The period of European musical history that lies between the death of Josquin in 1521 and the emergence of the mature Palestrina and Lassus in the 1560s, is not dominate by any single figure, but it saw an exceptional flowering of only slightly smaller talents, each of whom took elements from the immense store-house of Josquin's mature vocabulary as the basis for an individual stule of his own. The present record gives us an unusual opportunity to discover their distinct personalities by placing them side by side; so heard, their music reveals traits of individuality that might easily escape us if it were listened to in isolation.
Nicolas Gombert was probably born in southern Flanders, not long before 1500. He joined Charles V's Imperial Chapel, and from 1529 he served until about 1540 as the master of its chiristers; after a spell in the galleys as punishment for too close a relationship with one of them, he rtired to his canonry at Tournai, where he probably died about 1556. His setting of the Marian antiphon Ave Regina caelorum, first published in 1541, paraphrases the chant in all of its five voices but without placing particular emphasis on any one of them. It is typical, too, that Gombert avoids strict imitation between the voices, closely related though they are, and deliberately rejects the repetitive implications of the chant, preferring to treat each similar phrase slightly differently. His is an art that deliberately eschews strong cadences, clear-cut rhythmic phraseology and clarity of texture: there is hardly a trace of Josquin's lucid Italianate symmetry. What we have instead is a meditative, almost seamless interweaving of voices, each based on the chant and each beautiful in itself, proceeding in a placid rhythm that renews itself constantly through a mildly dissonant counterpoint.
What is absent, presumably because it did not concern Gombert, is any consistent attempt to mirror in the music the natural flow and accent of the Latin text. Of this there is far more evidence in Arcadelt's setting of a passage from the Song of Songs, also to be understood as addressed to the mother of God, as its ostinato cantus firmus, drawn from the litany of the Blessed Virgin, makes clear. Jacques Arcadelt was born, perhaps near Liège, some ten years later than Gombert, but unlike him spent much of his life in Italy, first at Florence (where he was one of the pioneers of the new madrigal genre) and later in the Papal Choir in Rome. O pulcherrima, first published in 1539 but probably written some years earlier, has far more of Josquin's harmonic lucidity and transparency of texture, though it is worth noting that the acceleration of the cantus firmus (which starts in long note-values and gradually moves to shorter ones) is handled more haphazardly than it would have been by Josquin, whose architectural ground-plans are laid out with mathematical precision. What Arcadelt has learned from Josquin in his subtle balance between strict imitation, as at the beginning, and near-homophony (e. g. "vulnerasti cor meum"). The long downward scales on "descende" (spanning a ninth in superius and bassus) are another Josquinian touch, nicely balanced by the quicker rising figure that characterizes the final section, "veni coronaberis". The whole motet is a model of refined sensuosness in the service of religious devotion.
Adrian Willaert (c. 1490-1562) is another of the northerners who pursued their careers in  Italy, in his case mainly in Venice, where he was maestro di cappella of St. Mark's from 1527 until his death. His immense influence both on his contemporaries and on a younger generation of pupils was due not only to his position at the head of this important institution but also to a powerful and probing intellect. More than any other composer of his generation he achieved the careful matching of musical and verbal accent that had begun with Josquin but was still regarded rather as an optional than an obligatory task for the composer. Ave Regina caelorum, mater regis is a setting, first published in 1545, of another Marian antiphon; from Willaert's polyphony we can deduce that it is based on a chant constructed on a pattern of melodically repeating phrases. As in so many of Josquin's later works, the structural framework is provided by a strict canon, in this case between the two upper voices - but since the other two share the same melodic material it is far from obtrusive. Characteristic too is the shift, at "funde preces", to triple metre - producing the effect of an increase in weight and tension - with a return to the original speed and metre for the final phrase, based on the same melody as the opening.
Jacobus Clemens "non Papa" (so-called in his later years, apparently to distinguish him from a poet working in the same town) was probably born, like Arcadelt, in the first decade of the 16th century, and died about 1557. He may have come from the island of Qalcheren, and his career seems to have confined entirely to Flanders. Among his numerous works, motets, masses and Magnificats predominate, but there are also some ninety French chansons and no fewer than 159 souterliedekens - Flemish metrical translations of the psalms designed to be sung to popular tunes in simple polyphonic settings; in this respect Clemens anticipates the multilingualism of Lassus. His music falls, in general, somewhere between the northern asymmetry of Gombert and the Italianate lucidity of Arcadelt. Ego flos campi, first published in 1555 near the end of his life, is not entirely typical in that it employs no fewer than seven voices. Though it begins imitatively, the number of parts precludes this kind of procedure throughout the piece, and we soon find Clemens concentrating rather on sonority than on counterpoint. The balanced, sometimes overlapping phrases and the strongly marked feeling for tonality are both "modern" features that distinguish this music clearly from that of Gombert, for example, but the frequent use of suspensions sounded against their resolutions is a hall-mark of Clemen's style that points backwards rather than to the strictly controlled dissonance-treatment of Willaert. The Christmas motet Pastores loquebantur was also firs published in 1555, but whis its five voices is more traditional in style. It begins spaciously and the whole first half flows placidly and without strongly marked cadences. In the second part the rhythm slows at "Mariam". to indicate the shepherd's awe as they come upon Mary and her child in the stable; thereafter the texture becomes more nearly homophonic, for "positum in praesaepio". The Christmastide refrain of "noe, noe" that ends the first part is repeated at the end of the second, but in a shortened form.
