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MUSIC

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Originally appearing in Volume V19, Page 81 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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MUSIC .—The See also:

Greek Wovo'LKiI (S6. TEXvi)), from which this word is derived, was used very widely to embrace all those arts over which the Nine See also:Muses (Mo aai) were held to preside. Contrasted with ryvµvaaTLKid (gymnastic) it included those branches of See also:education concerned with the development of the mind as opposed to the See also:body. Thus such widely different arts and sciences as See also:mathematics, See also:astronomy, See also:poetry and literaturegenerally, and even See also:reading and See also:writing would all fall under µovvLKi7, besides the singing and setting of lyric poetry. On the educational value of music in the formation of See also:character the philosophers laid See also:chief stress, and this biased their aesthetic See also:analysis. `Apµovia (See also:harmony), or appovud (sc. TEXvil), rather than µovvLKi?, was the name given by the Greeks to the See also:art of arranging sounds for the purpose of creating a definite aesthetic impression, with which this See also:article deals. I.—See also:GENERAL See also:SKETCH i. Introduction.—As a mature and See also:independent art music is unknown except in the See also:modern forms realized by Western See also:civilization; See also:ancient music, and the non-See also:European music of the See also:present See also:day, being (with insignificant exceptions of a character which confirms the generalization) invariably an See also:adjunct of poetry or See also:dance, in so far as it is recognizable as an art at all. The modern art of music is in a unique position; for, while its See also:language has been wholly created by art, this language is yet so perfectly organized as to be in itself natural; so that though the music of one See also:age or See also:style may be at first unintelligible to a listener who is accustomed to another style, and though the listener may help himself by acquiring See also:information as to the characteristics and meaning of the new style, he will best learn to understand it by merely divesting his mind of prejudices and allowing the music to make itself intelligible by its own self-consistency. The understanding of music thus finally depends neither upon technical knowledge nor upon See also:convention, but upon the listener's immediate and See also:familiar experience of. it; an experience which technical knowledge and See also:custom can of course aid him to acquire more rapidly, as they strengthen his memory and enable him to See also:fix impressions by naming them. Beyond certain elementary facts of See also:acoustics (see See also:SOUND), modern music shows no See also:direct connexion with nature independently of art; indeed, it is already art that determines the selection of these elementary acoustic facts, just as in See also:painting art determines the selection of those facts that come under the See also:cognizance of See also:optics.' In music, however, the purely acoustic principles are incomparably fewer and simpler than the See also:optical principles of painting, and their See also:artistic interaction transforms them into something no less remote from the laboratory experiments of acoustic See also:science than from the unorganized sounds of nature.

The result is that while the See also:

ordinary non-artistic experiences of sight afford so much material for plastic art that the vulgar conception of See also:good painting is that it is deceptively like nature, the ordinary non-artistic experience of sound has so little in See also:common with music that musical See also:realism is, with rare though popular exceptions, generally regarded as an eccentricity. This contrast between music and plastic art may be partly explained by the See also:mental See also:work undergone, during the earliest See also:infancy both of the See also:race and of the individual, in interpreting sensations of space. When a baby learns the shape of See also:objects by taking them in his hands, and gradually advances to the See also:discovery that his toes belong to him, he goes through an amount of work that is quite forgotten by the adult, and its complexity and difficulty has perhaps only been fully realized through the experience of persons who have been See also:born See also:blind but have acquired sight at a mature age by an operation. Such work gives the facts of normal adult See also:vision an amount of organic principle that makes them admirable raw material, for art. The See also:power of distinguishing sensations of sound is associated with no such mental skill, and is no more complex than the power of distinguishing See also:colours. On the other See also:hand, sound is the See also:principal See also:medium by which most of the higher animals_ both See also:express and excite emotion; and hence, though until 1 Thus See also:Chinese and See also:Japanese art has attained high organization without the aid of a veracious See also:perspective; while, on the other hand, its carefully formulated decorative principles, though not realistic, certainly See also:rest on an optical and physiological basis. Again, many modern impressionists justify their methods by an See also:appeal to phenomena of complementary See also:colour which earlier artists possibly did not perceive and certainly did not select as artistic materials. codified into human speech it does not give any raw material for art, yet so powerful are its See also:primitive effects that music (in the See also:bird-See also:song sense of sound indulged in for its own attractiveness) is as See also:long See also:prior to language as the brilliant colours of animals and See also:flowers are prior to painting (see SONG). Again, sound as a warning or a menace is eminently important in the See also:history of the See also:instinct of self-preservation; and, above all, its See also:production is instantaneous and instinctive. All these facts, while they tend to make musical expression an See also:early phenomenon in the history of See also:life, are extremely unfavourable to the early development of musical art. They invested the first musical attempts with a mysterious power over listener and musician, by re-awakening instincts more powerful, because more ancient and necessary, than any that could ever have been appealed to by so deliberate a See also:process as that of See also:drawing on a See also:flat See also:surface a See also:series of lines calculated to remind the See also:eye of the See also:appearance of solid objects in space. It is hardly surprising that music long remained as imperfect as its legendary See also:powers were portentous, even in the hands of so supremely artistic a race as that of classical See also:Greece; and what-ever wonder this backwardness might still arouse in us vanishes when we realize the extreme difficulty of the process by which the principles of the modern art were established.

2. Non-See also:

harmonic and Greek Music.—Archaic music is of two kinds—the unwritten, or spontaneous, and the recorded, or scientific. The earliest musical art-problems were far too difficult for conscious analysis, but by no means always beyond the reach of a lucky See also:hit from an inspired See also:singer; and thus folk-music often shows real beauty where the more systematic music of the See also:time is merely arbitrary. Moreover, folk-music and the present music of barbarous and civilized non-European races furnish the study of musical origins with material analogous to that liven by the present See also:manners and customs of different races in the study of social See also:evolution and ancient history. We may mention as examples the accurate comparison of the musical scales of non-European races undertaken by A. J. See also:Ellis (On the Musical Scales of Various Nations, 1885); the parallel researches and acute and cautious reasoning of his friend and collaborator, A. J. Hipkins (Dorian and Phrygian reconsidered from a Non-harmonic Point of View, 1902); and, perhaps most of all, the study of Japanese music, with its remarkable if uncertain signs of the beginning of a harmonic tendency, its logical coherence, and its See also:affinity to Western scales, points in which it seems to show a See also:great advance upon the Chinese music from which most of it is derived (Music and Musical See also:Instruments of See also:Japan, by J. F. Piggott, 1893). The reader will find detailed accounts of ancient Greek music in the article on that subject in See also:Grove's See also:Dictionary of Music and Musicians (new ed., ii.

223) and in See also:

Monro's Modes of Ancient Greek Music (See also:Clarendon See also:Press, 1894), while both the Greek music itself, and the steps by which it passed through Graeco-See also:Roman and early See also:Christian phases to become the See also:foundation of the modern art, are traced as clearly as is consistent with accuracy in The See also:Oxford History of Music, vol. i., by See also:Professor Wooldridge. See also:Sir See also:Hubert See also:Parry's Evolution of the Art of Music (" See also:International Scientific Series," originally published under the See also:title of The Art of Music) presents the See also:main lines of the evolution of modern musical ideas in the clearest and most readable See also:form yet attained. Sir Hubert Parry illustrates in this work the artificiality of our modern musical conceptions by the word " See also:cadence," which to a modern musician belies its See also:etymology, since it normally means for him no " falling " See also:close but a pair of final chords rising from dominant to tonic. Moreover, in consequence of our harmonic notions we think of scales as constructed from the bottom upwards; and even in the above-mentioned article in Grove's Dictionary all the Greek scales are, from sheer force of See also:habit, written upwards. But the ancient and, almost universally, the primitive See also:idea of music is like that of speech, in which most inflections are in fact cadences, while rising inflexions express less usual sentiments, such as surprise or interrogation. Again, our modern musical idea of " high "and " See also:low " is probably derived from a sense of greater and less vocal effort; and it has been much stimulated by our harmonic sense, which has necessitated a range of sounds incomparably greater than those employed in any non-harmonic See also:system. The Greeks derived their use of the terms from the position of notes on their instruments; and the Greek hypate was what we should See also:call the lowest See also:note of the mode, while nete was the highest. Sir See also:George See also:Macfarren has pointed out (Ency. Brit., 9th ed., art. " Music ") that Boethius (c. A.D. 500) already' See also:fell into the See also:trap and turned the Greek modes upside down.

