The specific qualities of Italian music for the next two centuries were undoubtedly determined by the atmosphere of sensuous pietism in which it flourished, at the very time when German music was striking far other roots in the Chorales of the Reformation epoch.

What Palestrina effected was to substitute in Church music the clear and melodious manner of the secular madrigal for the heavy and scholastic science of the Flemish school, and to produce masterpieces of religious art in his motetts on the Canticles which confounded the lines of demarcation between pious and profane expression.

He taught music to utter the emotions of the heart; but those emotions in his land and race were already tending in religion toward the sentimental and voluptuous.
There is no doubt that the peril to which music was exposed at the time of the Tridentine Council was a serious and real one.

When we remember how intimate was the connection between the higher kinds of music and the ritual of the Church, this will be apparent.

Nor is it too much to affirm that the art at that crisis, but for the favor shown to it by Pius IV.