BEETHOVEN AND HIS FORERUNNERS

BEETHOVEN
AND HIS
FORERUNNERS

BY

DANIEL GREGORY MASON

AUTHOR OF “FROM GRIEG TO BRAHMS”

NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1911
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

COPYRIGHT, 1904,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1904.
Reprinted August, 1911.

Norwood Press:
Berwick & Smith Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
THE PERIODS OF MUSICAL HISTORY

CHAPTER I
THE PERIODS OF MUSICAL HISTORY

The modern view of history is vivified by a principle scarcely dreamed of before the middle of the last century; the conception which permeates all our interpretations of the story of the world, which illuminates our study of all its phases, was by our grandfathers apprehended either vaguely or not at all. For them, history dealt with a more or less random series of happenings, succeeding each other accidentally, unaccountably, and at haphazard; each single event, determined by causes peculiar to itself, was without relation to all the others. Political and social history, for example, was an account of battles, sieges, revolutions, governments; of kings, warriors, and statesmen. Its salient features were special occasions and individual men: Marathon and Waterloo, Alexander, Cæsar, Alfred, Napoleon. Of pervasive social movements, tendencies of human feeling and thought, developments of industries, institutions, laws, and customs by a gradual process in which great numbers of personally insignificant men played their part, little account was taken. Facts were facts, and had no hidden significance, no mutual interaction, no cumulative force, momentum, or direction.

Far otherwise do we interpret the story of the world. Inspired by the great doctrine of the nineteenth century, the doctrine of evolution, first formulated by biology, but immediately applied to all realms of knowledge, we read in events a continuous movement, a coherent growth, a gradual, vast, and single process. For us, individual events and men sink into insignificance in comparison with the great drama of which they are only acts and actors. For us, great popular movements, instinctive strivings, of which the men and women under their sway were unconscious, vast blossomings of vital energy the roots of which were far below the surface of the human mind, rise into relief as the true interests of the historian, and we interpret all particular happenings and special persons in the light of these universal tendencies. In geology we trace the continuous formation of the earth through innumerable years; in zoology we study those slow but constant transformations of animals which are effected by natural selection and the survival of the fittest; in sociology we examine the painful yet inevitable crystallization out of the human spirit of such ideas as responsibility, liberty, justice; in philosophy we learn of the subtle implications of our nature, and so learning, substitute a human God for the idols of savages and the remote tyrannical deities of half-developed religions. There is not a branch of our thought in which this way of interpreting life as a process, this conceiving of it as dynamic and vital rather than static and inert, has not enlarged our outlook, deepened our sense of the sacredness and wonder of the universe, and filled our spirits with a new freedom, enthusiasm, and hope.

Peculiarly interesting is the application of this mode of study to the art of music. The expression of feeling through sounds combined in beautiful forms, gives us an opportunity, as cannot be too often pointed out, [1] for a much freer and more self-determined activity than we can enjoy in our other artistic pursuits. Because the art of music, both in its material and in its content, is less shackled, less thwarted in its characteristic processes, than the representative arts, its evolution is remarkably obvious and easy to trace. Its material, in the first place, is a product of man’s free selection; that complex system of musical tones which he has constructed by many centuries of work, is his own, to use as he will, in a sense in which language, natural objects, and physical substances can never be. Whereas the growth of poetry, of painting, of sculpture, of architecture, is complicated and distorted by a thousand external conditions, that of music is determined by its own inner laws alone,—by the laws, that is to say, of sound-production, of sound-perception, and of psychology. In the second place, the content of music, that which it expresses by means of these freely selected and composed tones, is purely internal. It is easy to see that the objects of musical expression, namely, human emotions in their essence, reduced, so to speak, to their lowest terms, are more fluid to manipulation than the comparatively fixed, indocile, and external objects of the representative arts. By virtue, then, both of its material medium and of its ideal content, music enjoys, among human modes of expression, a unique freedom and autonomy. It grows, not under pressure from outside, but by its own inner vitality; its forms are determined, not by correspondence with anything in the heavens or on the earth, but, like those of the snow-crystals, by the inexorable laws that govern it; and the particular changes it undergoes in its evolution, marking merely successive incarnations of tendencies and potencies always implicit in it, can be traced with comparative ease, clearness, and certainty.

But however unmistakably musical history may reveal an evolutionary process, it does not reveal that process as perfectly regular and uniform. That general tendency from a low toward a high state of organization, with increase in definiteness, coherence, and heterogeneity, which readers of Herbert Spencer expect in any evolutionary series, does characterize the growth of music as a whole; but within the large general process we also observe, as we do in many other cases of evolution of any degree of complexity, many momentary phases sharply marked off from one another, many separate and distinct periods, like the chapters in a book or the acts in a play. Each period, beginning tentatively, maturing slowly, and culminating in music which carries its characteristic effects to the highest possible pitch, is succeeded by another, presenting the same phases of growth, but seeking effects quite different. All the periods hang together in a large view; yet they are, after all, diverse in character, and therefore capable of being distinguished, and even dated.

An analogy offered by certain well-known chemical processes may help to make comprehensible this periodic nature of musical evolution. Chemists have a term, “critical point,” by which they name a stage in the behavior of a substance, under some systematic treatment, at which it suddenly undergoes some striking change, some catastrophic transformation. Put, for example, a lump of ice in a crucible and apply an even heat by which its temperature is raised, say, one degree each minute. Here is a systematic treatment of the ice, a steady influence exerted upon it. Yet, curiously enough, this ice which is being so equably acted upon will not change its form in the equable, regular fashion we might expect. It will seem to undergo little or no change until, at a given moment, suddenly, it passes into water, a liquid wholly different in appearance from the original solid. It has reached a “critical point.” Continue the heating, and presently another critical point will be reached, at which, with equal suddenness, the liquid will be transformed into a vapor—steam. These catastrophes, in which the physical properties of the substance suddenly change, are conditioned, of course, by its chemical nature. They take place in the midst of a systematic treatment which we might expect to produce only gradual, inconspicuous effects, but which, as a matter of fact, produces a series of events as strikingly differentiated one from another as the acts of a drama.

