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The first secular drama, the "Orfeo" of Poliziano, was equipped with the elements from which might have been evolved quickly all the materials of the first experimental operas; but the rapid spread of the polyphonic music through Italy and the sudden and overwhelming popularity of part singing soon, as we have seen, relegated the first suggestions of a manner of setting vocal solos for the stage into a position of comparative obscurity and in the end this possibility was conquered by the cumbrous method of Vecchi.
But the Italian madrigal had not been well developed at the time of the production of Poliziano's "Orfeo," while the frottola was the most popular song of the people. The frottola was a secular song, written in polyphonic style. The polyphony was simple and the aim of the composition was popularity.
"Metrical verse," says Miss Lowell in the Preface to Can Grande's Castle, "has one set of laws, cadenced verse another; 'polyphonic prose' can go from one to the other in the same poem with no sense of incongruity.... I finally decided to base my form upon the long, flowing cadence of oratorical prose.
Pure counterpoint could not give us such a charming effect as Chopin obtains in the first study of Opus 10; nor could the plainer and more free harmonic style give us such delicate bits of tracery as Bach has in his fugues. If now you will take the trouble to learn two long words, later in your study of music they will be of use to you. The first is Polyphonic; the other is Monophonic.
The invasion of the realm of popular melody by crude imitations of the polyphonic devices of the Netherlanders could not have crushed out the melodic and rhythmic basis of dance music and this had fitted itself to the utterance of instruments.
Rub the bloom from a peach or from a butterfly what remains will belong to the kitchen, to natural history! It is not otherwise with Chopin; the bloom consisted in Tausig's treatment of the Ballade. He came to the first passage the motive among blossoms and leaves a figurated recurrence to the principal theme is in the inner parts its polyphonic variant.
The point at issue in this celebrated discussion really was whether in polyphonic song the words could be made intelligible, for if not the music would become a mere decorative feature, and the mass itself unmeaning.
The analysis of the musical selection and the reasons for her decision are set down in her notebook by the listening student. The second-year class concerns itself with "the thematic and polyphonic melody, the larger forms, harmony in its aesthetic bearings, the aesthetic effects of the more complicated rhythms, comparative criticism and the various schools of composition."
As to Holmes, he returned refreshed to his monograph upon the Polyphonic Motets of Lassus, which has since been printed for private circulation, and is said by experts to be the last word upon the subject. Some weeks afterwards I learned incidentally that my friend spent a day at Windsor, whence he returned with a remarkably fine emerald tie-pin.
And much of the New Verse is Euphuistic, not merely in its self-conscious cleverness, its delightful toying with words and phrases for their own sake, its search of novel cadences and curves, but also in its naive pleasure in rediscovering and parodying what the ancients had discovered long before. "Polyphonic prose," for instance, as announced and illustrated by Mr.
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