Another See also:

radical though less See also:grotesque misconception was also already well exploded by Macfarren; but it still frequently survives at the present day, since the study of non-harmonic scales is, with the best of intentions, See also:apt rather to encourage than to dispel it. The more we realize the importance of See also:differences in position of intervals of various sizes, as producing differences of character in scales, the more irresistible is the temptation to regard the ancient Greek modes as differing from each other in this way. And the temptation becomes greater instead of less when we have succeeded in thinking away our modern harmonic notions. Modern harmonization enormously increases the differences of expression between modes of which the melodic intervals are different, but it does this in a See also:fashion that draws the See also:attention almost entirely away from these differences of See also:interval; and without harmony See also:Ave find it extremely difficult to distinguish one mode from another, unless it be by this different arrangement of intervals. Nevertheless, all the See also:evidence irresistibly tends to the conclusion that while the three Greek genera—diatonic, See also:chromatic, and enharmonic—were scales differing in intervals, the Greek modes were a series of scales identical in arrangement of interval, and differing, like our modern keys, only in See also:pitch. The three genera were applied to all these modes or keys, and we have no difficulty in understanding their modifying effects. But the only See also:clue we have to the mental process by which in a preharmonic age different characteristics can be ascribed to scales identical in all but pitch, is to be found in the limited See also:compass of Greek musical sounds, corresponding as it does to the evident sensitiveness of the Greek See also:ear to differences in vocal effort. We have only to observe the compass of the Greek See also:scale to see that in the most esteemed modes it is much more the compass of speaking than of singing voices. Modern singing is normally at a much higher pitch than that of the speaking See also:voice, but there is no natural See also:reason, outside the See also:peculiar nature of modern music, why this should be so. It is highly probable that all modern singing would strike a classical Greek ear as an outcry; and in any See also:case such See also:variations of pitch as are inconsiderable in modern singing are extremely emphatic in the speaking voice, so that they might well make all the difference to an ear unaccustomed to organized sound beyond the speaking compass. Again, much that See also:Aristoxenus and other ancient authorities say of the character of the modes (or keys) tends to confirm the view that that character depends upon the position of the mese or keynote within the general compass. Thus See also:Aristotle (Politics, v.

(viii.) 7, 1342 b. 20) states that certain low-pitched modes suit the voices of old men, and thus we may conjecture that even the position of tones and semitones might in the Dorian and Phrygian modes bring the bolder portion of the scale in all three genera into the best regions of the See also:

average See also:young voice, while the Ionian and Lydian might See also:lead the voice to dwell more upon semitones and enharmonic intervals, and so See also:account for the heroic character of the former and the sensual character of the latter (See also:Plato, See also:Republic, 398 to 400). Of the Greek genera, the chromatic and enharmonic (especially It is See also:worth adding that in the 16th See also:century the great contrapuntal composer See also:Costanzo Porta had been led by doubts on the subject to the wonderful conclusion that ancient Greek music was poly-phonic, and so constructed as to be invertible; in See also:illustration of which theory he and Vincentino composed four-See also:part motets in each of the Greek genera (diatonic, chromatic and enharmonic), Porta's being constructed like the 12th and 13th fugues in See also:Bach's Kunst der Fuge so as to be equally euphonious when sung upside down! (See See also:Hawkins's History of Music, i. 1 t2 5 the latter) show very clearly the origin of so many primitive scales in the interval of the downward See also:fourth. That interval (e.g. from C to G) is believed to be the earliest melodic relation-See also:ship which the ear learnt to fix; and most of the primitive scales were formed by the See also:accretion of See also:auxiliary notes at the bottom of this interval, and the addition of a similar interval, with similar accretions, below the former. In this way a pentatonic scale, like that of so many Scotch melodies, can easily be formed (thus, C, A, G; F, D, C); and though some primitive scales seem to have been on the See also:nucleus of the rising fifth, while the Siamese now use two scales of which not a single note within the See also:octave can be accounted for by any known principle, still we may consider that for general historic purposes the above example is typical. The Greeks divided their downward fourth into four notes, called a tetrachord; and by an elaborate system of linking tetrachords together they gave their scale a compass of two octaves. The enharmonic tetrachord, being the most ancient, gathered the See also:lower three notes very closely to the bottom, leaving the second note no less than a See also:major third from the See also:top, thus—C,Ab, G', G; (where G' stands for a note between Ab and G). The chromatic tetrachord was C, See also:Bbb, Ab, G; and the diatonic tetrachord was C, Bb, Ab, G. It is this last that has become the foundation of modern music, and the Greeks themselves soon preferred it to the other genera and found a scientific basis for it. In the first See also:place they noticed that its notes (and, less easily, the notes of the chromatic scale) could be connected by a series of those intervals which they recognized as concordant.

These were, the fourth; its converse, or See also:

inversion, the fifth; and the octave. The notes of the enharmonic tetrachord could not be connected by any such series. In the articles on HARMONY and SOUND account is given of the historic and scientific See also:foundations of the modern conception of See also:concord; and although this harmonic conception applies to simultaneous notes, while the Greeks concerned themselves only with successive notes, it is nevertheless permissible to regard the Greek sense of concord in successive notes as containing the germ of our harmonic sense. The stability of the diatonic scale was assured as early as the 6th century B.C. when See also:Pythagoras discovered (if he did not learn from See also:Egypt or See also:India) the extremely See also:simple mathematical proportions of its intervals. And this discovery was of unique importance, as fixing the intervals by a criterion that could never be obscured by the changes of See also:taste and custom otherwise inevitable in music that has no conscious harmonic principles to See also:guide it. At the same time, the foundation of a music as yet immature and See also:ancillary to See also:drama, on an acoustic science ancillary to a priori mathematics, was not without disadvantage to the art; and it is arguable that the great difficulty with which during the See also:medieval beginnings of modern harmony the concords of the third and See also:sixth were rationalized may have been increased by the fact that the See also:Pythagorean system See also:left these intervals considerably out of tune. In preharmonic times mathematics could not direct even the most observant ear to the study of those phenomena of upper partials of which See also:Helmholtz, in 1863, was the first to explain the significance; and thus though the Greeks knew the difference between a major and See also:minor See also:tone, on which See also:half the question depended, they could not possibly arrive at the modern reasons for adding both kinds of tone in See also:order to make the major third. (See SOUND.) Here we must digress in order to illustrate what is implied by our modern harmonic sense; for the difference that this makes to our whole musical consciousness is by no means universally realized. Music, as we now understand it, expresses itself in the interaction of three elements—See also:rhythm, See also:melody and harmony. The first two are obviously as ancient as human consciousness itself. Without the third a musical art of permanent value and intelligibility has not been known to attain independent existence. With harmony music assumes the existence of a See also:kind of space in three dimensions, none of which can subsist without at least implying the others.

When we hear an unaccompanied melody we cannot help interpreting it in the See also:

light of its most probable harmonies. Hence, whenit does not imply consistent harmonies it seems to us See also:quaint or See also:strange; because, unless it is very remote from our harmonic conceptions, it at least implies at any given moment some simple harmony which in the next moment it contradicts. Thus our inferences as to the expression intended by music that has not come under European See also:influence are unsafe, and the See also:pleasure we take in such music is capricious. The effort of thinking away our harmonic preconceptions is probably the most violent piece of mental gymnastics in all artistic experience, and furnishes much excuse for a sceptical attitude as to the artistic value of preharmonic music, which has at all events never become even partially independent of poetry and dance. Thus the rhythm of classical Greek music seems to have been entirely identical with that of See also:verse, and its beauty and expression appreciated in virtue of that identity. From the modern musical point of view the rhythm of words is limited to a merely monotonous uniformity of flow, with See also:minute undulations which are musically chaotic (see RHYTHM). The example of Greek tragedy, with the reports of its all-pervading music (in many cases, as in that of See also:Aeschylus, composed by the dramatist himself) could not fail to See also:fire the imaginations of modern pioneers and reformers of See also:opera; and See also:Monteverde, See also:Gluck and See also:Wagner convinced themselves and their contemporaries that their work was, amongst other things, a revival of Greek tragedy. But all that is known of Greek music shows that it represents no such modern ideas, as far as their really musical aspect is concerned. It represents, rather, an organization of the rise and fall of the voice, no doubt as elaborate and artistic as the organization of verse, no doubt powerful in heightening the emotional and dramatic effect of words and See also:action, but in no way essential to the understanding'or the organization of the See also:works which it adorned. The classical Greek preference for the diatonic scale indicates a latent harmonic sense and also that See also:temperance which is at the foundation of the general Greek sense of beauty; but, beyond this and similar generalities, all the See also:research in the See also:world will not enable us to understand the Greek musician's mind. Non-harmonic music is a world of two dimensions, and we must now inquire how men came to rise from this " flatland " to the solid world of sound in which See also:Palestrina, Bach, See also:Beethoven and Wagner live. 3.

