CHAPTER 16

The End of Perfection

PALESTRINA, BYRD, AND THE FINAL FLOWERING OF IMITATIVE POLYPHONY

UTOPIA

Before turning our attention to the many other ingredients in the seething cauldron that was sixteenth-

century music, it will make sense to pursue the ars perfecta to the end. For indeed, the perfected art had
an end, and it was near at hand. It had to be, for anything perfect, in this world, is doomed. Perfection
cannot change, yet nothing in human history stands still. The only way to preserve the perfected art was to
seal it off from history. This was done, but the price was high. The ars perfecta, as we shall see, still
exists, but not in a way that matters anymore. In the sixteenth century it claimed all the greatest musical
minds in Catholic Christendom. Later, it harbored nonentities, and the church that maintained its artificial
life-support system gradually lost its significance as a creative site for music. The sixteenth century was
the last in which the music of the Catholic church made history. From then on it was history.

The ars perfecta came about because musicians had something timeless, universal, and consummate
to express: God’s perfection as embodied and represented by God’s own true church, the institution that
employed them. Although nowhere stated by Zarlino, still less by Willaert (who wrote a quantity of
secular music in genres we will soon be taking up), the values of musical perfection, however mediated
by humanism, implied and reflected belief, as the Credo of the Mass puts it, in unam sanctam catholicam
et apostolicam ecclesiam: “one holy universal church, sent by God.” The standards to which musicians
serving such an institution aspired transcended the relativity of taste, just as the doctrines of religion are
held by believers to represent an absolute truth, mandating in turn an absolute standard of behavior—one
that does not aim to gratify the individual and that cannot be altered to suit the wishes or purposes of
individuals, or the changing values and fashions of secular society.

Therein lay both the beauty and the despair of the ars perfecta. It was the music of Utopia—a term
coined by Thomas More, not at all incidentally, during the sixteenth century. The world was its enemy.
Perfection had to be enforced in order to exist at all. And yet music, a human product, did inevitably
change. Many deplored the changes; the word used to sum them up—“Baroque”—though now regarded as
a neutral identifying tag like “Renaissance,” was originally a term of opprobrium, used by jewelers to
describe a misshapen pearl or by critics to describe a bombastic utterance. It meant “distorted.”

That is what music surely became from the perspective of the ars perfecta, as would anything that
deviated from a standard of perfection. By the second half of the sixteenth century the forces of
“distortion” were rife, and some of them had arisen within the church itself. Others were the result of
literary movements. Still others were the outcome of a radical turn within musical humanism, which had
always been an uneasy ally of religious transcendentalism. There were also pressures brought by the
burgeoning music trade, pressures that reflected the overall rise of mercantilism and that militated further
against the prestige of religious art. As we shall see, moreover, in every one of these responses that led
away from perfection and toward the “Baroque,” it was Italy that took the lead. What is usually called the
“Baroque” period might more truly be called the period of Italian dominance in music.

By century’s end the ars perfecta was only one style among many—no longer privileged, no longer
where the action was. In a way its fate mirrored the larger fate of the Roman Catholic Church, which was