The cultivated classes abandoned it in practice to popular creators of melody upon the one hand, and to grotesque scholastic pedants on the other.

And from the blending of those ill-accorded elements arose the chaos which I have attempted to describe.
Learned composers in the style developed by the Flemish masters had grown tired of writing simple music for four voices and a single choir.
They reveled in the opportunity of combining eight vocal parts and bringing three choirs with accompanying orchestras into play at the same time.

They were proud of proving how by counterpoint the most dissimilar and mutually-jarring factors could be wrought into a whole, intelligible to the scientific musician, though unedifying to the public.

In the neglect of their art, considered as an art of interpretation and expression, they abandoned themselves to intricate problems and to the presentation of incongruous complexities.
The singers were expert in rendering difficult passages, in developing unpromising motives, and in embroidering the arras-work of the composer with fanciful extravagances of vocal execution.

The instrumentalists were trained in the art of copying effects of fugue or madrigal by lutes and viols in concerted pieces.