ABSTRACT
Secondly, in one of the many brilliant examples of how to rearrange the existing pieces of a jigsaw to make a totally new picture which make up Christianity in the West, John argued that one of the ‘migrations of the holy’ between 1400 and 1700 was in the field of church music. The increased application of polyphony to church music in the fifteenth century, especially to the ordinary of the Mass, provided magnificent music such as that of Dufay and Josquin des Pres which was ‘an audible symbol of plurality in unity’; and a few years later Luther would agree that polyphonic music was a precious gift that wove multitudes of Christians into a single fabric, like a dance, ‘a foretaste of the consort of the angels’. But in the later fifteenth and sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such ravishing, unifying music was attacked by ‘tone-deaf humanists’ and hard-line Protestant reformers, who elevated the Word far above all else, denounced the new music as unscriptural, and complained that it got in the way of the words, and - worse - aroused vulgar passions. Although defended by some orthodox Catholics, conservative Lutherans, and insular Anglicans, the new church music was increasingly cut off from its roots. And while it helped to spawn new developments, such as the oratorio in Italy and the quasi-sacred concert in Northern Europe, its strongest supporters were unable to stem the tide of talent and invention that was running towards more secular and instrumental music, which left the faithful bereft of the kind of musical tension and resolution that had been theirs before the days of the Erasmians and the Calvinists.1