It is in a similar way that, in the history of music, the tonal material used, under the systematic treatment of man’s æsthetic faculty, has been constrained by its nature to undergo sudden changes, to recrystallize in novel ways, to take on unwonted aspects which initiate new periods. When the possibilities of one sort of tone-combination are nearly or quite exhausted, the keener minds of a generation, led by groping but unerring instinct, grasp an unused principle of organization, latent in the material, and inaugurate a new style. This in turn runs its course, develops its resources, reaches its perfection, and is succeeded by another, which, after due time, is also superseded. All these periods are but moments in one vast evolution, successive blossomings from the one root of human feeling expressible in music; yet each has its individual qualities, its peculiar style, its special masters. It is possible both to trace certain general tendencies through them all, and to define other special qualities in which each is peculiar; and it will be worth while, before passing on to our proposed study of the particular period of Beethoven, to describe thus in general terms the salient features of the evolution as a whole, and to characterize, however briefly, the individual periods we can discriminate in it.

In the most general point of view, an evolution, of whatever sort, is a progress from what Spencer calls “indefinite, incoherent, homogeneity,” to what, consistently if rather overwhelmingly, he calls “definite, coherent, heterogeneity.” All low forms of life, that is to say, are so homogeneous in constitution as to be comparatively indefinite and incoherent; their parts, being all very much alike, cannot be built up into definite, strongly cohesive structures. A jelly fish, made up of thousands of but slightly differentiated cells, and without legs, arms, head, or any viscera worth mentioning except stomach, is doubtless a useful animal, but not one of pronounced individuality or solidarity. A savage tribe, consisting of many human beings almost indistinguishable from one another as regards character, strength, accomplishments, or powers of leadership, is a similar phenomenon in a different field, a sort of social jelly fish.

In higher forms of life, on the contrary, such as vertebrate animals and civilized communities, the elementary parts are sufficiently diverse to be interwoven into highly individual and compact organisms. The variety of the atoms or molecules makes possible a great solidarity in the molar unit they compose, since the uniqueness and indissolubility of a structure is directly proportionate to the diversity of the elements that compose it. A man, if he is to attain the dignity of manhood, must be more than a stomach; he must knit into his single unity a bony skeleton, a circulatory system, a brain and nervous apparatus, complicated viscera, and heart, mind, and spirit. A state depends for its vitality on the varied characters and abilities of its citizens; it must have laborers, artisans, merchants, sailors, soldiers, students, and statesmen. In the second book of his “Republic,” Plato describes the differentiation of talents and pursuits in the citizens on which depends the advance in civilization of the society. Such an increase in differentiation of the parts, accompanied by increasing definiteness and coherence in the wholes, characterizes every process of evolution.

The history of music is the history of such an evolution. Music began with vague, unlocated sounds, not combined with one another, but following at haphazard, and but slightly contrasted in pitch or duration. Gradually, under the inconceivably slow yet irresistible influence of men’s selective and constructive faculty, these sounds took on definiteness, were fixed in pitch, were measured in time, were knit into phrases and themes as words are knit into sentences, were combined simultaneously in chords as individuals are combined in communities;—became, in a word, the various, clearly defined, and highly organized family of tones we use in modern music. Two passages from Spencer’s “First Principles” will bring before us very clearly the advance music has made towards heterogeneity in its elements, on the one hand, and towards definiteness and coherence in its wholes, on the other. “It needs,” he says, “but to contrast music as it is with music as it was, to see how immense is the increase of heterogeneity. We see this ... on comparing any one sample of aboriginal music with a sample of modern music—even an ordinary song for the piano; which we find to be relatively highly heterogeneous, not only in respect of the varieties in the pitch and in the length of the notes, the number of different notes sounding at the same instant in company with the voice, and the variations of strength with which they are sounded and sung, but in respect of the changes of key, the changes of time, the changes of timbre of the voice, and the many other modifications of expression: while between the old monotonous dance-chant and a grand opera of our own day, with its endless orchestral complexities and vocal combinations, the contrast in heterogeneity is so extreme that it seems scarcely credible that the one should have been the ancestor of the other.”[2] Of the corresponding increase in coherence and definiteness he writes as follows: “In music, progressive integration is displayed in numerous ways. The simple cadence embracing but a few notes, which in the chants of savages is monotonously repeated, becomes, among civilized races, a long series of different musical phrases combined into one whole; and so complete is the integration, that the melody cannot be broken off in the middle, nor shorn of its final note, without giving us a painful sense of incompleteness. When to the air, a bass, a tenor, and an alto are added; and when to the harmony of different voice-parts there is added an accompaniment; we see exemplified integrations of another order, which grow gradually more elaborate. And the process is carried a stage higher when these complex solos, concerted pieces, choruses, and orchestral effects, are combined into the vast ensemble of a musical drama; of which, be it remembered, the artistic perfection largely consists in the subordination of the particular effects to the total effect.”[3] In innumerable ways, which these passages will perhaps suffice to suggest, the material of music has undergone a continuous, orderly, and progressive process of development, from its earliest days down to our own. It has exemplified, in short, an evolution from “indefinite, incoherent, homogeneity” to “definite, coherent, heterogeneity.”

Concomitantly with this special evolution of the sound-material of music, moreover, has gone on a more general evolution of human faculties, which has involved a gradual turning away of men’s attention from comparatively low forms of musical effect to those higher forms which require for their appreciation a good deal of concentration, perception, and power of intellectual synthesis. What was the exclusive concern of the earliest musicians became, as time went on, but a factor in a more complex artistic enjoyment. In order to understand this aspect of the matter clearly, we shall have to distinguish as accurately as possible three kinds of musical effect, all indispensable to music worthy of the name, yet not of equal dignity and value.

There is, in the first place, the direct sensuous effect of the sounds, their deliciousness as sensations. Musical tones gratify the ear just as light and color gratify the eye, agreeable tastes the palate, aromatic odors the nose, and soft, warm surfaces the touch. A single tone from a flute, a violin, or a horn, is as delightful as a patch of pure color, white, red, or purple. To listen to music is, at least in part, to bathe in a flood of exquisite aural sensation. This immediate value for our sense of the “concord of sweet sounds” is a fundamental, legitimate, and important one, to deny or disparage which is to confess oneself insensitive or a prude. All music depends for a part of its appeal on its primary sensuous quality.

In the second place, music has what we call expressive value. Feelings, of surprising depth and variety, it can arouse in us, by inducing, through the contagiousness of rhythm and melody, tendencies to make those bodily motions and vocal sounds which are the natural accompaniment of our emotions.[4] These tendencies, of course, remain incipient; they do not discharge in actual movements greater than the tapping of the foot in “keeping time” and a slight contraction of the vocal cords; but even this faint organic commotion suffices to arouse those vivid feelings with which we listen to expressive music. It is worth while to note further that these feelings are in themselves necessarily most general and undefined, hardly more than moods of animation, excitement, apprehensiveness, solemnity, or depression. Their particular coloring is always imparted either by words or titles, or by the associations of the individual listener. On that very fact depend both the poignancy and the variety of musical expression.

