well as the soul seemed worthy of study and adoration; and the Church adopted the new skill into its service, not seeing that the world was destined to be the gainer, and not religion.

The same impulse produced analogous results in the music of the Catholic Church. The liturgic texts that were appropriated to choral setting remained, as they had been, the place and theoretic function of the musical offices in the ceremonial were not altered, but the music, in imitating the characteristics of the opera and exerting a somewhat similar effect upon the mind, became animated by an ideal of devotion quite apart from that of the liturgy, and belied that unimpassioned, absorbed and universalized mood of worship of which the older forms of liturgic art are the most complete and consistent embodiment. Herein is to be found the effect of the spirit of the Renaissance upon church music. It is not simply that it created new musical forms, new styles of performance, and a more definite expression; the significance of the change lies rather in the fact that it transformed the whole spirit of devotional music by endowing religious themes with sensuous charm, and with a treatment inspired by the arbitrary will of the composer and not by the traditions of the Church.
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At this point we reach the real underlying motive, however unconscious of it individual composers may have been, which compelled the revolution in liturgic music. A new ideal of devotional expression made inevitable the abandonment of the formal, academic style of the Palestrina school. The spirit of the age which required a more subjective expression in music, involved a demand for a more definite characterization in the setting of the sacred texts. The composer could no longer be satisfied with a humble imitation of the forms which the Church had sealed as the proper expression of her attitude toward the divine mysteries, but claimed the privilege of coloring the text according to the dictates of his own feeling as a man and his peculiar method as an artist. The mediaeval music was that of the cloister and the chapel. It was elevated, vague, abstract; it was as though it took up into itself all the particular and temporary emotions that might be called forth by the sacred history and articles of belief, and sifted and refined them into a generalized type, special individual experience being dissolved in the more diffused sense of awe and rapture which fills the hearts of an assembly in the attitude of worship. It was the mood of prayer which this music uttered, and that not the prayer of an individual agitated by his own personal hopes and fears, but the prayer of the Church, which embraces all the needs which the believers share in common, and offers them at the Mercy Seat with the calmness that comes of reverent confidence. Thus in the old masses the Kyrie eleison and the Miserere nobis are never agonizing; the Crucifixus does not attempt to portray the grief of an imaginary spectator of the scene on Calvary; the Gloria in excelsis and the Sanctus never force the jubilant tone into a frenzied excitement; the setting of the Dies Irae in the Requiem mass makes no attempt to paint a realistic picture of the terrors of the day of judgment.
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Now compare a typical mass of the modern dramatic school and see how different is the conception. The music of Gloria and Credo revels in all the opportunities for change and contrast which the varied text supplies; the Dona nobis pacem dies away in strains of tender longing. Consider the mournful undertone that throbs through the Crucifixus of Schubert’s Mass in A flat, the terrifying crash that breaks into the Miserere nobis in the Gloria of Beethoven’s Mass in D, the tide of ecstasy that surges through the Sanctus of Gounod’s St. Cecilia Mass and the almost cloying sweetness of the Agnus Dei, the uproar of brass instruments in the Tuba mirum of Berlioz’s Requiem. Observe the strong similarity of style at many points between Verdi’s Requiem and his opera “A?da.” In such works as these, which are fairly typical of the modern school, the composer writes under an independent impulse, with no thought of subordinating himself to ecclesiastical canons or liturgic usage. He attempts not only to depict his own state of mind as affected by the ideas of the text, but he also often aims to make his music picturesque according to dramatic methods. He does not seem to be aware that there is a distinction between religious concert music and church music. The classic example of this confusion is in the Dona nobis pacem of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, where the composer introduces a train of military music in order to suggest the contrasted horrors of war. This device, as Beethoven employs it, is exceedingly striking and beautiful, but it is precisely antagonistic to the [200] meaning of the text and the whole spirit of the liturgy. The conception of a large amount of modern mass music seems to be, not that the ritual to which it belongs is prayer, but rather a splendid spectacle intended to excite the imagination and fascinate the sense. It is this altered conception, lying at the very basis of the larger part of modern church music, that leads such writers as Jakob to refuse even to notice the modern school in his sketch of the history of Catholic church music, just as Rio condemns Titian as the painter who mainly contributed to the decay of religious painting.

