Gothic architecture is above all things organic and Teutonic music has the same character.

Its most Gothic form, the North German fugue, which is the instrumental descendant of the Netherlands church music, is the most closely organized of musical types.

The Italian architecture, on the other hand, displayed an aversion for the infinite detail of Gothic methods and found its individual expression in the grand and patent relations of noble mass effects.

This same feeling speedily found its way into Italian music, even that composed by the Netherland masters who had settled in Italy.
Adrian Willaert, who is often called the father of the madrigal (despite the fact that madrigals were written before he was born), became chapel master of St.Mark's, Venice, in 1527.

He seized with avidity the suggestion offered by the existence of two organs in the cathedral and wrote great works "for two choruses of four voices each, so that the choruses could answer each other across the church.