Harmonic Origins.—Although the simultaneous blending of different sounds was never seriously contemplated by the Greeks, yet in classical times they were fond of singing with high and low voices in octaves. This was called magadizing; from the name of an See also:

instrument on which playing in octaves was rendered easy by means of a See also:bridge that divided the strings at two-thirds of their length. While the practice was esteemed for the beauty of the blending of different voices, it was tolerated only because of the peculiar effect of identity furnished by the different notes of the octave, and no other interval was so used by the Greeks. In the article on HARMONY the degrees of identity-in-difference which characterize the simpler harmonic intervals are analysed, and the main steps are indicated by which the more complicated medieval magadizing uses of the fourth and fifth (the See also:symphonia, diaphonia or organum of See also:Hucbald) gave way (partly by their own interchange and partly through experiments in the introduction of ornaments and variety) to the modern conception of harmony as consisting of voices or parts that move independently to the exclusion of such parallel See also:motion. In The Oxford History of.Music, vols. i. and ii., will be found abundant examples of every See also:stage .of the process, which begins with the organum or diaphony that prevailed until the See also:death of Guido of See also:Arezzo (about 1050) and passes through the discant, or measured music, of the 13th century, in which rhythm is first organized on a sufficiently See also:firm basis to enable voices to sing contrasted rhythms simultaneously, while the new harmonic criterion of the See also:independence of parts more and more displaces and shows its opposition to the old criterion of See also:parallelism. The most extraordinary example of these conflicting principles is the famous See also:rota " See also:Sumer is icumen in," a 13th-century See also:round in four parts on a canonic ground-See also:bass in two. See also:Recent researches have brought to light a number of works in the forms of See also:motet, conductus, See also:rondel (neither the later See also:rondo nor the round, but a kind of triple See also:counterpoint), which show that " Sumer is icumen in " contains no unique technical feature; but no work within two centuries of its date attains a style so nearly intelligible to modern ears. Its richness and firmness of harmony are such that the frequent use of consecutive fifths and octaves, in strict accordance with 13th-century principles, has to our ears all the effect of a series of grammatical blunders, so sharply does it contrast with the smooth counterpoint of the rest. In what light this smooth counterpoint struck contemporaries, or how its author (who may or may not be the writer of the Reading MS., See also:John .of Fornsete) arrived at it, is not clear, though W. S. Rockstro's amusing article, " Sumer is icumen in," in Grove's Dictionary, is very plausible. All that we know is that music in See also:England in the 13th century must have been at a comparatively high See also:state of development; and we may also conjecture that the tuneful character of this wonderful rota has something in common with the unwritten but famous songs of the aristocratic troubadours, or trouveres, of the 12th and 13th centuries, who, while disdaining to practise the art of See also:accompaniment or the art of scientific and written music, undoubtedly set the fashion in melody, and, being themselves poets as well as singers, formed the current notions as to the relations between musical and poetic rhythm.

The music of See also:

Adam de la See also:Hale, surnamed Le See also:Bossu d'See also:Arras (c. 1230-1288), shows the transformation of the See also:troubadour into the learned musician; and, nearly a century later, the more ambitious efforts of a greater See also:French poet (like his contemporary Petrarca, one of See also:Chaucer's See also:models in poetic technique), See also:Guillaume de See also:Machault (ft. 1350) , See also:mark a further technical advance, though they are not appreciably more intelligible to the modern ear. In the next century we find an Englishman, John See also:Dunstable, who had as early as 1437 acquired a European reputation; while his works were so soon lost sight of that until recently he was almost a legendary character, sometimes revered as the " inventor " of counterpoint, and once or twice even identified with St See also:Dunstan! Recently a great See also:deal of his work has come to light, and it shows us (especially when taken in connexion with the fact that the early Netherlandish See also:master, G. Dufay, did not See also:die until 1494, twenty-one years after Dunstable) that See also:English counterpoint was fully capable of showing the composers of the See also:Netherlands the path by which they were to reach the art of the " See also:Golden age." In such examples of Dunstable's work as that appended to the article " Dunstable " in Grove's Dictionary (new ed., i. 744) we see music approaching a style more or less consistently intelligible to a modern ear; and in English Carols of the 15th Century (1891) several two-part compositions of the See also:period, in a style resembling Dunstable's, have been made accessible to modern readers and filled out into four-part music by the editor " in accordance with the rules of the time." And though it may be doubted whether Mr Rockstro's skill would not have been held in the 15th century to savour overmuch of the See also:Black Art, still the success of his See also:attempt shows that the musical conceptions he is dealing with are no longer radically different from those of our modern musical consciousness. 4. The Golden Age.—The struggle towards the realization of mature musical art seems incredibly slow when we do not realize its difficulty, and wonderfully rapid as soon as we attempt to imagine the effort of first forming those harmonic conceptions which are second nature to us. Even at the time of Dunstable and Dufay the development of the contrapuntal idea of independence of parts had not yet so transformed the harmonic consciousness that the ancient parallelisms or consecutive fourths and fifths that were the backbone of distant could be seen in their true light as contradictory to the contrapuntal method. By the beginning of the 16th century, however, the See also:laws of counterpoint were substantially fixed; practice was for a while imperfect, and aims still uncertain, but skill was increasing and soon became marvellous; and in 16th-century music we leave the archaic world altogether. Henceforth musicmay show various phenomena of crudeness, decadence and transition, but its transition-periods will always derive light from the past, whatever the darkness of the future.

In the best music of the 16th century we have no need of research or mental gymnastics, beyond what is necessary in all art to secure intelligent presentation and attention. Its materials show us the " three dimensions " of music in their simplest state of perfect See also:

balance. Rhythm, emancipated from the tyranny of verse, is See also:free to co-See also:ordinate and contrast a multitude of melodies which by the very independence of their flow produce a See also:mass of harmony that passes from concord to concord through ordered varieties of transitional discord. The criterion of discord is no longer that of See also:mere harshness, but is modified by the conception of the simplicity or remoteness of the steps by which the See also:flux of independent simultaneous melodies passes from one concord, or point of repose, to another. When the music reaches a See also:climax, or its final conclusion, the point of repose is, of course, greatly emphasized. It is accordingly the " cadences " or full closes of 16th-century music that show the greatest resemblance to the harmonic ideas of the present day; and it is also at these points that certain notes were most frequently raised so as to modify the ecclesiastical modes which are derived more or less directly from the melodic diatonic scale of the Greeks, and misnamed, according to inevitable medieval misconceptions, after the Greek modes .l In other passages our modern ears, when unaccustomed to the style, feel that the harmony is strange and lacking in definite direction; and we are apt to form the hasty conclusion that the mode is an archaic survival. A more familiar acquaintance with the art soon shows that its shifting and vague modulations are no mere survival of a scale inadequate for any but melodic purposes, but the natural result of a state of things in which only two See also:species of chord are available as points of repose at all. If no successions of such chords were given prominence, except those that define See also:key according to modern notions based upon a much greater variety of harmony, the resulting monotony and triviality would be intolerable. Moreover, there is in this music just as much and no more of formal See also:antithesis and sequence as its harmony will suffice to hold together. Lastly, we shall find, on comparing the masterpieces of the period with works of inferior See also:rank, that in the masterpieces the most archaic modal features are expressive, varied and beautiful; while in the inferior works they are often avoided in favour of ordinary modern ideas, and, when they occur, are always accidental and monotonous, although in strict conformity with the rules of the time. The consistent limitations of harmony, form and rhythm have the further consequence that the only artistic music possible within them is purely vocal. The use of instruments is little more than a necessary evil for the support of voices in case of insufficient opportunity for practice; and although the origins of instrumental music are already of some artistic See also:interest in the 16th century, we must leave them out of our account if our See also:object is to present mature artistic ideas in proper proportions.