The third and highest value of music is its æsthetic value, or beauty. This value, which springs from the delight we take in perceiving, or mentally organizing our sensations and ideas, is precisely analogous to the æsthetic value of the other arts, as, for example, the beauty of sonnets and other highly articulated poetic forms, of well-composed pictures, of finely-proportioned sculpture, of symmetrical and harmonious architecture. It depends, in general, on the perception of unity in a mass of various impressions, and is but one example of a type of satisfaction we are capable of finding in all the departments of our experience. Wherever, confronted by many objects, sensations, thoughts, or feelings, we are able to gain a sense of their coherence, inter-relation, and essential oneness, we get the characteristic æsthetic value. To win it is the highest success we know. To perceive unity in the bewildering complexity of our experience, is to possess, in the realm of knowledge, truth; in the realm of practice, character; in the realm of art, beauty. Moreover, since perception is a far more active, self-directed process than either sensation or emotion, which are in large degree passively suffered, its contribution to our mental life has for us a deeper charm, a more far-reaching significance, than that of any other faculty. Beauty transfigures all elements that may coexist with it in the mind. In the intellectual sphere, for example, we understand far more deeply the phenomenon when we know its species and genus, and “science is but classified knowledge.” In practical life, all the little every-day events, the petty pleasures and pains, take on, when we view them in relation to a conceived unity in our characters and destinies, a new significance. Similarly in music, values of the first two species, sweetness of sound and emotional expressiveness, can be transfigured by formal beauty; there is no tone that is not sweeter when it embodies a lovely melody; there is no emotion that is not apotheosized by association with others in a harmonious whole, or that does not defeat itself when it stands out single, and will not merge itself in the organism. No music is wholly devoid of any one of the three values; but the greatest music uses the first two only as the materials of the third.

It is easy to see, however, that supreme as the æsthetic value of music may be, men could arrive at an appreciation of it only after a long novitiate and training. To enjoy the sensuous beauty of sweet sounds one needs only ears; to be moved by melodies and rhythms that strongly suggest those vocal utterances and bodily motions which are the natural avenues of emotion, requires but a slightly more complex appreciative mechanism, the mechanism of organic sensations and their associations in the regions of naïve feeling; but to perceive the manifold inter-relationship, and the final unity, of groups of tones combined together by relations in pitch and in time, one needs a keen ear, an awakened memory, a capacity for tracing unity under the mask of variety,—in a word, a thoroughly trained and concentrated mind. Musical art could reach a stage in which all three of its values were associated in due proportion and proper adjustment, only through a gradual progress beginning with stages in which it was but the embodiment of sensuous, or at most of sensuous and emotional, values. That it did, as a matter of fact, go through these evolutionary phases, can be demonstrated by a brief and summary account of the actual periods in its history.

In the first periods that we can make out by theory and deduction—prehistoric periods that left no records—the values sought appear to have been preponderantly sensuous and expressive. The earliest savages, like all children even to this day, who make a noise for the mere joy of it, probably used their voices and their instruments chiefly as nerve-stimulants. As in the realm of color their tastes ran to vivid reds and greens and blues, barbaric hues that assaulted the eye with a potent stimulation, so in music they were addicted to the drums and trumpets, to shoutings, and wild contortions, to whatever gave them a generous measure of sensation, whether in ears or muscles. Their motto in art was doubtless the one which some unknown humorist, perhaps a Frenchman, has attributed to the Germans, in all departments from art to gastronomy—“Plenty of it.” They did, to be sure, take a certain satisfaction in the expressiveness of their wailings and shoutings, and even in the crude formal designs into which they shaped them, generally by mere repetition of some easily recognizable formula; but their chief pleasure was to make a good, rousing noise. Of these preliminary stages in the arts of dance and song it is impossible, however, to form any certain ideas. We can only rely upon conjecture and inference, supposing that something like them preceded the stages about which we have more reliable information.

The earliest music of which historic records remain is that of the Greeks. By painstaking study of the musical inscriptions on stone that have survived the centuries, of the instruments actually in existence, or described by ancient Greek writers, and of the technical treatises on music which are preserved, scholars have been able to substantiate a very few meager facts about the musical practices of the most artistic of nations. On the whole, these facts are singularly disappointing. Forgetting that music is the youngest of the arts, one is apt to expect of the Greeks that wondrous subtlety and maturity in it which they showed in sculpture, architecture, and poetry. A people possessed of so surpassing an artistic instinct, one is apt to think, must have carried its music to a high pitch of perfection. Investigation shows, nevertheless, that the reverse was the case. Indeed, no testimony could speak more eloquently for the deliberation and continuity of the growth of music than the childishness with which it was practiced by a people so gifted as the Greeks with every fineness of nature, but at the disadvantage of living too near the time at which it emerged from savagery.

The Greeks used music chiefly as an adjunct to their poetry, and were accustomed to chant long epics in what would seem to us a monotonous sing-song, generally if not always without accompaniment. Their love for moderation and their avoidance of the passionate, harsh, or over-expressive, moreover, impelled them to exclude from their gamut both the lowest and the highest tones of the voice, so that even their tonal material was confined to a range of about two octaves. The tones included in this limited range, however, they classified and disposed with the greatest ingenuity. The intervals at which tone should follow tone were dictated by seven arbitrary schemes called modes, and each mode was supposed to have its peculiar quality of expression. Thus the Lydian mode, corresponding to our modern major scale, was considered voluptuous and enfeebling, while the Doric mode, an idea of which may be gained by playing a scale, all on white keys, beginning with E, was thought to breathe manliness, vigor, and dignity. They used no harmony, and introduced rhythm only by the metre of the verses sung. Consequently it is easy to see that they can have had from their music but little æsthetic delight, which depends on the grouping into harmonic or rhythmic forms of the tonal material; but must have valued it chiefly for its sensuous beauty, and for its power to enhance the expressiveness of their poetry.

