ir town was built, the people
of Palestrina could look across the Campagna--the great plain
between--and see the walls and towers of Rome. At the time of our
story, Saint Peter's had withstood the sack of the city, which
happened a dozen years before, and Bramante's vast basilica had
already begun to rise. The artistic life of Rome was still at high
tide, for Raphael had passed away but twenty years before, and Michael
Angelo was at work on his Last Judgment.

Though painting and sculpture flourished, music did not keep pace with
advance in other arts. The leading musicians were Belgian, Spanish or
French, and their music did not match the great achievements attained
in the kindred art of the time--architecture, sculpture and painting.
There was needed a new impetus, a vital force. Its rise began when
the peasant youth John Peter Louis descended from the heights of
Palestrina to the banks of the Tiber.

It is said that Tomasso Crinello was the boy's master; whether this
is true or not, he was surely trained in the Netherland manner of
composition.

The youth, whom we shall now call Palestrina, as he is known by the
name of his birthplace, returned from Rome at the age of eighteen to
his native town, in 1544, as a practising musician, and took a post at
the Cathedral of Saint Agapitus. Here he engaged himself for life, to
be present every day at mass and vespers, and to teach singing to
the canons and choristers. Thus he spent the early years of his young
manhood directing the daily services and drumming the rudiments of
music into the heads of the little choristers. It may have been dry
and wearisome labor; but afterward, when Palestrina began to reform
the music of the church, it must have been of great advantage to him
to know so absolutely the liturgy, not only of Saint Peter's and Saint
John Lateran, but also that in the simple cathedral of his own small
hill-town.

Young Palestrina, living his simple, busy life in his home town, never
dreamed he was destined to become a great musician. He married in
1548, when he was about twenty-two. If he had wished to secure one of
the great musical appointments in Rome, it was a very unwise thing for
him to marry, for single singers were preferred in nine cases out of
ten. Palestrina did not seem to realize this danger to a brilliant
career, and took his bride, Lucrezia, for pure love. She seems to have
been a person after his own heart, besides having a comfortable dowry