The principles of 16th-century art-forms are discussed in more detail in the article on CONTRAPUNTAL FORMS. Here we will treat the formal criteria on a general basis; especially as with art on such simple principles the distinction between one art-form and another is apt to be either too See also:

external or too subtle for stability. With music there is a stronger See also:probability than in any other art that merely See also:mechanical devices will be self-evident, and thus they may become either dangerous or effective. With the masters of the Netherlands they speedily became both. Two adjacent See also:groups of illustrations in See also:Burney's 1 The technical nature of the subject forbids us to discuss the origin and characteristics of the great Ambrosian and Gregorian collections of melodic See also:church music on which nearly all medieval and 16th-century polyphony was based, and from which the ecclesiastical modes were derived. Professor Wooldridge in The Oxford History of Music, i. 2o-44, has shown the continuity of this early Christian music with the Graeco-Roman music, and the origin of its modes in the Ptolemaic modification (c. A. D. 15o) of the Greek diatonic scale; while a recent See also:defence of the ecclesiastical tradition of a revision by St See also:Gregory will he found in the article on " Gregorian music " in Grove's Dictionary (new ed.), ii. 235. History of Music will show on the one hand the astonishing way in which early polyphonic composers learnt to " dance in fetters," and, on the other hand, the expressive power that they attained by that discipline.

Burney quotes from the See also:

venerable 15th-century master Okeghem, or Okenheim, some canons so designed as to be singable in all modes. They are by no means extreme cases of the ingenuity which Okenheim and his pupils often employed; but though they are not very valuable artistically (and are not even correctly deciphered by Burney)' they prove that mechanical principles may be a help rather than a hindrance to the attainment of a smooth and plastic style. Burney most appropriately follows them with Josquin See also:Des Pres's wonderful Deploration de Jehan Okenheim, in which the See also:tenor sings the See also:plain See also:chant of the See also:Requiem a degree below its proper pitch, while the other voices sing a See also:pastoral See also:dirge in French. The See also:device of transposing the plain chant a note lower, and making the tenor sing it in that position through-out the whole piece, is obviously as mechanical as any form of See also:acrostic: but it is happily calculated to impress our ears, even though, unlike Josquin's contemporaries, most of us are not familiar with the plain chant in its normal position; because it alters the position of all the semitones and gives the chant a plaintive minor character which is no less impressive in itself than as a contrast to the orthodox form. And the harmonic superstructure is as See also:fine an instance of the expressive possibilities of the church modes at their apogee from modern tonality as could be found anywhere. A still nobler example, which we may perhaps acclaim as the earliest really See also:sublime masterpiece in music, is Josquin's See also:Miserere, which is accessible in a modern edition. In this monumental work one of the tenor parts is called Vagans, because it sings the See also:burden Miserere mei See also:Deus at See also:regular intervals, in an almost monotonous wailing figure, wandering through each successive degree of the scale throughout the See also:composition. The effect, aided as it is by consummate rhetorical power in every detail of the surrounding mass of harmony and counterpoint, is extremely expressive; and the device lends itself to every shade of feeling in the works of the greatest of all Netherland masters, Orlando di See also:Lasso. Palestrina is less fond of it. Like all more obvious formal devices it is crowded out of his Roman art by the exquisite subtlety of his sense of proportion, and the exalted spirituality of his style which, while it allows him to set the letters of the See also:Hebrew See also:alphabet in the See also:Lamentations of See also:Jeremiah in much the same spirit as that in which they would be treated in an illuminated See also:Bible, forbids him to stimulate a sense of form that might distract the mind from the sense of See also:mystery and See also:awe proper to objects of devout contemplation. Yet in one of his greatest motets, Tribularer si nescirem, the burden of Josquin's Miserere appears with the same treatment and purpose as in its prototype. But with the lesser Flemish masters, and sometimes with the greatest, such mechanical principles often became not only inexpressive but absolutely destructive to musical effect.

The ingenuity necessary to make the stubborn material of music plastic was not so easily attainable as the ingenuity necessary to turn music into a mathematical See also:

game; and when Palestrina was in his See also:prime the inferior composers so outnumbered the masters to whom music was a devout language, and so degraded the art, not only by ousting genuine musical expression but by foisting See also:secular tunes and words into the church services, that one of the minor questions with which the See also:Council of See also:Trent was concerned was whether polyphonic church music should be totally abolished with other abuses, or whether it was capable of reform. Legendary history relates that Palestrina submitted for See also:judgment three masses of which the Missa papae Marcelli proved to be so sublime that it was henceforth accepted as the ideal church music (see PALESTRINA). This See also:tale is difficult to reconcile with the See also:chronology of Palestrina's works, but there is no doubt that Palestrina was officially recognized by the Church as a See also:bulwark against See also:bad taste. But we must not allow this to mislead us as to the value of church music before ' The correct version will be found in The Oxford History of Music, fi. 215. Palestrina. Nor must we follow the example of See also:Baini, who, in his detestation of what he is pleased to call fiammingo squalore, views with uncritical suspicion any work in which Palestrina does not confine himself to strictly See also:Italian methods of expression. A notion still prevails that Josquin represents counterpoint in an anatomical perfection into which Palestrina was the first to breathe life and soul. This gives an altogether inadequate idea of 16th-century music. Palestrina brought the century to a glorious close and is undoubtedly its greatest master, but he is See also:Primus inter pares; and in every part of See also:Europe music was represented, even before the See also:middle of the century, by masters who have every claim to See also:immortality that sincerity of aim, completeness of range, and See also:depth and perfection of style can give. It has been rightly called the golden age of music, and our See also:chronological table at the end of this article gives but an inadequate idea of the number of its masters whom no See also:lover of music ought to neglect. It is not exclusively an age of church music.

It is also the age of madrigals, both secular and spiritual; and, small as was its range of expression, there has been no period in musical art when the distinctions between secular and ecclesiastical style were more accurately maintained by the great masters, as 4s abundantly shown by the test cases in which masses of the best period have been based on secular themes. (See See also:

MADRIGAL.) 5. The Monodic Revolution and its Results.—Like all golden ages, that of music vanished at the first appearance of a knowledge beyond its limitations. The first and simplest realization of mature art is widespread and nourishes a veritable See also:army of great men; its masterpieces are innumerable, and its organization is so See also:complete that no narrowness or specialization can be See also:felt in the nature of its limitations. Yet these are exceedingly close, and the most modest attempt to widen them may have disastrous results. Many experiments were tried before Palestrina's death and throughout the century, notably by the See also:elder and younger See also:Gabrieli. Perhaps Palestrina himself is the only great composer of the time who never violates the principles of his art. Orlando di Lasso, unlike Palestrina, wrote almost as much secular as sacred music, and in his youth indulged in many eccentricities in a chromatic style which he afterwards learnt to detest. But if experiments are to revolutionize art it is necessary that their novelty shall already embody some artistic principle of coherence. No such principle will avail to connect the Phrygian mode with a chord containing A#; and, however proud the youthful Orlando di Lasso may be at being the first to write At neither his early chromatic experiments nor those of Cipriano di Rore, which he admired so much, left a mark on musical history. They appealed to nothing deeper than a See also:desire for sensational variety of harmony; and, while they carried the successions of chords far beyond the limits of the modes, they brought no new elements into the chords themselves. By the beginning of the 17th century the true revolutionary principles were vigorously at work, and the powerful See also:genius of Monteverde speedily made it impossible for men of impressionable artistic See also:temper to continue to work in the old style when such vast new regions of thought See also:lay open to them.

In the See also:

year of Palestrina's death, 1594, Monteverde published, in his third See also:book of madrigals, works in which without going irrevocably beyond the See also:letter of 16th-century See also:law he showed far more zeal for emotional expression than sense of euphony. In 1599 he published madrigals in which his means of expression involve harmonic principles altogether incompatible with 16th-century ideas. But he soon ceased to place confidence in the madrigal as an adequate art-form for his new ideals of expression, and he found an unlimited See also:field in musical drama. Dramatic music received its first stimulus from a See also:group of Florentine dilettanti, who aspired amongst other things to revive the ideals of Greek tragedy. Under their auspices the first true opera ever performed in public, Jacopo See also:Peri's Euridice, appeared in 1600. Monteverde found the conditions of dramatic music more favourable to his experiments than those of choral music, in which both voices and ears are at their highest sensibility to discord. Instruments do not blend like voices; and players, producing their notes by more mechanical means, have not the singer's difficulty in making combinations which the ear does not readily understand. The one difficulty of the new art was fatal: there were no limitations. When Monteverde introduced his unprepared discords, the effect upon musical style was like that of introducing modern metaphors into classical Greek. There were no harmonic principles to See also:control the new material, except those which just sufficed to hold together the pure 16th-century style; and that style depended on an exquisite continuity of flow which was incompatible with any rigidity either of harmony or rhythm. Accordingly there were also no rhythmic principles to hold Monteverde's work together, except such as could be borrowed from types of secular and popular music that had hitherto been beneath serious attention. If the 17th century seems almost devoid of great musical names it is not for want of incessant musical activity.