In the Middle Age artists were grouped in schools or in guilds, each renouncing his right of initiative and shaping his productions in accordance with the legalized formulas of his craft. The modern artist is a separatist, his glory lies in the degree to which he rises above hereditary technic, and throws into his work a personal quality which becomes his own creative gift to the world. The church music of the sixteenth century was that of a school; the composers, although not actually members of a guild, worked on exactly the same technical foundations, and produced masses and motets of a uniformity that often becomes academic and monotonous. The modern composer carries into church pieces his distinct personal style. The grandeur and violent contrasts of Beethoven’s symphonies, the elegiac tone of Schubert’s songs, the enchantments of melody and the luxuries of color in the operas of Verdi and Gounod, are also characteristic marks of the masses of these composers. The older music could follow the text submissively, for there was no prescribed musical form to be worked out, and [201] cadences could occur whenever a sentence came to an end. The modern forms, on the other hand, consisting of consecutive and proportional sections, imply the necessity of contrast, development, and climax—an arrangement that is not necessitated by any corresponding system in the text. This alone would often result in a lack of congruence between text and music, and the composer would easily fall into the way of paying more heed to the sheer musical working out than to the meaning of the words. Moreover, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there was no radical conflict between the church musical style and the secular; so far as secular music was cultivated by the professional composers it was no more than a slight variation from the ecclesiastical model. Profane music may be said to have been a branch of religious music. In the modern period this relationship is reversed; secular music in opera and instrumental forms has remoulded church music, and the latter is in a sense a branch of the former.

Besides the development of the sectional form, another technical change acted to break down the old obstacles to characteristic expression. An essential feature of the mediaeval music, consequent upon the very nature of the Gregorian modes, was the very slight employment of chromatic alteration of notes, and the absence of free dissonances. Modulation in the modern sense cannot exist in a purely diatonic scheme. The breaking up of the modal system was foreshadowed when composers became impatient with the placidity and colorlessness of the modal harmonies and began to introduce unexpected dissonances for the sake of variety. The [202] chromatic changes that occasionally appear in the old music are scattered about in a hap-hazard fashion; they give an impression of helplessness to the modern ear when the composer seems about to make a modulation and at once falls back again into the former tonality. It was a necessity, therefore, as well as a virtue, that the church music of the old régime should maintain the calm, equable flow that seems to us so pertinent to its liturgic intention. For these reasons it may perhaps be replied to what has been said concerning the devotional ideal embodied in the calm, severe strains of the old masters, that they had no choice in the matter. Does it follow, it may be asked, that these men would not have written in the modern style if they had had the means? Some of them probably would have done so, others almost certainly would not. Many writers who carried the old form into the seventeenth century did have the choice and resisted it; they stanchly defended the traditional principles and condemned the new methods as destructive of pure church music. The laws that work in the development of ecclesiastical art also seem to require that music should pass through the same stages as those that sculpture and painting traversed,—first, the stage of symbolism, restraint within certain conventions in accordance with ecclesiastical prescription; afterwards, the deliverance from the trammels of school formulas, emancipation from all laws but those of the free determination of individual genius. At this point authority ceases, dictation gives way to persuasion, and art still ministers to the higher ends of the Church, not through fear, but through reverence for the teachings and appeals which the Church sends forth as her contribution to the nobler influences of the age.
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The writer who would trace the history of the modern musical mass has a task very different from that which meets the historian of the mediaeval period. In the latter case, as has already been shown, generalization is comparatively easy, for we deal with music in which differences of nationality and individual style hardly appear. The modern Catholic music, on the other hand, follows the currents that shape the course of secular music. Where secular music becomes formalized, as in the early Italian opera, religious music tends to sink into a similar routine. When, on the other hand, men of commanding genius, such as Beethoven, Berlioz, Liszt, Verdi, contribute works of a purely individual stamp to the general development of musical art, their church compositions form no exception, but are likewise sharply differentiated from others of the same class. The influence of nationality makes itself felt—there is a style characteristic of Italy, another of South Germany and Austria, another of Paris, although these distinctions tend to disappear under the solvent of modern cosmopolitanism. The Church does not positively dictate any particular norm or method, and hence local tendencies have run their course almost unchecked.

