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the clerical usage as barbarous. By the 1530s in England, for instance, Reformers, or “Heretics,” were often identified in the minds of suspicious conservative churchmen by the “newfangled” way they spoke Greek. Music became another source of cultural-religious contention. There had long been grumbles within the church about the way in which polyphony and other proliferating musical devices were obscuring the meaning of the words sung in masses and other sacred music. In 1324 the Avignon pope John XXII issued a bad-tempered decree condemning “certain disciples of the new school” for “preferring to devise ways of their own rather than to continue singing in the old manner.” He complained that “the divine office is now performed with semibreves and minims, and with these notes of small value every composition is pestered. Moreover, they truncate the melodies with hockets, they deprave them with discantus” and so on, in an exasperated tone—ending lamely, however, that disobedience would be punished by “suspension from office of eight days.”

Little notice was taken of this warning or of others, and sacred music continued to become more complicated and, to the layman, incomprehensible. This, it should be said, was typical Gothic multiplication of complexity, the exact counterpart of the fantastically ornate architecture—late Perpendicular, Plateresque, and so on—that was prevalent in the second half of the fourteenth through the fifteenth century. It had nothing to do with Renaissance antiquarianism. It is not clear whether there was such a phenomenon as Renaissance music, as opposed to music during the Renaissance. The “new art,” as it was called, of musical notation had been introduced around 1316 by a Frenchman, Philippe de Vitry (1291–1361). This made notation far more flexible and allowed composers to express their wishes with clarity and to introduce far more varieties of rhythm. Certainly Italian musicians played only a minor part in musical development in the closing centuries of the Middle Ages. Changes came from France, the Low Countries and England. It is notable that whereas in the visual arts Italy exported innovators and masters, in music it imported them. The most celebrated musical composer and organizer of the entire period, Adriaan Willaert (c. 1490–1562), came from Bruges. After holding various posts in Italy he was appointed in 1527 maestro di capella at St. Mark’s, Venice, at a salary that eventually rose to the enormous sum of 200 ducats a year. Apart from composing nine masses and innumerable other works, sacred and secular, he made the music at St. Mark’s the best in Europe, rivaled only by companies run by the emperor, the kings of England and France, the pope and the courts of Mantua and Ferrara.

Italy, then, at least had the credit of maintaining four out of the seven best musical ensembles in Europe. It also played a role in the technology of music, including the development of the lute, the violin, the viol, the trumpet and woodwinds, and such keyboard instruments as the harpsichord and the virginal. By the late sixteenth century, compositions required instruments with four octaves and the whole chromatic range. Venice was the first printing center to start reproducing scores (1501), and these sixteenth-century print runs were often extensive, five hundred to two thousand copies. Moreover, in music as well as the other arts, Italy led the way in resuscitating antiquity, publishing Isadore of Seville (1470) as well as the musical writings of Plato and Aristotle. During the first quarter of the sixteenth century, translations of the treatises on music by Ptolemy and Baccheus were in print, and by 1562 so was the first translation of Aristoxenus’ Harmonics. In 1581 Vincenzo Galilei, in his Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna, actually reproduced three ancient Greek hymns by Mesomedes, which had come down through Byzantium.4

There is evidence that, in the sixteenth century, knowledge of music was spreading in the towns of Europe, and that a bourgeois market was opening to supplement the princely