ic--ended with Orlando Gibbons in 1625. Since then we
have had no religious musicians. The Catholic Church brought them forth,
and when that Church suffered eclipse we got no more of them.

Not that music was at all eclipsed. The last great English musician was
not born till more than a hundred years after the Reformation. Between
Gibbons and Purcell came, amongst others, John Jenkins, Henry Lawes,
Matthew Locke, Pelham Humphries, Dr. Blow, Captain Cooke and the
madrigal writers. These last, however, mainly used contrivances adapted
from sacred music. Some really beautiful madrigals exist, but Purcell
could have done almost if not quite as well without them. During this
period the old style of polyphonic music went out and the new came in.
To understand the change, I beg the reader to refrain from impatience
under the infliction of a few technicalities; they are a regrettable
but inexorable necessity.

The old polyphonic music differed from the newer harmonic music in three
respects:

1. _Form and Structure_.--Nearly all the important old music, the music
that counts, was for voices--for chorus--with or without accompaniment.
"Forms," in the modern sense of the word--cyclical forms with recurring
themes arranged in regular sequence, and with development passages,
etc.--of these there were none. Some composers were groping blindly
after a something they wanted, but they did not hit on it.
Self-sustaining musical structures, independent of words, were poor and
flimsy. The form of the music that matters was determined by the words.
From beginning to end of each composition voice followed voice, one
singing, higher or lower, what had been sung by the others, while those
others added melodies that made correct harmony. Thus a web of music was
spun which has to be listened to, so to speak, horizontally and
vertically--horizontally for the melodies that are sung simultaneously,
and vertically for the chords that are produced by the sounding together
of the notes of those melodies. When the words were used up the
composition came to an end. Often the words were repeated, and repeated
often; but there should be reason in all things, and the finest
composers stopped when they had finished.

The tendency in the new music was to abandon the horizontal aspect.
Purcell, in his additions to Playford's "Brief Introduction to the
Skill of Musick," remarks on the fact that musicians now composed "to
the treble, when they make counter