Catholic music has shared all the fluctuations of European taste. The levity of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries was as apparent in the mass as in the opera. The uplift in musical culture during the last one hundred years has carried church composition along with it, so that almost all the works [204] produced since Palestrina, of which the Church has most reason to be proud, belong to the nineteenth century. One of the ultimate results of the modern license in style and the tendency toward individual expression is the custom of writing masses as free compositions rather than for liturgic uses, and of performing them in public halls or theatres in the same manner as oratorios. Mozart wrote his Requiem to the order of a private patron. Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, not being ready when wanted for a consecration ceremony, outgrew the dimensions of a service mass altogether, and was finished without any liturgic purpose in view. Cherubini’s mass in D minor and Liszt’s Gran Mass were each composed for a single occasion, and both of them, like the Requiems of Berlioz and Dvo?ák, although often heard in concerts, have but very rarely been performed in church worship. Masses have even been written by Protestants, such as Bach, Schumann, Hauptmann, Richter, and Becker. Masses that are written under the same impulse as ordinary concert and dramatic works easily violate the ecclesiastical spirit, and pass into the category of religious works that are non-churchly, and it may often seem necessary to class them with cantatas on account of their semi-dramatic tone. In such productions as Bach’s B minor Mass, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, and Berlioz’s Requiem we have works that constitute a separate phase of art, not masses in the proper sense, for they do not properly blend with the church ceremonial nor contribute to the special devotional mood which the Church aims to promote, while yet in their general conception they are held by a loose band to the altar. So apart do these mighty creations stand that they may almost be said to glorify religion in the abstract rather than the confession of the Catholic Church.
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The changed conditions in respect to patronage have had the same effect upon the mass as upon other departments of musical composition. In former periods down to the close of the eighteenth century, the professional composer was almost invariably a salaried officer, attached as a personal retainer to a court, lay or clerical, and bound to conform his style of composition in a greater or less degree to the tastes of his employer. A Sixtus V. could reprove Palestrina for failing to please with a certain mass and admonish him to do better work in the future. Haydn could hardly venture to introduce any innovation into the style of religious music sanctioned by his august masters, the Esterhazys. Mozart wrote all his masses, with the exception of the Requiem, for the chapel of the prince archbishop of Salzburg. In this establishment the length of the mass was prescribed, the mode of writing and performance, which had become traditional, hindered freedom of development, and therefore Mozart’s works of this class everywhere give evidence of constraint. On the other hand, the leading composers of the present century that have occupied themselves with the mass have been free from such arbitrary compulsions. They have written masses, not as a part of routine duty, but as they were inspired by the holy words and by the desire to offer the free gift of their genius at the altar of the Church. They have been, as a rule, devoted churchmen, but they [206] have felt that they had the sympathy of the Church in asserting the rights of the artist as against prelatical conservatism and local usage. The outcome is seen in a group of works which, whatever the strict censors may deem their defects in edifying quality, at least indicate that in the field of musical art there is no necessary conflict between Catholicism and the free spirit of the age.