It is nevertheless noteworthy that all three kinds of value did exist in the music of the Greeks, though the third was still in a rudimentary stage. As a result of the generally equal length of their verses or lines of poetry, the melody that accompanied them tended to be divided into equal sections remotely resembling our modern “phrases”; and these sections tended to balance each other, and so to give the sense of symmetrical form. Furthermore, it was customary to end each line with a fall of the voice analogous to the downward inflection of a speaking voice at the end of a sentence. These downward inflections, called cadences, from a Latin verb meaning “to fall,” afforded a convenient means of dividing off the musical as well as the poetic flow into definite parts like segments in a piece of bamboo or the inches on a tape-line; and in the subsequent development of musical structure these divisions, marked by cadences, became the indispensable elements in a highly complex organism. Thus the Greeks, in spite of the immaturity of their music, considered in and for itself, did actually make valuable contributions to the progress of the art. Their period was one of promise rather than of fruition; but it contained the seeds of further growth. It is often called the Monophonic or “one-voiced” period, from the fact that their chants were purely melodic, employing but one voice at a time, without harmonic support.

With the simultaneous employment of more than one voice, music passed out of its infancy. The Polyphonic period, so called from Greek words signifying “many-voiced,” extended, through all the Middle Ages, up to so recent a date as the end of the sixteenth century, there to culminate in the remarkable compositions of Palestrina. In duration it was the longest of all the periods; but this is not surprising when we consider, in the first place, the almost insuperable difficulties to be overcome before even two voices could be pleasantly and fluently conducted together; in the second place, the absence of all prototypes or models for the first experimenters to work from; and, above all, the surprising distance that separates Palestrina’s ingenious, intricate, and beautiful tone-fabrics, written sometimes in as many as sixteen parts, from the rude and protoplasmic chants of two voices, singing an interval of a “fifth” apart, from which they were developed.

That type of chant in which two voices, one a fifth higher than the other, sang the same melody, primitive as it was, and intolerable to modern ears, was to its originators a convenient and pleasant device. It was convenient because, the natural range of soprano and tenor voices being about a fifth above that of contraltos and basses, choirs could chant at this interval more naturally than at the octave. It was pleasant because, while it left each of the two melodies distinctly audible, it produced by their combination a harmonic richness that must have fallen on mediæval ears with an unwonted splendor. Organum, as this device of singing in fifths was called, must be ever memorable in the history of music as the beginning of harmony.

After musicians had once taken the plunge, and dared to make different melodies sound simultaneously, it took them but a comparatively short time (though eras in music, as in geology, are long) to combine the parts in other intervals than the fifth, to use varying intervals in successive chords, to add more voices, and in general to elaborate in every way their tissue of tones. Adopting, with some modifications, the Greek modes as the prescribed orbits of the individual melodies, they produced effects of harmony necessarily very unlike our modern ones, which are built upon the major and minor scales, but nevertheless novel and in their way extremely beautiful. The fabric of the mediæval ecclesiastical music was made up of a succession of shifting chords, each very pure and sweet in itself, yet without those definite connections with its fellows that modern habits of thought demand. The whole effect was curiously kaleidoscopic, mysterious, and vague. Unity depended, not on the piece being in any one key, which it never was, but on the melodies being coherent and expressive. These were the salient features, the harmony was ancillary and incidental. One voice after another came out from the filmy background, sounded for a moment above the rest, and subsided again, to be replaced by another. Not only was there no attempt at a definite series of even sections, built up into recognizable rhythms, such as are indispensable to modern music, but any such effect was studiously avoided. The effort was rather to make the voices interweave inextricably and untraceably. The entire mass was in constant flux and change, a body of lovely and expressive sound, without a single distinct lineament, or any conceivable whence or whither. In Palestrina we have the style at its acme, vague, iridescent, beautiful with a mystical and unearthly beauty. Beyond the point it reached with him, pure polyphonic music, without rhythmic or harmonic definition, could not go. Another critical point was reached, another transformation was imminent.

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, moreover, there began to dawn upon men’s minds various new principles of musical construction which were pregnant with possibilities for a far wider and more vital development than any that had gone before. The rapidity with which the art now began to grow, ramify, and mature, the variety of the new tendencies, and the multiplicity of different styles or orders of art, such as opera and oratorio, fugue and sonata, toward which they led, are surprising. In the countless centuries before Palestrina music grew slowly and uniformly, like a plant; in the short three hundred years between the birth of Palestrina in 1528 and the death of Beethoven in 1827, it had its inconceivably rich and various blossoming, and Monteverde and Gluck, Corelli and Scarlatti, Couperin and Rameau, Bach and Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, were the bright flowers it now put forth. Such a rapid and many-sided advance is fairly bewildering; but it is nevertheless possible to distinguish in the movement a few salient and dominant features, more significant and remarkable than all the others. From our present point of view, the labors of J. S. Bach in the fugue and suite forms, and of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven in the sonata form, are of supreme interest. These labors were guided and fructified by several new principles of musical effect.[5]

The first step toward new fields was taken early in the seventeenth century by a set of daring reformers in Florence, who, boldly discarding the perfect polyphonic style of Palestrina, contrived a style of dramatic music, embodied in small operas, in which single voices sing more or less expressive melodies over an instrumental accompaniment in chords. Crude in the extreme as were necessarily the compositions of Cavaliere, Caccini, Peri, and their fellows, they opened up novel paths, because they had to rely for their effectiveness largely on the conduct of the harmonies employed. So long as the old church modes were adhered to, to be sure, the harmonic style remained necessarily vague, wandering, and monotonous; but gradually the composers began to see that, by altering their intervals, they could introduce variety and contrast into their cadences, making one line end on one chord, and the next on a different though related one, and that thus they could make coherent the successive phrases, punctuated by the cadences, and at the same time set them in an opposition that made for variety. In the interests of definiteness of cadence and an obvious distribution of contrasted yet complementary chords, therefore, the modes were slowly transformed into the modern scale, and music became at last harmonically definite and firm. All the tones came to be conceived as grouped around certain tonal centres, which could be manipulated and organized like the masses in a picture. Thus emerged the principle of tonality or key, and in the course of time the device of modulation by which one passes from one key to another. Still it remained difficult to get far away from the key in which one started out, because of the manner of tuning, which made only a few keys available at once; but J. S. Bach, modifying the system of tuning to what is called equal temperament,[6] which opens the doors simultaneously to the entire twelve keys, emancipated music entirely from the restrictions of the ecclesiastical modes, and in his great work, “The Well-[or Equally-] Tempered Clavichord,” demonstrated practically the use of all the twelve keys as an intimate and compact family. By his time the principle of tonality was firmly established.

