The composers of the Flemish school prided themselves on overloading their work with every kind of intricate and difficult ornament, exhibiting their dexterity by canons of many types, inversions, imitations, contrapuntal devices of divers ingenious and distracting species.

The verbal theme became a mere basis for the utterance of scientific artifices and the display of vocal gymnastics.
The singers, for their part, were allowed innumerable licenses.

While the bass sustained the melody, the other voices indulged in extempore descant (_composizione alla mente_) and in extravagances of technical execution (_rifiorimenti_), regardless of the style of the main composition, violating time, and setting even the fundamental tone at defiance.
The composers, to advance another step in the analysis of this strange medley, took particular delight in combining different sets of words, melodies of widely diverse character, antagonistic rhythms and divergent systems of accentuation in a single piece.

They assigned these several ingredients to several parts; and for the further exhibition of their perverse skill, went even to the length of coupling themes in the major and the minor.
The most obvious result of such practice was that it became impossible to understand what words were being sung, and that instead of concord and order in the choir, a confused discord and anarchy of dinning sounds prevailed.

What made the matter from an ecclesiastical point of view still worse, was that these scholastically artificial compositions were frequently based on trivial and vulgar tunes, suggesting the tavern, the dancing-room, or even worse places, to worshipers assembled for the celebration of a Sacrament.