In fact, a main objection
against Lawes--and a true one in many instances--is that he sacrificed
the melody rather than the meaning of the poem. This is significant.
The Puritans are held to have damaged church music less by burning the
choir-books and pawning the organ-pipes than by insisting (as we may
say) on One word one note. As a matter of fact, this was not
exclusively a plank in the political platform of the Puritans. The
Loyalist Campion, the Loyalist Lawes, and many another Loyalist
insisted on it. Even when they did not write a note to each word, they
took care not to have long roulades (divisions) on unimportant words,
but to derive the accent of the music from that of the poem. This
showed mainly two tendencies: first, one towards expression of poetic
feeling and towards definiteness of that expression, the other towards
the entirely new technique which was to supersede the contrapuntal
technique of Byrde and Palestrina. In making a mass or an anthem or
secular composition, the practice of these old masters was to start
with a fragment of church or secular melody which we will call A;
after (say) the trebles had sung it or a portion of it, the altos took
it up and the trebles went on to a new phrase B, which dovetailed with
A.
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