A second principle vital to modern music is that of “thematic development.” By this is meant, first, the existence in the music of certain salient, easily recognizable groups of tones, called motifs, subjects, or themes, which are presented to the hearer at the outset, and impressed upon him by their unique individuality of cut; and second, that subsequent elaboration of these themes, in varied but still recognizable forms, which corresponds closely with the process by which an essayist develops an idea, a mathematician proves a theorem, or a preacher elucidates a text. It is interesting to note that the German word “Satz,” often used by musicians to mean “a theme,” signifies primarily a thesis or proposition in logic, while “Durchführung,” used to describe the development of the theme, means primarily a leading-through or bringing to an issue. Thus the process of thematic development in music is much like any other process of intellectual statement and proof. Now it is evident that this process, which is indispensable to all the higher intellectual forms of music, requires in the first place definite, concise, and memorable themes, since it is impossible to discuss what one fails to grasp, or after grasping, forgets. As the proverb says, the preparer of a ragout of hare must “first catch his hare.” Similarly musicians, before they could make their music logical, had to catch their themes. But as musical material up to the time of Palestrina never was definite or memorable, the first requisite of thematic music was some principle by which themes could be defined. This principle was found in the time-measurement of tones. So soon as a group of tones were placed in measured relations of duration to one another, an individual theme emerged, and could be elaborated. The second great conquest of modern music, then, was the conquest of the definite theme or motif, strictly measured in time, and of those devices by which it could be developed in an extended and logical discourse.

The third notable achievement of seventeenth century composers was the emancipation of music from servitude to poetry, and the establishment of it as an independent art. In one sense this was but a natural outcome of its new qualities of harmonic and thematic definition, lacking which it could never reach independence. So long as it remained in itself vague, amorphous, inchoate, it was constrained to be but a hand-maid, to content itself with lending eloquence or atmosphere to the utterances of its sister art; but this condition of dependence, however inevitable for a time, was nevertheless unfortunate, and bound to be eventually outlived. Music is always fatally handicapped by association with words. In the first place, words impose upon it a concrete meaning immeasurably more trite, prosaic, and limited than that abstract and indefinable meaning to the heart and mind which is its proper prerogative; the expressive power of music really begins where that of poetry fails and ceases. In the second place, the limitations of all vocal music are in many ways serious. Not only are voices incapable of sounding readily and with certainty many intervals, but they are confined to a range of a little over three octaves, and to phrases short enough not to overtax the breath. Instruments are free from all these disqualifications. They produce pure tones, without words, the most celestial of artistic materials; they can sound any interval; they extend over a range of more than seven octaves, from the deep bass of the organ or contrabass to the shrill and immaterial treble of the piccolo; and the breadth of the phrases they can produce is limited not by their own mechanism, but only by the power of intellectual synthesis possessed by listeners. For all these reasons, instruments are the ideal media for producing music; and never until they supplanted voices could music reach its complete stature as a mature and self-sufficient art, leaning on no crutch, borrowing no raison d’être, but making by its own legitimate means its own unique effects.

The task of seventeenth century musicians was, then, in large part, the establishment of tonality and the hierarchy of keys, contrasted with one another, but accessible by modulation; the crystallization, by means of both harmonic and metrical definition, of individual themes out of the amorphous tonal matrix of previous eras, and the exploration of means for building up these themes into coherent organisms; and lastly the emancipation of the art thus brought into full life from the tyranny of association with words and voices. This was an immense task; and it is not to be wondered at that most of the men engaged in it never attained mastery enough to give them great personal prominence. Theirs was a time of beginnings, of preparation for novel and unprecedented achievements. The early opera-writers, the Italian violinists, the German organists, and the clavichord and harpsichord writers of that period, men like Cavaliere and Caccini, Corelli and Scarlatti, Sweelinck and Frescobaldi, Purcell, Kuhnau, and Couperin, are chiefly known to us as preparers of the soil, and sowers of the seed, for a harvest which was gathered by later, and probably greater, though not more honorable men. The first composer after Palestrina who like him overtopped all his fellows, and brought to its culmination another great period, was Johann Sebastian Bach.

In Bach’s style we find, in addition to the polyphonic or many-voiced texture of Palestrina, a thematic pointedness and logic and a harmonic structure which are entirely unforeshadowed in the older man. The fugue, a form which he carried to its highest pitch, and which was admirably suited to his genius, is in certain respects allied to the earlier style, though in others wholly modern. Like the ecclesiastical forms of Palestrina, it is of the basket-work type of texture. One voice begins alone, others enter in succession,and all wind in and out amongst one another almost as intricately as in a sixteenth century madrigal. On the other hand, the fugue as a whole begins and ends in some one key, and throughout its progress modulates from key to key with well-planned contrasts and firmly-controlled movement. Moreover, a single definite theme or subject appears at the outset of the piece, and stands prominently forth through its whole extent; it is announced by the first voice, repeated at a different pitch in the answer of the second, reiterated again by the third and fourth, and subsequently made the basis of an ingenious, varied, and extended development. Finally, although some of Bach’s fugues are vocal, most of them are written either for organ or for clavichord. In all these respects his work is modern, and perhaps most of all is it modern in its inexorable logic, its subtlety and variety, and in its poignant, deeply emotional expressiveness, which is always held within the bounds necessary to supreme architectural beauty. The period of Bach and his precursors, sometimes called the “polyphonic-harmonic” period, because in it the modern harmonic system was grafted upon the polyphony of Palestrina, remains to-day, from some points of view, the purest and noblest period of musical history.

All the time that Bach, in the privacy of an obscure German town, was writing his wonderfully intricate and beautiful polyphonic music, the world about him, oblivious, was seeking out a quite different type of art. It is a surprising fact that Bach’s compositions were virtually unknown for fifty years after his death, and might have remained so permanently had they not been “discovered” by appreciative students, much as the receptacles of classical lore were discovered in the Renaissance after the long darkness of the Middle Ages, and made the basis of an intellectual revival. Bach’s great works, too, were full of an undying vitality; but for a long time their potency had to remain latent, because men were occupied with another order of art, a different set of problems, an alien style. Ever since the Florentine revolution, when the polyphonic texture of mediæval music was abandoned for a simple monodic or one-voiced style, in which a melody is accompanied by a series of chords, much of the musical genius of the world had been devoted to the development of eloquent single melodies, and of suitable harmonic backgrounds for them. With the systematization of harmony and the establishment of definite themes this type of art became mature. Composers discerned the possibility of building up whole movements to which interest could be given by the statement and development of one or more themes, contrasted both in character and in key. They saw that the whole could be unified by general qualities of style, by recurrence of the themes, and, above all, by being made to embody, in the long run, a single tonality, though with momentary departures from it for the sake of variety. Working out their idea, they devised a type of structure which has remained up to this day the highest and most widely useful of all musical forms. The essential features of “sonata-form,” as it is called, are, in the first place, the Exposition of two themes or subjects of discourse, contrasting both in character and in key; in the second place, the Development of these themes, the exploitation of their latent possibilities; in the third place, Restatement of them, in the central key of the movement, bringing all to a point, and completing the cycle of Statement, Argument, and Summary. Sonata-form, of which it is easy to see the naturalness and beauty, depends for its unity, not on the equal interplay of many voices, like the older polyphonic forms, but on the saliency, cumulative development, and harmonic inter-relations, of single themes. We may, therefore, call the great period of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, the period in which the sonata-form attained its full maturity, the “harmonic period,” or, in view of the complete round or circuit of themes its forms exemplified, the “cyclical-form period.” It culminated in the early years of the nineteenth century, in the grand works of Beethoven’s maturity.