Under these conditions the mass in the modern musical era has taken a variety of directions and assumed distinct national and individual complexions. The Neapolitan school, which gave the law to Italian opera in the eighteenth century, endowed the mass with the same soft sensuousness of melody and sentimental pathos of expression, together with a dry, calculated kind of harmony in the chorus portions, the work never touching deep chords of feeling, and yet preserving a tone of sobriety and dignity. As cultivated in Italy and France the mass afterward degenerated into rivalry on equal terms with the shallow, captivating, cloying melody of the later Neapolitans and their successors, Rossini and Bellini. In this school of so-called religious music all sense of appropriateness was often lost, and a florid, profane treatment was not only permitted but encouraged. Perversions which can hardly be called less than blasphemous had free rein in the ritual music. Franz Liszt, in a letter to a Paris journal, written in 1835, bitterly attacks the music that flaunted itself in the Catholic churches of the city. He complains of the sacrilegious virtuoso displays of the prima donna, the wretched choruses, the vulgar antics of the organist playing galops and variations from comic operas in the most solemn [207] moments of the holy ceremony. Similar testimony has from time to time come from Italy, and it would appear that the most lamentable lapses from the pure church tradition have occurred in some of the very places where one would expect that the strictest principles would be loyally maintained. The most celebrated surviving example of the consequences to which the virtuoso tendencies in church music must inevitably lead when unchecked by a truly pious criticism is Rossini’s Stabat Mater. This frivolous work is frequently performed with great éclat in Catholic places of worship, as though the clergy were indifferent to the almost incredible levity which could clothe the heart-breaking pathos of Jacopone’s immortal hymn—a hymn properly honored by the Church with a place among the five great Sequences—with strains better suited to the sprightly abandon of opera buffa.

Another branch of the mass was sent by the Neapolitan school into Austria, and here the results, although unsatisfactory to the better taste of the present time, were far nobler and more fruitful than in Italy and France. The group of Austrian church composers, represented by the two Haydns, Mozart, Eybler, Neukomm, Sechter and others of the period, created a form of church music which partook of much of the dry, formal, pedantic spirit of the day, in which regularity of form, scientific correctness, and a conscious propriety of manner were often more considered than emotional fervor. Certain conventions, such as a florid contrapuntal treatment of the Kyrie with its slow introduction followed by an Allegro, the fugues at the Cum Sanctu Spiritu [208] and the Et Vitam, the regular alternation of solo and chorus numbers, give the typical Austrian mass a somewhat rigid, perfunctory air, and in practice produce the effect which always results when expression becomes stereotyped and form is exalted over substance. Mozart’s masses, with the exception of the beautiful Requiem (which was his last work and belongs in a different category), were the production of his boyhood, written before his genius became self-assertive and under conditions distinctly unfavorable to the free exercise of the imagination.

The masses of Joseph Haydn stand somewhat apart from the strict Austrian school, for although as a rule they conform externally to the local conventions, they are far more individual and possess a freedom and buoyancy that are decidedly personal. It has become the fashion among the sterner critics of church music to condemn Haydn’s masses without qualification, as conspicuous examples of the degradation of taste in religious art which is one of the depressing legacies of the eighteenth century. Much of this censure is deserved, for Haydn too often loses sight of the law which demands that music should reinforce, and not contradict, the meaning and purpose of the text. Haydn’s mass style is often indistinguishable from his oratorio style. His colorature arias are flippant, often introduced at such solemn moments as to be offensive. Even where the voice part is subdued to an appropriate solemnity, the desired impression is frequently destroyed by some tawdry flourish in the orchestra. The brilliancy of the choruses is often pompous and hollow. Haydn’s genius [209] was primarily instrumental; he was the virtual creator of the modern symphony and string quartet; his musical forms and modes of expression were drawn from two diverse sources which it was his great mission to conciliate and idealize, viz., the Italian aristocratic opera, and the dance and song of the common people. An extraordinary sense of form and an instinctive sympathy with whatever is spontaneous, genial, and racy made him what he was. The joviality of his nature was irrepressible. To write music of a sombre cast was out of his power. There is not a melancholy strain in all his works; pensiveness was as deep a note as he could strike. He tried to defend the gay tone of his church music by saying that he had such a sense of the goodness of God that he could not be otherwise than joyful in thinking of him. This explanation was perfectly sincere, but Haydn was not enough of a philosopher to see the weak spot in this sort of aesthetics. Yet in spite of the obvious faults of Haydn’s mass style, looking at it from a historic point of view, it was a promise of advance, and not a sign of degeneracy. For it marked the introduction of genuine, even if misdirected feeling into worship music, in the place of dull conformity to routine. Haydn was far indeed from solving the problem of church music, but he helped to give new life to a form that showed danger of becoming atrophied.

