widely known by the title of 'Missa Papae Marcelli.' With
Palestrina commenced, indisputably, the most glorious era of ancient
ecclesiastical music, and, consequently, of all music. This lasted for
nearly two hundred years, maintaining its pristine pious dignity and
forcibility, although it cannot be denied that, even in the first
century after Palestrina, that lofty, inimitable simplicity and dignity
lost itself to some extent in a certain 'elegance' which the composers
began to aim at. What a master is Palestrina! Without the smallest
ornament, without anything approaching melodic sweep, his works consist
mainly of chords of the simplest kind, succeeding each other in perfect
concords of chords of the triad, by the forcibility and the boldness of
which consonances the mind is grasped with indescribable might, and
lifted up to the very highest love: _i.e._, the attunement and
consonance of the spiritual with nature (as promised to the Christian),
speaks itself out in the _chord_, which, consequently, came first into
existence under the Christian 'dispensation.' So that the chord, and
harmony (in contradistinction to mere melody), are the images and
expressions of spiritual union, and _communion_ of union, and
incorporation with the eternal, the ideal, which thrones above us, and
yet encompasses and surrounds us. Therefore the holiest, purest, most
ecclesiastical music must be that which flows from the soul as the
uncontaminated expression of the love in question, disregarding, nay
despising, all that is mundane. And such are Palestrina's simple,
majestic compositions, which, conceived in the highest fervour of piety
and love, proclaim the godlike with might and glory. To his music truly
applies what the Italians apply to the writings of many composers who
are shallow and miserable compared to him; it is, of a truth, 'music of
another world'--_musica dell' altro mondo_. Successions of consonant
perfect chords of the triad have nowadays become so strange and
unfamiliar to us, in our effeminacy, that many an one whose soul is
wholly closed to the holy sees nothing in them but helpless
unskilfulness of technical construction. But, looking away from those
higher considerations, and adverting merely to what we are used to call
'effect,' it is clear as day (as you said already, Theodore), that, in
a church, in a great resonant building, everything in the nature of the
blending of chord with chord by means of 'transition notes,