The task of organizing new resources into a consistent language was too gigantic to be accomplished within three generations. Its fascinating dramatic suggestiveness and incalculable range disguised for those who first undertook it the fact that the new art was as difficult and elementary in its beginnings as the very beginning of harmony itself in the 13th and 14th centuries. And the most beautiful compositions at the beginning of the 17th century are rather those which show the decadence of 16th-century art than those in which the new principles were most consistently adopted. Thus the madrigals of Monteverde, though often dull and always rough, contain more music than his operas. On the other hand, almost until the middle of the 17th century great men were not wanting who still carried on the pure polyphonic style. Their See also:

asceticism denotes a spirit less comprehensive than that of the great artists for whom the golden age was a natural environment; but in parts of the world where the new influences did not yet prevail even this is not the case, and a composer like Orlando See also:Gibbons, who died in 1625, is well worthy to be ranked with the great Italian and Flemish masters of the preceding century. But the main task of composers of the 17th century lay elsewhere; and if the result of their steady attention to it was trivial in comparison with the glories of the past, it at least led to the glories of the greater world organized by Bach and See also:Handel. The early monodists, Monteverde and his See also:fellows, directed attention to the right See also:quarter in attempting to express emotion by means of single voices supported by instruments; but the formless declamation of their dramatic writings soon proved too monotonous for permanent interest, and such method as it showed became permanent only by being codified into the formulas of recitative, which are, for the most part, very happy idealizations of speech-cadence, and which accordingly survive as dramatic elements in music at the present day, though, like all rhetorical figures, they have often lost meaning from careless use.' It was all very well to revolutionize current conceptions of harmony, so that chords were no longer considered, as in the days of pure polyphony, to be the result of so many independent melodies. But in art, as elsewhere, new thought eventually shows itself as an addition to, not a substitute for, the See also:wisdom of ages. Moreover, it is a See also:mistake, though one endorsed by high authorities, to suppose that the 16th-century composers did not appreciate the beauty of successions of chords apart from polyphonic See also:design. On the contrary, Palestrina and Orlando di Lasso themselves are the greatest masters the world has ever seen of a style which depends wholly on the beauty of masses of harmony, entirely devoid of polyphonic detail, and held together by a delicately balanced rhythm in which obvious symmetry is as carefully avoided as it is in the successions of chords themselves. Nevertheless, the monody of the 17th century is radically different in principle, not only because chords are used which were an See also:outrage on 16th- _ " invention " of recitative is frequently ascribed to this or tnat monodist, with as little See also:room for dispute as when we ascribe the invention of clothes to Adam and See also:Eve.

All monody was recitative, if only from inability to organize melodies.century ears, but because the fundamental idea is that of a See also:

solo voice declaiming phrases of See also:paramount emotional interest, and supported by instruments that See also:play such chords as will heighten the poignancy of the voice. And the first advance made on this chaotic monody consisted, not in the reintroduction of vitality into the texture of the harmonies, but in giving formal symmetry and balance to the vocal surface. This involved the strengthening of the harmonic system, so that it could carry the new discords as parts of an intelligible See also:scheme, and not merely as uncontrollable expressions of emotion. In other words, the chief energies of the successors of the monodists were devoted to the See also:establishment of the modern key-system; a system in comparison with which the subtle variety of modal concord sounded vague and See also:ill-balanced, until the new key-system itself was so safely established that Bach and Beethoven could once more appreciate and use essentially modal successions of chords in their true meaning. The second advance of the monodic See also:movement was in the cultivation of the solo voice. This See also:developed together with the cultivation of the See also:violin, the most capable and expressive of the instruments used to support it. Monteverde already knew how to make interesting experiments with violins, such as directing them to play See also:pizzicato, and accompanying an excited description of a See also:duel by rapidly repeated strokes on a major chord, followed by sustained dying harmonies in the minor. By the middle of the century violin music is fairly common, and the distinction between See also:Sonata da chiesa and Sonata da See also:camera appears (see SONATA). But the cultivation of instrumental technique had also a great effect on that of the voice; and Italian vocal technique soon developed into a monstrosity that so corrupted musical taste as not only to blind the contemporaries of Bach and Handel to the greatness of their choral art, but, in Handel's case, actually to swamp a great deal of his best work. The balance between a solo voice and a group of instruments was, however, successfully cultivated together with the modern key-system and melodic form; with the result that the classical See also:aria, a highly effective art-form, took shape. This, while it totally destroyed the dramatic character of opera for the next See also:hundred years, yet did good service in furnishing a reasonably effective means of musical expression which could encourage composers and listeners to continue cultivating the art until the day of small things was past. The operatic aria, as matured by Alessandro See also:Scarlatti, is at its. worst a fine opportunity for a gorgeously dressed singer to display feats of vocal gymnastics, either on a See also:concert See also:platform, or in scenery worthy of the See also:Drury See also:Lane See also:pantomime.

At its best it is a beautiful means of expression for the devout fervour of Bach and Handel. At all times it paralyses dramatic action, and no more ironic revenge has ever overtaken iconoclastic reformers than the historic development by which the purely dramatic declamation of the monodists settled down into a series of about See also:

thirty successive displays of vocalization, designed on rigidly musical conventions, and produced under spectacular conditions by artificial sopranos as the highest ideal of music-drama. The principal new art-forms of the 17th century are then, firstly, the aria (not the opera, which was merely a spectacular See also:condition under which See also:people consented to listen to some thirty arias in See also:succession); and, secondly, the polyphonic instrumental forms, of which those of the See also:suite or sonata da camera were mainly derived from the See also:necessity for See also:ballet music in the opera (and hence greatly stimulated by the taste of the French See also:court under See also:Louis XIV.), while those of the sonata da chiesa were also inspired by a See also:renaissance of interest in polyphonic texture. The sonata da chiesa soon settled into a conventionality only less inert than that of the aria because violin technique had wider possibilities than vocal; but when Lulli settled in See also:France and raised to a higher level of effect the operatic style suggested by See also:Cambert, he brought with him just enough of the new instrumental polyphony to make his typical form of French See also:overture (with its slow introduction in dotted rhythm, and its quasi-fugal See also:allegro) worthy of the important place it occupies in Bach's and Handel's art. Meanwhile great though subordinate activity was also shown in the evolution of a new choral music dependent upon an instrumental accompaniment of more complex See also:function than that of mere support. This, in the hands of the Neapolitan masters, was destined to lead straight to the early choral music of See also:Mozart and See also:Haydn, both of whom, especially Mozart, subsequently learnt its greater possibilities from the study of Handel. But the most striking choral art of the time came from the Germans, who never showed that thoughtless acquiescence in the easiest means of effect which was already the bane of Italian art. Consequently, while the See also:German output of the 17th century fails to show that rapid attainment of modest maturity which gives much Italian music of the period a permanent if slight artistic value, there is, in spite of much harshness, a stream of See also:noble polyphonic effort in both See also:organ and choral music in See also:Germany from the time of H..Schiitz (who was born in 1585 and who was a great friend and admirer of Monteverde) to that of Bach and Handel just a century later. Nor was Germany inactive in the dramatic See also:line, and the 17th-century Italian efforts in comic opera, which are so interesting and so unjustly neglected by historians, found a parallel, before Handel's maturity, in the work of R. Keiser, and may be traced through him in Handel's first opera, Almira. The best See also:proof of the insufficiency of 17th-century resources is to be found in the almost tragic blending of genius and failure shown by our English church music of the Restoration. The works of See also:Pelham Humfrey and See also:Blow already show the qualities which with See also:Purcell seem at almost any given moment to amount to those of the highest genius, while hardly a single work has any coherence as a whole.