Two masses of world importance rise above the mediocrity of the Austrian school, like the towers of some Gothic cathedral above the monotonous tiled roofs of a mediaeval city,—the Requiem of Mozart and the Missa Solemnis of Beethoven. The unfinished masterpiece [210] of Mozart outsoars all comparison with the religious works of his youth, and as his farewell to the world he could impart to it a tone of pathos and exaltation which had hardly been known in the cold, objective treatment of the usual eighteenth-century mass. The hand of death was upon Mozart as he penned the immortal pages of the Requiem, and in this crisis he could feel that he was free from the dictation of fashion and precedent. This work is perhaps not all that we might look for in these solemn circumstances. Mozart’s exquisite genius was suited rather to the task, in which lies his true glory, of raising the old Italian opera to its highest possibilities of grace and truth to nature. He had not that depth of feeling and sweep of imagination which make the works of Bach, H?ndel, and Beethoven the sublimest expression of awe in view of the mysteries of life and death. Yet it is wholly free from the fripperies which disfigure the masses of Haydn, as well as from the dry scholasticism of much of Mozart’s own early religious work. Such movements as the Confutatis, the Recordare, and the Lacrimosa—movements inexpressibly earnest, consoling, and pathetic—gave evidence that a new and loftier spirit had entered the music of the Church.

The Missa Solemnis of Beethoven, composed 1818-1822, can hardly be considered from the liturgic point of view. In the vastness of its dimensions it is quite disproportioned to the ceremony to which it theoretically belongs, and its almost unparalleled difficulty of execution and the grandeur of its choral climaxes remove it beyond the reach of all but the most exceptional [211] choirs. It is, therefore, performed only as a concert work by choral societies with a full orchestral equipment. For these reasons it is not to be classed with the service masses of the Catholic Church, but may be placed beside the B minor Mass of Sebastian Bach, both holding a position outside all ordinary comparisons. Each of these colossal creations stands on its own solitary eminence, the projection in tones of the religious conceptions of two gigantic, all-comprehending intellects. For neither of these two works is the Catholic Church strictly responsible. They do not proceed from within the Church. Bach was a strict Protestant; Beethoven, although nominally a disciple of the Catholic Church, had almost no share in her communion, and his religious belief, so far as the testimony goes, was a sort of pantheistic mysticism. Both these supreme artists in the later periods of their careers gave free rein to their imaginations and not only well-nigh exceeded all available means of performance, but also seemed to strive to force musical forms and the powers of instruments and voices beyond their limits in the efforts to realize that which is unrealizable through any human medium. In this endeavor they went to the very verge of the sublime, and produced achievements which excite wonder and awe. These two masses defy all imitation, and represent no school. The spirit of individualism in religious music can go no further.

The last masses of international importance produced on Austrian soil are those of Franz Schubert. Of his six Latin masses four are youthful works, pure and graceful, but not especially significant. In his E flat [212] and A flat masses, however, he takes a place in the upper rank of mass composers of this century. The E flat Mass is weakened by the diffuseness which was Schubert’s besetting sin; the A flat is more terse and sustained in excellence, and thoroughly available for practical use. Both of them contain movements of purest ideal beauty and sincere worshipful spirit, and often rise to a grandeur that is unmarred by sensationalism and wholly in keeping with the tone of awe which pervades even the most exultant moments of the liturgy.