After Beethoven, music began to ramify in so many directions that it is impossible to classify its phases in a hard-and-fast series. It had its romanticists, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin, who uttered with freer passion and poetry the emotional and spiritual meanings already heard in Beethoven. It had its realists, notably Berlioz and Liszt, who, attempting to divert it into the realm of pictorial delineation and description, have been followed by all the horde of contemporary writers of programme-music. It had its nationalists, men like Glinka, Smetana, and in our own day, Grieg and Dvořák, who sought to impress upon its speech a local accent. Above all, it had one great master, Brahms, who, assimilating the polyphony of Bach, the architectonic structure of Beethoven, and the romantic ardor of Schumann, added to them all his own austere beauty and profound feeling. But we are too near these later masters to get any general, justly-proportioned view of them. It is on the horizon only that mountains cease to be solitary peaks, and become ranges, the trend and disposition of which can be accurately plotted on the maps. The general tendency of musical evolution, down to Beethoven so clearly traceable, so obviously continuous, becomes after him bafflingly complex.

Fortunately, this complexity need not embarrass our present undertaking. We have seen how, in the gradual and laborious, but incessant and inevitable growth of musical art, period succeeded period as the artistic faculty of man constantly discerned new possibilities of beauty, sensuous, expressive, and æsthetic, in the tonal material with which it dealt. We have seen how this evolution tended always from the indefinite, incoherent, and homogeneous toward the definite, coherent, and heterogeneous; and how it tended to embody ever higher and higher values, beginning with the mere sense-stimulations of savages and leading up to the highly complex and intellectual sound-fabric of Beethoven, in which the sensuous and emotional values are held ever subordinate to the æsthetic. We have examined, briefly and summarily, the special characteristics of the successive periods into which the great evolution has been divided by those critical points which the nature of its material determined. With the general view of musical history thus gained held clearly in mind, we may now profitably pass to that more detailed study of the great period of Beethoven, the golden age of pure music, which is the especial task before us.

It will be necessary, however, to linger still a little longer on the threshold, in order to examine in more detail yet the two scarcely less interesting periods which preceded it,—the periods of Palestrina and Bach,—and to define yet more precisely those fundamental principles of pure music on the efficacy of which its glory depended.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See the author’s “From Grieg to Brahms,” pp. 219-223.

[2] “First Principles,” American edition, p. 358.

[3] Op. cit., p. 326.

[4] For a fuller statement of this theory of musical expression, see “From Grieg to Brahms,” pp. 6-11.

[5] These principles will be studied more in detail in the chapter on The Principles of Pure Music.

[6] For a technical explanation of equal temperament, see Dr. Parry’s “Evolution of the Art of Music,” pp. 187-188.

CHAPTER II
PALESTRINA AND THE MUSIC
OF MYSTICISM

CHAPTER II
PALESTRINA AND THE MUSIC OF MYSTICISM

It has been often pointed out by historians and critics that in their early stages the arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting were the servants of religion. Nursed through their infancy by the cherishing hand of the church, they emerged into the secular world only with their comparative maturity. Architecture, which in our day and country embodies itself chiefly in great civic and mercantile buildings, began with the temples of the pagan Greeks and the cathedrals of the mediæval Christians. Sculpture for the most part delineated, in antiquity, Egyptian or Greek gods and goddesses; and in the middle ages, Christian saints. Even painting, which at the Renaissance became for all time a secular art, inspired by its own ideals and controlled only by intrinsic conditions, commenced by picturing on mediæval altar-pieces and frescoes the heroes of sacred story, with their upturned eyes and their clasped hands, and by symbolizing the dogmas or illustrating the narratives of its task-master, religion. J. A. Symonds, in the third part of his “Renaissance in Italy,” in which he describes at length this universal dependence of art, in its early stages, on the church, offers the following plausible explanation of it: “Art aims at expressing an ideal; and this ideal is the transfiguration of human elements into something nobler, felt and apprehended by the imagination. Such an ideal, such an all-embracing glorification of humanity, exists for simple and unsophisticated societies only in the forms of religion.”[7] It is not, indeed, until art, nurtured in cloisters, acquires definite aims, technical methods, and self-confidence, that it can put off its dependence on ecclesiastical aid, at first favorable but eventually restrictive, and essay a free life.

To this general rule music is no exception—mediæval music was the child, nursling, and hand-maid of the Church. It is true that there did grow up, in the lyrical songs of troubadours and minstrels, a kind of popular music that had in many respects more vitality, individuality, and beauty than the more conventional ecclesiastical art; and that the latter, at many stages in its development, had to draw fresh inspiration from the humble popular minstrels. But in the middle ages, when the common people were entirely illiterate, and all intellectual concerns were in the hands of priests, who alone could read, write, and preserve manuscripts and artistic traditions, it was inevitable that the only recognized music, stamped with the seal of age and authority, should be that of the ecclesiastical choristers. The student of the infancy of music has to direct his attention, not to the mediæval world at large, but to the cathedrals and the monasteries of that intensely clerical age.

For the modern mind, permeated as it is with the instincts of liberty and individualism, and perhaps especially for the American mind, naturally radical and irreverent, it is difficult to conceive the degree in which all the rites, customs, and beliefs of the mediæval Catholic Church were matters of traditional authority. There was not a word of the liturgy, not a tone of the plain chant to which it was sung, not a gesture of the priest nor a genuflexion of the worshippers, that was not prescribed by what was considered supreme dictation and hallowed by immemorial practice.[8] The liturgy, or text of the Mass, the skeleton and fixed basis, so to speak, of the ritual as a whole, began to take shape in the hands of the apostles themselves; was developed by a gradual accretion of prayers, hymns, responses, and readings from Scripture; was translated into Latin and adopted by the Roman Church; and became fixed in practically its present form so early as the end of the sixth century. When we consider the almost superstitious regard in which its great antiquity caused it to be held, and when we reflect that the musical setting used with it was considered a mere appanage to the sacred words, we can understand the slow development of music in the first eleven centuries of the Christian era. In taking its first steps music was not merely hampered by its own uncertainty and infantile feebleness; it was paralyzed by servile dependence on a text swathed within the bandages of priestly convention.