Willaert's In convertendo belongs to a very specific liturgical tradition, that of antiphonal settings of the vesper psalms. around the middle of the 16th century in Italy, three modes of performance had become customary in those churches where a polyphonic choir was available. The simplest was the alternation, verse by verse, of plainchant with polyphony. More lavishly endowed institutions might employ, at leat occasionally, two separate polyphonic groups, again in alternation, and much music was composed for such forces - but with each verse musically self-contained, so that the odd or, more usually, the even verses could if desired be replaced by plainchant. Only the richest cathedral and princely churches, and then only on specially solemn occasions, could rely on a choir large enough to guarantee this alternation, and therefore make it possible to overlap one side with another, and even combine them. In such sumptuous settings as these, composers often took the opportunity to get away from the rigid alternation of single verses by giving more than one successive verse to each choir -  as Willaert does here with verses 3 ("Tunc dicent inter gentes") and 4 ("Magnificavit Dominus"), both given to the first choir. The traditional psalm-tone, in this case the sixth, is referred to, but only glancingly, as it were, at the beginning of each verse. Willaert's art is shown in the subtle contrasts of rhythm (this setting begins, most unusually, in a triumphant triple metre) and of texture; he reserves the full eightpart ensemble for the final "et in saecula saeculorum").
The career of Willaert's Flemish pupil Cipriano de Rore (1516-1565) followed much the same pattern as that of his master, first at Ferrara, and later, with a brief interlude at Venice as Willaert's successor, at the court of Parma; but the fastidious and uncompromising temperament which unfitted him for a large public organization like St. Mark's gave rise to music of the utmost refinement and subtlety. This is to be heard at its most impressive in his remarkable settings of serious Italian poetry, which were to exert a profound influence on the young Monteverdi in the following generation, But even in a motet like O altitudo divitiarum, which opens his thord collection of five-part motet (1549), we can sense the presence of a highly individual composer. Here the texture is entirely contrapuntal, with much free imitation but no homophony at all; each nuance of the text is mirrored with the appropriate device of musical rhetoric, as at the very beginning, where the "altitudo" is ymbolised by the fact that each voice begins at the top of its range and the texture expands downwards. Rore embodies more than any other composer of the 16th century the profound humanistic impulse to explore and reveal in music the inmost details of whatever text he sets, even at the expense of that purely musical impetus which less highly intellectual composers sometimes achieve at the text's expense.
The two remaining composers represented on this record belong to a later generation than the others, and to a different musical orbit that reflects the changed political and relogious map of Europe in the latter half of the century. Philippe de Monte was born in Malines in 1521 and after a roving but distinguished early career spent mostly in Italy and the Netherlands he accepted, in 1568, the directorship of music at the Imperial court in Vienna. The remainder of his long life was based here and at Prague, where he died in 1603. Jacob Handl (latinized as Gallus, = chicken) was born in 1550 in Carniola, the southernmost of the Hapsburgs' Austrian Dominions. He gravitated towards Vienna, and after a period in the Hofkapelle there spent the remainder of his life at various positions in Silesia and Bohemia; at the time of his early death in 1591 he was Cantor at the Imperial church of St. John in Prague.
Though Monte was a full geberation older than Handl, their church music reflects their common background in the fervently Catholic Imperial court at the time of the Counterreformation. Gallus's two motets, both published in 1586 in a systematically collected edition of his works, are fine examples of the new reconciliation between Flemish counterpoint and Italian (more specifically Venetian) sonority that we find above all in the music of Lassus. Like him, Gallus can command a chromatic style for texts of fervent devotion, but in Canite tuba his music is essentially diatonic, with brilliant figures at the mention of trumpets, and fanfares to summon the nations. Ave Maria naturally calls for smoother lines and less overt pictorialism; it is worth noting that the texture is often essentially homophonic, enlivened by a single "out-of-phase" voice. In neither motet is there a trace of reference to the traditional plainsong.
Of the two eight-part pieces by Monte O suavitas, first published in 1575, is unquestionably the earlier: its eight voices are employed in a manner much like that of Andrea Gabrieli, combining and recombining flexibly to achieve ever-changing contrasts of sonority within the whole group. Laudate Dominum, on the other hand, a setting of Psalm 150, is preserved in a single manuscript dated 1599, and here the eight voices are deployed in a brilliant antiphony which it is instructuve to compare with that of Willaert's vesper-psalm composed half a century before. Here, perhaps under the influence of Giovanni Gabrieli, Monte employs a rapid alternation between the choirs and an essentially parlando rhythmic style to achieve an effect of the utmost splendour and vivacity. On the threshold of a new century we are also on the threshold od a new musical world.