The lofty idealism exemplified in such works as Mozart’s Requiem, Beethoven’s Mass in D, Schubert’s last two masses, and in a less degree in Weber’s Mass in E flat has never since been lost from the German mass, in spite of local and temporary reactions. Such composers as Kiel, Havert, Grell, and Rheinberger have done noble service in holding German Catholic music fast to the tradition of seriousness and truth which has been taking form all through this century in German secular music. It must be said, however, that the German Catholic Church at large, especially in the country districts, has been too often dull to the righteous claims of the profounder expression of devotional feeling, and has maintained the vogue of the Italian mass and the shallower products of the Austrian school. Against this indifference the St. Cecilia Society has directed its noble missionary labors, with as yet but partial success.
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If we turn our observation to Italy and France we find that the music of the Church is at every period sympathetically responsive to the fluctuations in secular music. Elevated and dignified, if somewhat cold and constrained, in the writings of the nobler spirits of the Neapolitan school such as Durante and Jomelli, sweet and graceful even to effeminacy in Pergolesi, sensuous and saccharine in Rossini, imposing and massive, rising at times to epic grandeur, in Cherubini, by turns ecstatic and voluptuous in Gounod, ardent and impassioned in Verdi—the ecclesiastical music of the Latin nations offers works of adorable beauty, sometimes true to the pure devotional ideal, sometimes perverse, and by their isolation serving to illustrate the dependence of the church composer’s inspiration upon the general conditions of musical taste and progress. Not only were those musicians of France and Italy who were prominent as church composers also among the leaders in opera, but their ideals and methods in opera were closely paralleled by those displayed in their religious productions. It is impossible to separate the powerful masses of Cherubini, with their pomp and majesty of movement, their reserved and pathetic melody, their grandiose dimensions and their sumptuous orchestration, from those contemporary tendencies in dramatic art which issued in the “historic school” of grand opera as exemplified in the pretentious works of Spontini and Meyerbeer. They may be said to be the reflection in church art of the hollow splendor of French imperialism. Such an expression, however, may be accused of failing in justice to the undeniable merits of Cherubini’s masses. As a man and as a musician Cherubini commands unbounded respect for his unswerving [214] sincerity in an age of sham, his uncompromising assertion of his dignity as an artist in an age of sycophancy, and the solid worth of his achievement in the midst of shallow aims and mediocre results. As a church composer he towers so high above his predecessors of the eighteenth century in respect to learning and imagination that his masses are not unworthy to stand beside Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis as auguries of the loftier aims that were soon to prevail in the realm of religious music. His Requiem in C minor, particularly, by reason of its exquisite tenderness, breadth of thought, nobility of expression, and avoidance of all excess either of agitation or of gloom, must be ranked among the most admirable modern examples of pure Catholic art.

The effort of Lesueur (1763-1837) to introduce into church music a picturesque and imitative style—which, in spite of much that was striking and attractive in result, must be pronounced a false direction in church music—was characteristically French and was continued in such works as Berlioz’s Requiem and to a certain extent in the masses and psalms of Liszt. The genius of Liszt, notwithstanding his Hungarian birth, was closely akin to the French in his tendency to connect every musical impulse with a picture or with some mental conception which could be grasped in distinct concrete outline. In his youth Liszt, in his despair over the degeneracy of liturgic music in France and its complete separation from the real life of the people, proclaimed the necessity of a rapprochement between church music and popular music. In an article written [215] for a Paris journal in 1834, which remains a fragment, he imagined a new style of religious music which should “unite in colossal relations theatre and church, which should be at the same time dramatic and solemn, imposing and simple, festive and earnest, fiery and unconstrained, stormy and reposeful, clear and fervent.” These expressions are too vague to serve as a program for a new art movement. They imply, however, a protest against the one-sided operatic tendency of the day, at the same time indicating the conviction that the problem is not to be solved in a pedantic reaction toward the ancient austere ideal, and yet that the old and new endeavors, liturgic appropriateness and characteristic expression, reverence of mood and recognition of the claims of contemporary taste, should in some way be made to harmonize. The man who all his life conceived the theatre as a means of popular education, and who strove to realize that conception as court music director at Weimar, would also lament any alienation between the church ceremony and the intellectual and emotional habitudes and inclinations of the people. A devoted churchman reverencing the ancient ecclesiastical tradition, and at the same time a musical artist of the advanced modern type, Liszt’s instincts yearned more or less blindly towards an alliance between the sacerdotal conception of religious art and the general artistic spirit of the age. Some such vision evidently floated before his mind in the masses, psalms, and oratorios of his later years, as shown in their frequent striving after the picturesque, together with an inclination toward the older ecclesiastical forms. These two ideals are probably incompatible; at any rate Liszt did not possess the genius to unite them in a convincing manner.
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Among the later ecclesiastical composers of France, Gounod shines out conspicuously by virtue of those fascinating melodic gifts which have made the fame of the St. Cecilia mass almost conterminous with that of the opera “Faust.” Indeed, there is hardly a better example of the modern propensity of the dramatic and religious styles to reflect each other’s lineaments than is found in the close parallelism which appears in Gounod’s secular and church productions. So liable, or perhaps we might say, so neutral is his art, that a similar quality of melting cadence is made to portray the mutual avowals of love-lorn souls and the raptures of heavenly aspiration. Those who condemn Gounod’s religious music on this account as sensuous have some reason on their side, yet no one has ever ventured to accuse Gounod of insincerity, and it may well be that his wide human sympathy saw enough correspondence between the worship of an earthly ideal and that of a heavenly—each implying the abandonment of self-consciousness in the yearning for a happiness which is at the moment the highest conceivable—as to make the musical expression of both essentially similar. This is to say that the composer forgets liturgic claims in behalf of the purely human. This principle no doubt involves the destruction of church music as a distinctive form of art, but it is certain that the world at large, as evinced by the immense popularity of Gounod’s religious works, sees no incongruity and does not feel that such [217] usage is profane. Criticism on the part of all but the most austere is disarmed by the pure, seraphic beauty which this complacent art of Gounod often reveals. The intoxicating sweetness of his melody and harmony never sinks to a Rossinian flippancy. Of Gounod’s reverence for the Church and for its art ideals, there can be no question. A man’s views of the proper tone of church music will be controlled largely by his temperament, and Gounod’s temperament was as warm as an Oriental’s. He offered to the Church his best, and as the Magi brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh to a babe born among cattle in a stable, so Gounod, with a consecration equally sincere, clothed his prayers in strains so ecstatic that compared with them the most impassioned accents of “Faust” and “Romeo and Juliet” are tame. He was a profound student of Palestrina, Mozart, and Cherubini, and strong traces of the styles of these masters are apparent in his works.