The only form of music used in the Church, up to the beginning of the twelfth century, the only form of music ever given its official sanction, was the Gregorian chant or plain song, which consists in a single unaccompanied series of tones set to the liturgic text, intoned by priest or choristers, and for many centuries used exclusively throughout the entire service. It has not only no harmony, but, properly speaking, no meter or rhythm, being dependent for time-measurement on the prose text it accompanies. “It follows” says Mr. Dickinson,[9] “the phrasing, the emphasis, and the natural inflections of the voice in reciting the text, at the same time that it idealizes them. It is a sort of heightened form of speech, a musical declamation, having for its object the intensifying of the emotional powers of ordinary spoken language. It stands to true song or tune in much the same relation as prose to verse, less impassioned, more reflective, yet capable of moving the heart like eloquence.” Having neither harmonic nor metrical relationship, it had, of course, no proper structure of its own; and so long as it was used in this primary way, sung in unison or even in two parts at the interval of an octave, there was little about it that could properly be called musical at all.

But after a while it occurred to some one to let a second set of voices sing the same chant at an interval of a fifth above the first.[10] This scheme, which, simple as it was, contained the seeds of wonderful developments, was probably first recommended by several practical advantages. When the chant was sung by two choirs, one made up of the high voices (soprano and tenors) and the other of the low voices (contraltos and basses) the interval of the octave was practically inconvenient because the low voices could not use their highest tones without throwing the high voices out of range, and the high voices could not use their lowest tones without similarly embarrassing the low ones. When the interval of the fifth was used, on the contrary, practically all the tones in both ranges, which are by nature about a fifth apart,[11] became available. This was a very practical argument in favor of chanting “at the fifth.” An even stronger one was the fact that, while fifths, like octaves, are harmonious and pleasant to the ear, without harshness or discordance, they are richer than octaves, and their constituents stand out distinct instead of merging into one impression, as do tones an octave apart; so that the practice of Organum, or chanting at the fifth, was harmonically sweet and full as well as melodically interesting. Organum came therefore into general and wide use in the mediæval church. Hucbald, a monkish writer of the tenth century, gives the following example of a fragment of plain chant “organized,” or sung by two voices a fifth apart:

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FIGURE II. EXAMPLE OF ORGANUM.

In patris sempiturnus es filius.

The practice of Organum, crude as it may seem to modern ears, was or immense historical importance, as the first embodiment of that principle of combining various parts simultaneously which in due time produced all the resources of polyphony and of harmony. It is not necessary to examine here, in detail, all the stages of that long and weary journey which the mediæval composers made from this starting-point of Organum to the highly developed contrapuntal music of the sixteenth century. In all its aspects it was essentially a growth in definiteness, coherence, and heterogeneity. The parts were combined with more and more freedom, both as to their comparative rate of movement and as to the purity of the chords they made at prominent points (less harmonious intervals being gradually tolerated); the number of parts was increased, in spite of the great difficulties that each additional part must have meant to writers with inadequate experience and models; experiments were tried in combining together tunes already composed, popular songs and the like, trimming and twisting and compressing or expanding them to make them fit; the device of imitation, of which more will be said presently, was introduced in the interests of sense and coherence;[12] one experiment after another was tried, one resource after another was utilized, until eventually, in the sixteenth century, the art of ecclesiastical counterpoint[13] was fully established.

To this sixteenth-century music it is difficult for modern ears to listen appreciatively. The exact value and significance of chords, cadences, and melodic phrases, like the exact significance of words in language, depends so largely upon current usage and the mental habits it reposes upon, that it is as much an effort for modern listeners to comprehend mediæval music as it is for the modern reader to understand the vocabulary of Chaucer or Shakespeare. Just as words, in the course of long service, gradually take on new associations, new shades of suggestion, and even, in extreme cases, a significance quite opposite to their original one, so the material of music, as used to-day, has hundreds of associations and subtle shades of value, developed only during the last three hundred years, but nevertheless permeating our minds so thoroughly that it is almost impossible for us to think them away.

—Perhaps the most inveterate of these modern habits of musical thought is the harmonic habit. It is second nature for us to conduct all our musical thinking in terms of harmonic relations. We think of chords as related to one another in certain fixed ways, as forming groups or clusters just as definite as the groups of atoms in a chemical molecule. It is not more sure, for example, that in a molecule of water two atoms of hydrogen are engaged or held in combination by one atom of oxygen, than it is that in any key the dominant and sub-dominant chords are held in the position of subordinate companions by the tonic chord, and that the other chords of the key are held in more remote but still perfectly fixed relations with this Paterfamilias of the harmonic family. We think of the chords in a phrase, of whatever length and complexity, as progressing in a coherent series, as intertwined one with another by manifold relationships, and as embodying, all together, some one key. For us, every composition is in some particular key as inevitably as every poem or essay is in some particular language. We modulate freely, to be sure, from key to key; but this rather intensifies than obliterates our sense of key, just as the process of translating from one language to another intensifies our sense of the peculiar idioms of each. Our whole manner of thought would be as indescribably shocked by a passage which placed together, cheek by jowl, chords belonging to different keys, as by a sentence every word of which was drawn from a different tongue.

Now this habit of thought simply did not exist in Palestrina and his contemporaries and forerunners; it had not been evolved. The bit of Organum given in Figure II is hideous to modern ears just because it violates at every step our harmonic sense; it was pleasant to its composer, whoever he was, because he had no harmonic sense to be violated. To us, the sound of a tone with its fifth suggests immediately and inexorably the whole “triad” founded on that tone—root, third, fifth, and octave—and the key we consider it to be in. The sound of the tone and its fifth summons up in our imagination the whole chord and its key just as automatically as the sight of a horse’s head arouses in us an image of the trunk, legs, and tail that accompany it. This being the case, the bit of Organum quoted means for us a series of abrupt transitions from key to key, without warning, reason, or coherence. It is musical nonsense, gibberish, delirium. To its composer, on the contrary, it was merely an agreeable combination of two pleasing melodies in a harmonious interval. The chords used had for him no implications, no necessary relations, the observance of which made sense, the violation nonsense. They were pleasant combinations of sounds formed by the melodies in their progress; and that was all. Even more striking becomes the contrast between mediæval and modern usage in the more mature music of the later contrapuntal epoch. Palestrina, for example, begins a Stabat Mater as follows:

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FIGURE III.