The patchiness of Purcell's music was, no doubt, increased by the influence of French taste then predominant at court. When Pelham Humfrey was sixteen, See also:

King See also:Charles II., as Sir Hubert Parry remarks, " achieved the characteri§See also:tic and subtle stroke of See also:humour of sending him over to Prance to study the methods of the most celebrated composer of theatrical music of the time in order to learn how to compose English church music." Yet it is impossible to see how such ideas as Purcell's could have been presented in more than French continuity of flow by means of any designs less powerful than those of Bach and Handel. Purcell's ideas are, like those of all great artists, at least sixty years in advance of the normal See also:intellect of the time. But they are unfortunately equally in advance of the only technical resources then conceivable; and Purcell, though one of the greatest contrapuntists that ever lived, is probably the only instance in music of a See also:man of really high genius born out of due time. Musical See also:talent was certainly as common in the 17th century as at any other time; and if we ask why, unless we are justified in counting Purcell as a tragic exception, the whole century shows not one name in the first artistic rank, the See also:answer must be that, after all, artistic talent is far more common than the interaction of environment and character necessary to direct it to perfect artistic results. 6. Bach and Handel.—It was not until the 18th century had begun that two men of the highest genius could find in music a worthy expression of their grasp of life. Bach and Handel were born within a See also:month of each other, in 1685, and in the same part of See also:Saxony. Both inherited the tradition of polyphonic effort that the German organists and choral writers had steadily maintained throughout the 17th century; and both profited by the Italian methods that were penetrating Germany. In Bach's case it was the Italian art-forms that appealed to his sense of design. Their style did not affect him, but he saw every possibility which the forms contained, and studied them the more assiduously because they were not, like polyphonic texture, his birthright. In recitative his own distinctively German style attained an intensity and freedom of expression which is one of the most moving things in art.

Nevertheless, if he handled recitative in his own way it was not for want of acquaintance with the Italian formulas, nor even because he despised them; for in his only two extant Italian works the scraps of recitative are strictly in accordance with Italian convention, and the arias show (when we allow for their See also:

family likeness with Bach'snormal style) the most careful modelling upon Italian forms. Again, as is well known, Bach arranged with copious additions and alterations many concertos by Vivaldi (together with some which though passing under Vivaldi's name are really by German contemporaries) ; and, while thus taking every opportunity of assimilating Italian influences in instrumental as well as in vocal music, he was no less alive to the importance of the French overture and suite forms. Moreover, he is very clear as to where his ideas come from, and extremely careful to maintain every art-form in its integrity. Yet his style remains his own through-out, and the first impression of its resemblance to that of his German contemporaries diminishes the more the period is studied. Bach's art thus forms one of the most perfectly systematic and complete records a life's work has ever achieved. His art-forms might be arranged in a sort of biological scheme, and their interaction and See also:genealogy has a clearness which might almost be an object of envy to men of science even if Bach had not demonstrated every detail of it by those wonderful re-writings of his own works which we have described elsewhere (see BAcx). Handel's methods were as different from Bach's as his circumstances. He soon left Germany and, while he never betrayed his birthright as a great choral writer, he quickly absorbed the Italian style so thoroughly as to become practically an Italian. He also adopted the Italian forms, but not, like Bach, from any profound sense of their possible place in artistic system. To him they were effective, and that was all. He did not trouble himself about the permanent idea that might underlie an art-form and typify its expression. He has no notion of a form as anything higher than a rough means of holding music together and maintaining its flow; but he and Bach, alone among their contemporaries, have an unfailing sense of all that is necessary to secure this end.

They worked from opposite points of view: Bach develops his art from within, until its detail, like that of Beethoven's last works, becomes dazzling with the See also:

glory of the whole design; Handel at his best is inspired by a magnificent scheme, in the See also:execution of which he need condescend to finish of detail only so long as his See also:inspiration does not hasten to the next design. Nevertheless it is to the immense sweep and breadth of Handel's choral style, and its emotional force, that all subsequent composers owe their first See also:access to the larger and less mechanical resources of music. (See HANDEL.) 7. The Symphonic Classes.—After the death of Bach and Handel another See also:change of view, like .that Copernican revolution for which See also:Kant sighed in See also:philosophy, was necessary for the further development of music. Once again it consisted in an inversion of the relation between form and texture. But, whereas at the beginning of the 17th century the revolution consisted mainly in directing attention to chords as, so to speak, harmonic lumps, instead of moments in a flux of simultaneous melodies; in the later half of the 18th century the revolution concerned the larger musical outlines, and was not complicated by the discovery of new harmonic resources. On the contrary, it led to an extreme simplicity of harmony. The art of Bach and Handel had given perfect vitality to the forms developed in the 18th century, but chiefly by means of the reinfusion of polyphonic life. The formal aspects (that is, those that See also:decree the shapes of aria and suite-movement and the balance and contrasts of such choruses as are not fugues) are, after all, of secondary importance; the real centre of Bach's and Handel's technical and intellectual activity is the polyphony; and the more the external shape occupies the foreground the more the work assumes the character of light music. In the article SONATA FORMS we show how this state of things was altered, and attention is there See also:drawn to the dramatic power of a music in which the form is technically prior to the texture. And it is not difficult to understand that Gluck's reform of opera would have been a sheer impossibility if he had not dealt with music in the sonata style, which is capable of changing its character as it unfolds its designs. The new period of transition was neither so long nor so interesting as that of the 17th century.

The contrast between the MUSIC 9 i squalid beginnings of the new art and the glories of Bach and Handel is almost as great as that between the monodists and Palestrina, but it appeals far less to our sympathies, because it seems like a contrast between noble sincerity and idle elegance. The new art seems so easy-going and empty that it conceals from us the necessity of the sympathetic See also:

historical insight for which the painful experiments of the monodists almost seem to cry aloud. And its boldest rhetorical experiments, such as the fantasias of Philipp Emanuel Bach, show a See also:security of harmony which, together with the very vividness of their realization of modern ideas, must appear to a modern listener more like the hollow See also:rhetoric of a decadent than the prophetic inspiration of a See also:pioneer. And, just as in the 17th century, so in the time before Haydn and Mozart, the work that is most valuable artistically tends to be that which is of less importance historically. The cultivation of the shape of music at the expense of its texture was destined to lead to greater things than polyphonic art had ever dreamt of; but no living art could be achieved until the texture was brought once more into vital, if subordinate, relation to the shape. Thus, far more interesting artistically than the See also:epoch-making earlier See also:pianoforte works of Philipp Emanuel Bach are his historically less fruitful oratorios, and his symphonies, and the See also:rich polyphonic modifications of the new principles in the best works of his elder See also:brother Friedemann. Yet the transition-period is hardly second in historic importance to that of the 17th century; and we may gather from it even more direct hints as to the meaning of the tendencies of our own day. As in the 17th century, so in the 18th the composers and critics of Haydn's youth, not knowing what to make of the new tendencies, and conscious rather of the difference between new and old ideas than of the true nature of either, took See also:refuge in speculations about the emotional and external expression of music; and when artistic power and balance fail it is very convenient to go outside the limits of the art and explain failure away by external ideas. Fortunately the external ideas were capable of serious organic function through the medium of opera, and in that art-form music was passing out of the hands of Italians and assuming artistic and dramatic life under Gluck. The metaphysical and See also:literary See also:speculation which overwhelmed musical See also:criticism at this time, and which produced See also:paper warfares and musical party-feuds such as that between the Gluckists and the Piccinists, at all events had this See also:advantage over the Wagnerian and See also:anti-Wagnerian controversies of the last See also:generation and the disputes about the legitimate function of instrumental music at the present day—that it was speculation applied exclusively to an art-form in which literary questions were directly concerned, an art-form which moreover had up to that time been the See also:grave of all the music composers See also:chose to put into it. But as soon as music once more attained to consistent principles all these discussions became but a memory. If Gluck's music had not been more musical as well as more dramatic than Piccini's, all its foreshadowing of Wagnerian principles would have availed it no more than it availed Monteverde.

