ABSTRACT
In musical as well as textual conception, Deploration is correspondingly manylevelled. Cosimo Bartoli 's comments suggest that in surveying the music of the period, there are parallels to be drawn and developments to be recorded no less significant than in any of the other arts. Music, as Renaissance mythology itself suggests, can master the barbaric overreacher and generate its own peculiar reciprocation of individual and group. Unique among the arts, Renaissance music, then, was impelled in its early stages almost wholly by vernacular and Christian impulses. The Masses, then - even within the disciplined form of liturgical words and inherited musical forms - still yields a high degree of freedom to Josquin des Prez. Seicento music may, then, reveal moments of both difficulty and grace which are not to be found in later music. The madrigal claims similar rights, and in musical terms relies on through-composition rather than the repetition of strophic units.