Somewhat similar qualities, although far less sensational, are found in the productions of that admirable band of organists and church composers that now lends such lustre to the art life of the French capital. The culture of such representatives of this school as Guilmant, Widor, Saint-Sa?ns, Dubois, Gigout is so solidly based, and their views of religious music so judicious, that the methods and traditions which they are conscientiously engaged in establishing need only the reinforcement of still higher genius to bring forth works which will confer even greater honor upon Catholicism than she has yet received from the devotion of her [218] musical sons in France. No purer or nobler type of religious music has appeared in these latter days than is to be found in the compositions of César Franck (1822-1890). For the greater part of his life overlooked or disdained by all save a devoted band of disciples, in spirit and in learning he was allied to the Palestrinas and the Bachs, and there are many who place him in respect to genius among the foremost of the French musicians of the nineteenth century.

The religious works of Verdi might be characterized in much the same terms as those of Gounod. In Verdi also we have a truly filial devotion to the Catholic Church, united with a temperament easily excited to a white heat when submitted to his musical inspiration, and a genius for melody and seductive harmonic combinations in which he is hardly equalled among modern composers. In his Manzoni Requiem, Stabat Mater, and Te Deum these qualities are no less in evidence than in “Aida” and “Otello,” and it would be idle to deny their devotional sincerity on account of their lavish profusion of nerve-exciting effects. The controversy between the contemners and the defenders of the Manzoni Requiem is now somewhat stale and need not be revived here. Any who may wish to resuscitate it, however, on account of the perennial importance of the question of what constitutes purity and appropriateness in church art, must in justice put themselves into imaginative sympathy with the racial religious feeling of an Italian, and make allowance also for the undeniable suggestion of the dramatic in the Catholic ritual, and for the natural effect of the Catholic ceremonial and its peculiar atmosphere upon the more ardent, enthusiastic order of minds.
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The most imposing contributions that have been made to Catholic liturgic music since Verdi’s Requiem are undoubtedly the Requiem Mass and the Stabat Mater of Dvo?ák. All the wealth of tone color which is contained upon the palette of this master of harmony and instrumentation has been laid upon these two magnificent scores. Inferior to Verdi in variety and gorgeousness of melody, the Bohemian composer surpasses the great Italian in massiveness, dignity, and in unfailing good taste. There can be no question that Dvo?ák’s Stabat Mater is supreme over all other settings—the only one, except Verdi’s much shorter work, that is worthy of the pathos and tenderness of this immortal Sequence. The Requiem of Dvo?ák in spite of a tendency to monotony, is a work of exceeding beauty, rising often to grandeur, and is notable, apart from its sheer musical qualities, as the most precious gift to Catholic art that has come from the often rebellious land of Bohemia.

