In the second decade of the sixteenth century some musicians began to tire of teleologies. Chapter 15 describes a “new sonorousness” that would soon flourish in music by composers such as Jean Richafort and Adrian Willaert. Whereas their settings of the Pater noster embrace continuous musical flow, Josquin’s reaches new heights in projecting an esthetics of opposition.

Chapter 13 identifies a special kind of Osanna setting that surfaces in music by Antoine Busnoys and clusters in masses by Josquin des Prez. Characterized by a kind of breathless energy, these “hurricane” Osannas are compelling on their own and as they relate to the rest of the formally tumultuous Sanctus.

This chapter demarcates two eras of piano composition – pre-Debussy and post-Debussy – by taking as its focal point a comment made by the pianist Marguerite Long that since Debussy no one has heard or played the piano in the same way as it was played before. As crude as these delineations are, the goal is to emphasise the truly transformative nature of his approach to thinking about the piano in its entirety – as a technological machine, a source of unlimited and variegated sonority, and a catalyst for freeing the human imagination. While taking into consideration the pianistic tradition that Debussy was born into and the one that he was propelled towards – spurred on by the innovations of his contemporaries at the piano, including Gabriel Fauré, Emmanuel Chabrier, and Maurice Ravel – this chapter highlights Debussy’s uniquely refined sense of how the piano might be made to sound anew. By the turn of the twentieth century he was beginning to establish his status as a trailblazer at the keyboard. It would be up to his immediate successors, particularly the French composers Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez, to extend the expressive potential of his engagement with the sensual, dramatic, and formal potentials of sound into a dimension that exploited aspects of acoustics and resonance.