Page:History of the German people at the close of the Middle Ages vol1.djvu/253

 241 CHAPTEE V MUSIC While architecture, sculpture and painting, woodcutting and copper engraving, were making such progress, music, the mightiest of arts, was by degrees attaining to perfection. From the middle of the fifteenth century the number of German composers was unusually large, and their compositions of very high merit. Musical advantages were so very great that even mediocre talent had a chance of reaching a high grade ; indeed, all branches of art were studied and practised as labours of love, and by an appreciative people. Music, being pre-eminently calculated to express religious sentiment, took a high position ; professors of the art were the most highly thought of, whether in cathedral, chapel, or college. The actual basis of the new school of music was the Gregorian Chant. On this the German masters built up a true science of Church music, in the polyphonous structures of which the whole deep meaning of the old Church hymns is developed. In their grand Masses, as well as in their motetts on psalms, antiphons, or Church hymns, there is a close analogy to the architectural wonders of the age. The same harmony, exactness, and symmetry pervades both, and as in architecture a strict mathematical intelligence was at work, subduing, controlling, animating, and spiritualising the hard, vol. i. R