When the new art found symphonic expression in Haydn and Mozart, it became music pure and simple, and yet had no more difficulty than painting or poetry in dealing with external ideas, when these were naturally brought into it by the human voice or the conditions of dramatic action. It had once more become an art which need reject or accept nothing on artificial or extraneous grounds. Beethoven soon showed how gigantic the scale and range of the sonata style could be, and how tremendous was its effect on the possibilities of vocal music, both dramatic and choral. No revolution was needed to accomplish this. The style was perfectly formed, and for the first and so far the only time in musical history a mature art of small range opened out into an equally perfect one of gigantic range, without a moment of decadence or destruction. The chief glory of the art that culminates in Beethoven is, of course, the instrumental music, all of which comes under the See also:

head of the sonata-forms (q.v.). - Meanwhile Mozart raised comic opera, both Italian and German, to a height which has never since been -approachedwithin the classical limits, and from which the operas of See also:Rossini and his successors show a decadence so deplorable that if " classical music " means " high art " we must say that classical opera buffo begins and ends in Mozart. But Gluck, finding his dramatic ideas encouraged by the eminent theatrical sensibilities of the French, had already given French opera a stimulus towards the expression of tragic emotion which made the See also:classics of the French operatic school well worthy to inspire Beethoven to his one noble operatic effort and See also:Weber to the greatest works of his life. See also:Cherubini, though no more a Frenchman than Gluck, was Gluck's successor in the French classical school of dramatic music. His operas, like his church music, account for Beethoven's touching estimation of him as the greatest composer of the time. In them his melodies, elsewhere curiously See also:cold and prosaic, glow with the warmth of a true classic; and his tact in developing, accelerating and suspending a dramatic climax is second only to Mozart's. Scarcely inferior to Cherubini in mastery and dignity, far more lovable in temperament, and weakened only by inequality of invention, Maul deserves a far higher place in musical history than is generally accorded him.

His most famous work, See also:

Joseph, is of more historical importance than his others, but it is by no means his best from a purely musical point of view, though its Biblical subject impelled See also:Mehul to make extremely successful experiments in " See also:local colour " which had probably considerable influence upon Weber, whose admiration of the work was boundless. One thing is certain, that the romantic opera of Weber owes much of its inspiration to the opera comique of these masters.' 8. From Beethoven to Wagner.—After Beethoven comes what is commonly though vaguely described as the "romantic" movement. In its essentials it amounts to little more than this, that musicians found new and prouder titles for a very ancient and universal See also:division of parties. The one party set up a convenient scheme of form based upon the average See also:procedure of all the writers of sonatas except Haydn and Beethoven, which scheme they chose to call classical; while the other party devoted itself to the See also:search for new materials and new means of expression. The classicists, if so they may be called, did not quite approve of Beethoven; and while there is much See also:justification for the See also:charge that has been brought against them of reducing the sonata-form to a kind of game, they have for that very reason no real claim to be considered inheritors of classical traditions. The true classical method is that in which See also:matter and form are so See also:united that it is impossible to say which is prior to the other. The pseudo-classics are the artists who set up a form conveniently like the average classical form, and fill it with something conveniently like the average classical matter, with just such difference as will seem like an advance in brilliance and range. The romanticists are the artists who realize such a difference between their matter and that of previous art as impels them to find new forms for it,•or at all events to alter the old forms considerably. But if they are successful the difference between their work and that of the true classics becomes merely external; they are classics in a new art-form. As, however, this is as rare as true classical art is at the best of times, romanticism -tends to mean little more than the difference between an unstable artist who cannot master his material and an artist who can, whether on the pseudo-classical or the true classical See also:plane. The See also:term " romantic opera " has helped us to regard Weber as a romanticist in that See also:sphere, but when we call his instrumental works " romantic " the term ceases to have really valuable meaning.

As applied to pieces like the Concertstuck, the- Invitation d la dance, and other pieces of which the external subject is known either from Weber's letters or from the titles of the pieces themselves, the term means simply " See also:

programme-music " such as we have seen to be characteristic of any stage in which the art is imperfectly mastered. Weber's programme-music shows no advance on Beethoven in the illustrative resources of the art; and the application of the term " romantic " 1 We must remember in this connexion that the term opera comique means simply opera with spoken See also:dialogue, and has nothing to do with the comic, idea. to his interesting and in many places beautiful pianoforte sonatas has no definite ground except the brilliance of his piano-forte technique and the helplessness in matters of design (and occasionally even of harmony) that drives him to violent and operatic outbreaks. See also:Schubert also lends some colour to the opposition between romantic and classical by his weakness in large instrumental designs, but his sense of form was too vital for his defective training to warp his mind from the true classical spirit; and the new elements he introduced into instrumental music, though not ratified by concentration and unity of design, were almost always the fruits of true inspiration and never mere struggles to See also:escape from a difficulty. His talent for purely instrumental music was incomparably higher than Weber's, while that for stage-drama, as shown in the most ambitious of his numerous operas, Fierrabras, was almost nil. But he is the first and perhaps the greatest classical song writer. It was Beethoven's work on a larger scale that so increased the possibilities of handling remote harmonic sequences and rich instrumental and rhythmic effects as to prepare for Schubert a world in which music, no less than literature, was full of suggestions for that concentrated expression of a single emotion which distinguishes true lyric art. And, whatever the defects of Schubert's treatment of larger forms, his construction of small forms which can be compassed by a single melody or group of melodies is unsurpassable and is truly classical in spirit and result. See also:Schumann had neither Schubert's native talent for larger form nor the irresponsible spirit which allowed Schubert to handle it uncritically. Nor had he the astounding lightness of See also:touch and perfect balance of style with which See also:Chopin See also:con-trolled the most wayward See also:imagination that has ever found expression in the pianoforte lyric. But he had a deep sense of melodic beauty, a mastery of polyphonic expression which for .all its unorthodox tendency was second only to that of the greatest classics, and an epigrammatic See also:fancy which enabled him to devise highly artistic forms of music never since imitated with success though often unintelligently copied. In his songs and pianoforte lyrics his romantic ideas found perfectly mature expression.

Throughout his life he was inspired by a deep reverence which, while it prevented him from attempting to handle classical forms with a technique which he felt to be inadequate, at the same time impelled him as he See also:

grew older to devise forms on a large scale externally resembling them. The German lyric poetry, which he so perfectly set to music, strengthened him in his tendency to present his materials in an epigrammatic and antithetic manner; and, when he took to writing orchestral and chamber music, the See also:extension of the principles of this style to the designing of large spaces in rigid sequence furnished him with a means of attaining great dignity and See also:weight of climax in a form which, though neither classical nor strictly natural, was at all events more•true in its relationship to his matter than that of the pseudo-classics such as See also:Hummel or even See also:Spohr. Towards the end of his See also:short life, before darkness settled upon his mind, he See also:rose perhaps to his greatest height as regards solemnity of inspiration, though none of his later works can compare with his early lyrics for artistic perfection. Be this as it may, his last choral works, especially the latter parts of See also:Faust (which, unlike the first part, was written before his powers failed), show that the sense of beauty and polyphonic life with which he began his career was always increasing; and if he was led to substitute an artificial and ascetic for a natural and classical See also:solution of the difficulties of the larger art-forms it was only because of his insight into artistic ideals which he felt to be beyond his attainment. He shared with Mendelssohn the inevitable misunderstanding of those contemporaries who grouped all music under one or other of the two heads, Classical and Romantic. There is good reason to believe that Mendelssohn died before he had more than begun to show his power, though this may be denied by critics who have not thought of comparing Handel's career up to the age at which Mendelssohn's ceased. And his mastery, resting, like Handel's, on the experience of a boyhoodcomparable only to Mozart's, was far too easy to induce him as a critic to reconcile the idea of high talent with distressing intellectual and technical failure. This same mastery also tended to discredit his own work, both as performer and composer, in the estimation of those whose experience encouraged them to See also:hope that imperfection and over-excitement were infallible signs of genius. And as his facility actually did co-operate with the tendencies of the times to deflect much of his work into pseudo-classical channels, while nevertheless his independence of form and style kept him at all times at a higher level of interest and variety than any mere pseudo-classic, it is not to be wondered that his reputation became a formidable object of See also:jealousy to those apostles of new ideas who felt that their own works were not likely to make way against See also:academic opposition unless they called journalism to their aid. Nothing has more confused, hindered and embittered the careers of Wagner and See also:Liszt and their disciples than the paper warfare which they did everything in their power to encourage. No doubt it had a useful purpose, and, as nothing affords a greater field for intrigue than the production of operas, it is at least possible that the gigantic and unprecedentedly expensive works of Wagner might not even at the present day have obtained a See also:hearing if Wagner himself had been a tactful and reticent man and his partisans had all been discreet lovers and practisers of art. As to Wagner's achievement there is now no important difference of See also:opinion.

