Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

EX. 16-5A   Giovanni    Pierluigi   da  Palestrina, Missa   O   magnum  mysterium,  Kyrie,  beginning

At least as early as the 1540s, and particularly in Roman circles, some churchmen had taken a
negative attitude toward the music of the post-Josquin generation, which for all its technical excellence
ran counter, they thought, to the proper role and function of church music. To put their concerns in a
nutshell, they thought that the elegantly wrought imitative texture that had gained universal currency was
far too artistic, and therefore not sufficiently functional. Such music, in its preoccupation with its own
beauty of form, exemplified the sin of pride, and interfered with the intelligibility of the sacred texts to
which it was meant to be subordinate.

EX. 16-5B   Giovanni    Pierluigi   da  Palestrina, Missa   O   magnum  mysterium,  Gloria  (“Et    in  terra...    “), beginning