The music designed to present these ideas in a high light necessarily has an appropriate character.

We do not find here music of strongly marked rhythm and clearly defined measure, suitable to the utterance of worldly emotions, but a melody resembling the chant, written in the tonalities used in the church, but containing a certain kind of prose rhythm and accentuation, such as exists in the Gregorian music.
This was the inevitable march of development.

The liturgical drama originated, as has been shown, in the celebration of certain offices and fetes, for which the music assumed a style of delivery clothed in unwonted pomp.

Characters and costumes and specially composed music soon found their way into these ceremonies.

The new music followed the old lines and preserved the character of the liturgical chant.