If anybody's music gives us the sound of contemplative prayer, it is Palestrina's. His music does not have to rise up to Heaven because it is already there before the first note sounds and it remains there long after the last note has faded away. Yet Palestrina's music is not remote from human sentiments. Although the sounds are not what we are accustomed to while thinking of the things of earth, one never gets the sense that earthly people do not belong in the regions of this music. We are guests, but we are welcome guests.

The modal system is much more conducive for circumambulating unearthly realms than it is for plunging into more familiar human passions. Even so, the coloring that eventually led to the major and minor scales of tonal music was available to Palestrina for portraying joy and sorrow. Unlike his great contemporaries Victoria, Byrd, and Lassus, Palestrina did exploit these possibilities very much. The joy of a motet like "Laudate Pueri" is rather solemn, Mary's lament over the suffering of her son in the "Stabat Mater" is rather serene. The penitence of the motet "Civitatem Tribulationis" is more confident in God's forgiveness than anguished It isn't that the emotions of joy and sorrow are unrecognizable in these works. Rather, they are on a plane elevated way above these emotions as we normally experience them, even in our most devout moments at prayer. It seems that all the joys and sorrows in human life, even the human life of Christ, are gently lifted into Eternity.

Palestrina exploits the ambiguity of minor and major sounding modes in many works. The Missa de Beata Virgine is a particularly good example of this. The motifs in this Mass setting transform themselves smoothly between darker minor sounds and brighter major ones. There is nothing here of the dramatic dialectic of light and dark that we find later in Schubert. There is nothing dramatic about the music at all. As with any Palestrina mass, the incarnation of Christ is an awesome transcendent mystery, the crucifixion a moment of solemn contemplation, and the resurrection a confident proclamation.

Smoothness is an apt word for Palestrina. He eschews the dramatic possibilities available to him for strong contrasts in musical texture and expression. His motifs constantly develop and transform themselves, yet there is no sense that they have really changed. Where Tallis will startle the listener with dissonance before resolving it, Palestrina resolves dissonances before they really happen. In the polyphonic texture, there is never a sense of one voice being at odds with another. Although they are all doing something different, they are all on precisely the same wave length. The result is a seamless flow of music that may swell and recede, but which basically maintains its lofty height throughout.

The strongest emotion in Palestrina's sacred music is what I can only call a contemplative joy. It isn't the handspring type of outburst such as one can find in J.S. Bach. Usually, the music makes us still and keeps us that way rather than inspiring us to move. That is, the body stays with the music most closely by keeping still and freeing the smallest muscles of the body move with it a little. Time and again, Palestrina portrays this transcendent ecstasy through both ascending and descending modal scales. It seems that no matter how many times he does this, it sounds new and different, a new song for God who is always the newest thing for human beings.

The counterpoint in Palestrina's earlier works (of which the Missa de Beata Virgine and the Missa Tu es Petrus are fine examples) is quite dense. It is all perfectly harmonious and it suggests that many voices can coexist in Heaven without the least hint of conflict or tension, but there is a lot of it. In fact, the dense counterpoint in polyphonic religious music led the Vatican authorities to doubt if such music should continue to be used in worship. The famous story of Palestrina's masterpiece the Missa Papae Marcelli has been discredited in the eyes of music historians. However, even if Palestrina did not need to write this mass as a last-ditch effort to save polyphonic music, there is not question that it could have done just that. The Vatican's concern was that complex polyphony obscured the words so that worshipers did not know what was being prayed, which was true. In the Missa Papae Marcelli, it is possible to hear every word quite distinctly (provided one understands the Latin text). The polyphony of Palestrina's later works is simpler but it blooms all the more with quiet ecstasy and unhurried dignity.

Was Palestrina always (or ever) rapt in the contemplation embodied in his music? It seems likely that he came down to earth somewhat just to deal with his wife and children. A Papal decision to the effect that, as a married man, he was not sufficiently pure to continue as the residential composer at St. Peter's probably did not leave Palestrina as unruffled as the text of the Stabat Mater did when he composed the music for it. We don't really know how much music expresses what is active in a composer's heart at the time. It may be that, with the genius of a Palestrina, the music grows its own wings and soars way beyond what the composer can imagine of God's glory.