It would be profitless to attempt to predict the future of Catholic church music. In the hasty survey which we have made of the Catholic mass in the past three centuries we have been able to discover no law of development except the almost unanimous agreement of the chief composers to reject law and employ the sacred text of Scripture and liturgy as the basis of works in which not the common consciousness of the Church shall be expressed, but the emotions aroused by the action of sacred ideas upon different temperaments and [220] divergent artistic methods. There is no sign that this principle of individual liberty will be renounced. Nevertheless, the increasing deference that is paid to authority, the growing study of the works and ideals of the past which is so apparent in the culture of the present day, will here and there issue in partial reactions. The mind of the present, having seen the successful working out of certain modern problems and the barrenness of others, is turning eclectic. Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of musical culture, both religious and secular. We see that in many influential circles the question becomes more and more insistent, what is truth and appropriateness?—whereas formerly the demand was for novelty and “effect.” Under this better inspiration many beautiful works are produced which are marked by dignity, moderation, and an almost austere reserve, drawing a sharp distinction between the proper ecclesiastical tone and that suited to concert and dramatic music, restoring once more the idea of impersonality, expressing in song the conception of the fathers that the Church is a refuge, a retreat from the tempests of the world, a place of penitence and restoration to confidence in the near presence of heaven.

Such masses as the Missa Solemnis of Beethoven, the D minor of Cherubini, the Messe Solennelle of Rossini, the St. Cecilia of Gounod, the Requiems of Berlioz and Verdi, sublime and unspeakably beautiful as they are from the broadly human standpoint, are yet in a certain sense sceptical. They reveal a mood of agitation which is not that intended by the ministrations of the Church in her organized acts of worship. And yet such works will [221] continue to be produced, and the Church will accept them, in grateful recognition of the sincere homage which their creation implies. It is of the nature of the highest artistic genius that it cannot restrain its own fierce impulses out of conformity to a type or external tradition. It will express its own individual emotion or it will become paralyzed and mute. The religious compositions that will humbly yield to a strict liturgic standard in form and expression will be those of writers of the third or fourth grade, just as the church hymns have been, with few exceptions, the production, not of the great poets, but of men of lesser artistic endowment, and who were primarily churchmen, and poets only by second intention. This will doubtless be the law for all time. The Michael Angelos, the Dantes, the Beethovens will forever break over rules, even though they be the rules of a beloved mother Church.

The time is past, however, when we may fear any degeneracy like to that which overtook church music one hundred or more years ago. The principles of such consecrated church musicians as Witt, Tinel, and the leaders of the St. Cecilia Society and the Paris Schola Cantorum, the influence of the will of the Church implied in all her admonitions on the subject of liturgic song, the growing interest in the study of the masters of the past, and, more than all, the growth of sound views of art as a detail of the higher and the popular education, must inevitably promote an increasing conviction among clergy, choir leaders, and people of the importance of purity and appropriateness in the music of the Church. The need of reform in many of the Catholic churches of this and other [222] countries is known to every one. Doubtless one cause of the frequent indifference, of priests to the condition of the choir music in their churches is the knowledge that the chorus and organ are after all but accessories; that the Church possesses in the Gregorian chant a form of song that is the legal, universal, and unchangeable foundation of the musical ceremony, and that any corruption in the gallery music can never by any possibility extend to the heart of the system. The Church is indeed fortunate in the possession of this altar song, the unifying chain which can never be loosened. All the more reason, therefore, why this consciousness of unity should pervade all portions of the ceremony, and the spirit of the liturgic chant should blend even with the large freedom of modern musical experiment.