The pressure from without was supplied by the Council of Trent.
It may here be parenthetically remarked that music, all through modern history, has needed such legislators and initiators of new methods.
Considered as an art of expression, she has always tended to elude control, to create for herself a domain extraneous to her proper function, and to erect her resources of mere sound into self-sufficingness.

What Palestrina effected in the sixteenth century, was afterwards accomplished on a wider platform by Gluck in the eighteenth, and in our own days the same deliverance has been attempted by Wagner.

The efforts of all these epoch-making musicians have been directed toward restraining the tendencies of music to assert an independence, which for herself becomes the source of weakness by reducing her to co-operation with insignificant words, and which renders her subservient to merely technical dexterities.
Giovanni Pier Luigi, called Palestrina from his birthplace in one of the Colonna fiefs near Rome, the ancient Praeneste, was born of poor parents, in the year 1524, He went to Rome about 1540, and began his musical career probably as a choir-boy in one of the Basilicas.

Claude Goudimel, the Besancon composer, who subsequently met a tragic death at Lyons in a massacre of Huguenots, had opened a school of harmony in Rome, where Palestrina learned the first rudiments of that science.

What Palestrina owed to Goudimel, is not clear.