Interestingly enough, it is not the style of Palestrina’s own Omagnum mysterium that Sartori’s motet
imitates, but the much more rarefied, cerebral, and impersonal—one might even say “Jesuitical”—style of
the late Offertories like Tui sunt coeli (Ex. 16-13). Only such a style, rather than an “expressive” one,
could aspire convincingly to “timelessness.” But the stile antico lived on longer still and has assumed
another role entirely in Western musical culture. In 1725, ten years after the manuscript containing
Sartori’s motet was compiled, an Austrian church composer named Johann Joseph Fux (1660–1741), who
as it happened was trained in Jesuit schools and colleges, published a treatise called Gradus ad
Parnassum (“Stairway to Parnassus,” that is, to the abode of the Muses). Like many Catholic musicians of
his time, Fux composed “bilingually,” turning out operas and oratorios in the stile moderno of the day,
and Masses and motets in the immutable stile antico. His treatise was a brilliantly successful attempt to
reduce the stile antico to a concise set of rules, which Fux accomplished by dividing the realm of old-
style polyphony into five “species” (as he called them) of rhythmic relationships, as follows—and
prescribing the “dissonance treatment” for each. Fux’s rationalization of the stile antico gave it a new
lease on life, not only as an artificially preserved style of Roman Catholic church music but also as basic
training for composers. As the bible of the “strict style,” Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum became the first
“counterpoint text” in the modern sense and the greatest schoolbook in the history of European music.
Starting with the generation of Haydn, musicians—at first in Austria, gradually everywhere—used it to
gain facility in “the first principles of harmony and composition,” which were regarded by teachers as an
eternal dogma in its own right, a bedrock of imperishable lore that “remains unaltered, let taste change as
it will.”^14 Thus the stile antico, in the form of Fux’s rules, became the gateway to the stile moderno.
- Note against note (or punctum contra punctum, whence “counterpoint”)
- Two notes against one in cantus firmus style
- Three or four notes against one in cantus firmus style
- Syncopation against a cantus firmus
- Mixed values (“florid style”)
EX. 16-14 Balthasar Sartori, Omagnum mysterium, mm. 1–10