It has survived all attacks as the most monumental result music has achieved with the aid of other arts. Its antecedents must be sought in many very remote regions. The rediscovery, by Mendelssohn, of the choral works of Bach, after a century of oblivion, revealed the possibilities of polyphonic expression in a grandeur which even Handel rarely suggested; and inspired Mendelssohn with important ideas in the designing of oratorios as wholes. The complete See also:

fusion of polyphonic method with external and harmonic design had, under the same stimulus, been carried a step further than Beethoven by means of Schumann's more concentrated harmonic and lyric expression. That wildest of all romanticists, See also:Berlioz, though he had less polyphonic sense than any composer who ever before or since attained distinction, nevertheless revealed important new possibilities in his unique imagination in orchestral colour. The breaking down of the barriers that check continuity in classical opera was already indicated by Weber, in whose Euryanthe the movements frequently run one into the other, while at least twenty different themes are discoverable in the opera, recurring, like the Wagnerian leit-motif, in apt transformation and logical association with definite incidents and persons. But many things undreamed of by Weber were necessary to complete the breakdown of the classical barriers; for the whole See also:pace of musical motion had to be emancipated from the influence of instrumental ideas. This was the most See also:colossal See also:reformation ever attempted by a man of real artistic balance; and even the undoubted, though unpolished, dramatic genius shown in Wagner's libretti (the first in which a great composer and dramatist are one) is but a small thing in comparison with the musical problems which Wagner overcomes with a success immeasurably outweighing any defects his less perfect literary mastery allowed to remain in his dramatic structure and poetic diction. Apart from the squabbles of Wagnerian and anti-Wagnerian journalism, the chief difficulty of his supporters and antagonists really lay in this question of the pace of the music and the consequent breadth of harmony and design. The opening of the WalkUre, in which, before the See also:curtain rises, the sound of See also:driving See also:rain is reproduced by very simple sequences that take sixteen long bars to move a single step, does not, as instrumental music, compare favourably for terseness and variety with the first twenty bars of the thunderstorm in Beethoven's Pastoral See also:Symphony, where at least four different incidents faithfully portray not only the first drops of rain and the distant See also:thunder, but all the feelings of depression and See also:apprehension which they inspire, besides carrying the listener rapidly through three different keys in chromatic sequence. But Beethoven's See also:storm is idealized, in its whole rise and fall, within a space of five it is strictly applied to that principle by which every work of minutes. Wagner's task is to select five real minutes near the end of the storm and to treat them with no greater variety than the action of the drama demands.

When we have learnt to dissociate our minds from irrelevant ideas of an earlier instrumental art, we find that Wagner's broad spaces contain all that is necessary. Art on a large scale will always seem to have empty spaces, so long as we expect to find in it the kind of detail appropriate to art on a smaller scale. Wagner's new harmonic resources are of similar and more complex but not less legitimate origin. In Der fliegende Hollander they are, like his wider rhythmic sweep, imperfectly digested; in fact, much of his work before the See also:

Meistersinger is, in patches, debased by the influence of See also:Meyerbeer. But in his later works the more closely his harmonic language is studied the more conclusively does it show itself to be a logical and mastered thing. His treatment of key is, of course, adapted to a state of things in which the designs are far too long for the mind to attach any importance to the works ending in the key in which it began. To compare Wagner's key-system with that of a symphony is like comparing the perspective and composition of a See also:panorama with the perspective and composition of an easel picture. Indeed the differences are precisely analogous in the two cases; and Wagner's sense of harmony and key turns out on investigation to be the classical sense truly adapted to its new conditions. For this very reason it is in detail quite irrelevant to symphonic art; and there was nothing anti-Wagnerian in the reasons why See also:Brahms had so little to do with it in his music, although every circumstance of the See also:personal controversies and thinly disguised persecutions of Brahms's youth were enough to give any upholder of classical symphonic art a rooted See also:prejudice to everything bearing the name of " romantic." See also:Side by side with Wagner many enthusiasts place Liszt; and it is, indisputable that Liszt had in mind a larger and slower flow of musical sequence closely akin to Wagner's, and, no doubt, partly independent of it; and moreover, that one of Liszt's aims was to apply this to instrumental music. Also his mastery and poetic power as a pianoforte player were faithfully reflected in his later treatment of the See also:orchestra, and ensured an extra-ordinary rhetorical plausibility for anything he chose to say. But neither the princely magnanimity of his personal character, which showed itself in his generosity alike to struggling artists and to his opponents, nor the great stimulus he gave (both by his compositions and his unceasing personal efforts and encouragement) to new musical ideas on romantic lines, ought at this time of day to blind us to the hollowness and essential vulgarity of his style. These unfortunate qualities did not secure for his compositions immediate popular See also:acceptance; for they were outweighed by the true novelty of his aims.

But recently they have given his symphonic poems an attractiveness which, while it has galvanized a belated interest in those works, has made many critics blind to their historical importance as the foundation of new forms which have undergone a development of sensational brilliance under See also:

Richard See also:Strauss. Meanwhile the party politics of modern music did much to distract public attention from the works of Brahms, who carried on the true classical method of the sonata-forms in his orchestral and chamber music, while he was no less great and See also:original as a writer of songs and choral music of all kinds. He also developed the pianoforte lyric and widened its range. Without losing its characteristic unity it assumed a freedom and largeness of expression hitherto only attained in sonatas. Hence, however, Brahms's work, like Bach's, seemed, from its continuity with the classical forms, to look backward rather than forward. Indeed Brahms's reputation is in many quarters that of an academic reactionary; just as Bach's was, even at a time when the word " academic " was held to be rather a title of See also:honour than of reproach. When the contemporary standpoints of criticism are established by the production of works of art in which the new elements shall no longer be at See also:war with one another and with the whole, perhaps it will be recognized once more that the idea of progress has no value as a See also:critical See also:standard unlessart must differ in every part of its form from every other work, precisely as far as its material differs and no further. Then, perhaps, as the conservative Bach after a hundred years of neglect revealed himself as the most profoundly modern force in the music of the 19th century, while that of his gifted and progressive sons became a forgotten fashion as soon as their See also:goal was attained by greater masters, so may the musical epoch that seems now to have closed be remembered by posterity as the age, not of Wagner and the pioneer Liszt. but the age of Wagner and Brahms. It will also in all probability be remembered as the age in which the performer ceased to be necessarily the intellectual inferior of the composer and musical See also:scholar. With the exception of Wagner and Berlioz every great composer, since Palestrina sang in the papal See also:choir, has paid his way as a performer; but Joseph See also:Joachim was the first who threw the whole mind of a great composer into the career of an interpreter; and the example set by him, Billow, See also:Clara Schumann and Jenny See also:Lind, though followed by very few other artists, sufficed to dispel for ever the old association of the musical performer with the See also:mountebank. Joachim's influence on Brahms was incalculable. The two composers met at the time when new musical tendencies were beginning to arouse violent controversy.

At the age of twenty-one Joachim had produced in his Hungarian See also:

Concerto a work of high classical mastery and great See also:nobility, and his technique in form and texture was then considerably in advance of Brahms's. For some years Joachim and Brahms interchanged contrapuntal exercises, and many of the greatest and most perfect of Brahms's earlier works owe much to Joachim's criticism. Yet it is impossible to regret that Joachim did not himself carry on as a composer the work he so nobly began, when we realize the enormous influence of his playing in the history of modern music. By it we have become familiar with a standard of truthfulness in performance which all the generous efforts of Wagner and Liszt could hardly have rendered independent of their own See also:special propaganda. And by it the See also:record of classical music has been made a matter of genuine public knowledge, with a unique freedom from those popularizing tendencies which invest vulgar See also:error with the authority of academic truth. In this respect there is a real change in the nature of modern musical culture. No serious composer at the present day would dedicate a great work to an artist who, like F. See also:Clement, for whom Beethoven wrote his Violin Concerto, would perform the work in two portions and between them play a sonata for the violin on one See also:string with the violin upside down. But it is hardly true that Wagner and Liszt produced a real alteration in the standard of general culture among musicians. Their work, especially Wagner's, appealed, like Gluck's, to many specific literary and philosophical interests, and they themselves were brilliant talkers; but music will always remain the most self-centred of the arts, and men of true culture will measure the depth and range of the musician's mind by the spontaneity and truthfulness of his musical expression rather than by his volubility on other subjects. The greatest musicians have not often been masters of more than one language; but they have always been men of true culture. Their humanity has been illuminated by the See also:constant presence of ideals which their artistic mastery keeps in touch with reality.

End of Article: MUSIC

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