itations, canons, and fugal devices; inversions
of motives, so that an ascending melody was transformed into a
descending melody and vice versa; the enlargement or augmentation of a
motive by doubling or quadrupling the length of each one of its tones;
the diminution of a motive by shortening its tones to a quarter of
their original value; modification by repeating its rhythm in the
chromatic scale in place of the melodic intervals of the original
figure, and even to the extent of reversing motives, so that the
melodic steps were made in reversed order from the end to the
beginning;--and in the midst of all this elaboration the composer or
the trained listener of the time was supposed to enjoy not alone the
music as such, but all these complicated devices of the composer.

When these things had been carried out in movements having as many as
sixteen voice parts, which was not a phenomenally large number at that
time, two results unexpected by the composer almost necessarily came
about. The first of these was the production of chord successions
which could be felt by the hearer only as such, since sixteen real
parts moving within the three octaves of choral compass were
necessarily obliged to cross each other continually, whereby the
contour of the different voice melodies became lost in the mixture, and
only the chords and chord successions came to realization. In this
way, perhaps, the perception of harmonic good and evil was very much
forwarded where nothing of the kind had been intended. The other
result was the practical exhaustion of all these artificial resources
for conveying an impression of power in a composer. When everything
had been done that could be done, the new composer necessarily had to
take a different path and arrive in some other way; otherwise he became
merely a repeater of what had been done before.

All the scientific composition up to about the middle of the sixteenth
century had been designed for voices, and the great bulk of it for the
service of the Church. Presently, however, a distinctly secular music
began to be developed, in which, very naturally, lighter principles of
composition prevailed. Thus arose a great literature of madrigals,
which generally were love-songs or glees, containing many of the
devices of the extremely well-taught composer already mentioned, but
also having in them a lively rhythm and a pleasant quality which, even
after the lapse of three centuries and more, s