Stabat mater dolorosa,

Here the first three chords, a modern musician would say, are in as many keys. The first is the triad of A-major, the second that of G-major, and the third that of F-major. The coherence of the passage depends, in fact, entirely on the melodies; the chords they form have no harmonic cohesiveness. For the old composers, in whose scores hundreds of such passages may be found, harmony was still a sensuous, not an intellectual or æsthetic agent.

Another peculiarity of their harmonic style resulted from their attitude toward dissonances, or chords containing harsh intervals. Dissonance, as we shall have frequent occasion to see, plays an important part in modern music, both as an indispensable element in design and as a means of peculiar emotional expressiveness. In the sixteenth century, on the contrary, dissonances were admitted in the harmonic fabric but sparingly, and when admitted were subject to stringent rules, the purpose of which was to mollify their harshness. The result was not only still further to preclude the sense of harmonic sequence and coherence so essential to modern ears, and produced largely by the skilful use of dissonance merging into consonance, but also to limit the expressive powers of music to that range of feeling which is aroused by the purest, clearest, and most mellifluous chords sounding continuously, without contrast or relief.

But if the music of the sixteenth century was lacking in harmonic cogency and intensity, it was not for that reason either incoherent or inexpressive. It had its own sort of coherence, its own type of eloquence, both depending on melodic rather than on harmonic qualities. Music was to Palestrina and his fellows entirely a matter of melody, not of harmony at all. The reader needs only to glance again at Figure III, attending not to the chords and their sequence, but to the individual voices, one after another, to see that in their own way the phrases hang together firmly, and say efficiently what they mean. Each of the four voices has an intelligible and expressive part, and if together they sound a little strange, singly they are eminently good. The more one studies this old music the more one realizes that it is all melody; from beginning to end, from top to bottom, the mediæval scores sing. They are not, like many modern works, full of inert, lifeless matter, tones put in to fill out the harmonies, and having no melodic excuse for being. In the modern monophonic style, in which but one melody sings, the remaining parts are almost inevitably treated by the composer as affording rather a logical sequence of harmonies than a subsidiary tissue of melodic strands. In the sixteenth century, on the other hand, harmony was the accident, melody the essence; any chord would do very well in any place, provided it were consonant enough not to offend the ear; but every tone must have a melodic reason for being; it must be a point in a line; all the lines must be conducted with draughtsman-like deftness and economy. Melodic life is accordingly the supreme trait of the style well named polyphonic.

And yet, here we encounter still another difficulty introduced by modern habits of thought. To us nowadays melody means, not merely a series of tones having that sort of elementary consecutiveness which we find in Palestrina, for example, but a series of tones divided up into several definite segments which in someway balance, complement, and complete one another. The first phrase of “Yankee Doodle” has “elementary consecutiveness,” but it does not satisfy our melodic sense. We must add the second phrase, equal to it in length, which echoes and reinforces it, and the third phrase, twice as long as either, which rounds out the whole tune to a complete period. In short, just as harmony involves for us chord structure and inter-relation, melody involves for us metrical balance, response, symmetry—that recognizable recurrence, to use the most general term possible, which we call “rhythm.” Mere eloquent intoning, without repetition and balance of phrases, is to us no more “tune” than prose is verse. Here again we are in danger of letting our own habits of thought confuse our understanding of an unfamiliar type of art. The truth is, Palestrina does not write “tunes,” in the modern sense of the word. He lived and wrote before musical evolution had given the world that principle of metrical structure so essential to modern music; and his style, therefore, lacks definite meter, lacks all rhythm save that vague one superposed upon it by his Latin prose text. His music, devoid of any regular segmental division, is indeed a sort of tonal prose, as massive and majestic as the “Religio Medici.”

One other technical peculiarity of the music of the polyphonic period deserves notice here, as it involved a principle destined to assume great importance in later stages of art. The polyphonic writers often introduced successive voices with an identical formula of notes, which by repetition came to have somewhat the virtue of a motif or subject in giving to the music rationality and sequence. They had not as yet, to be sure, enough experience in composing definite themes strictly measured in time to make these embryonic motifs either very long or very distinct, but they did make and utilize subjects striking enough to be remembered and recognized. In this way they introduced the important device of “Imitation.” This imitating of one part by another, even when crudely carried out, gave a certain air of intention and fore-thought to what without it would have been a haphazard utterance of tones, and in later times, when developed to a high pitch of perfection in the fugue and allied forms, became a powerful agent for securing intelligibility. Meanwhile, as we have seen, the intelligibility of the sixteenth-century music depended chiefly on the fine melodic cogency and expressiveness of its individual voice parts. Although time-measurement was well understood, melody was without metrical structure and rhythmic organization. Harmony was the art of making pleasant sounds by bringing the voices together, at prominent moments, on consonant chords; it took no heed of chord relation, of tonality, or of orderly modulation; and it used dissonance with extreme conservatism. Such, in sum, were the most notable technical peculiarities of that polyphonic period which Palestrina brought to its culmination.

Giovanni Pierluigi Sante da Palestrina, named Palestrina from the place of his birth, which was a small town in the Campagna not far from Rome, was born of humble parents about the year 1524. About 1550 he went to Rome as teacher of the boy-singers in the Capella Giulia of the Vatican. All the rest of his life was spent in Rome, in various posts in the service of the church, and in studious and uneventful labor at his great compositions. Although a married man, he was made in 1554 one of the singers in the Papal choir by Pope Julius III, to whom he had dedicated a set of masses; on the accession of Pope Paul IV a year later he was dismissed, and became ill with anxiety as to the support of his growing family; he was nevertheless almost immediately appointed music-director of the Lateran Church, and later he held successively the posts of music-director in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, “Composer to the Pontifical Choir,” leader of the choir of St. Peter’s, and music-director to Cardinal Aldobrandini. Aside from these meagre and arid details, unfortunately, little is known of the man Palestrina. His private life is almost a blank. The one story oftenest told of him, that his Mass of Pope Marcellus, produced in 1565, was written to convince the reforming Council of Trent of the possibility of purging church music of the trivialities and abuses which had crept into it, has been discredited by recent historians. Mythical also seems to be the story of Palestrina’s one great popular triumph, in 1575, a year of jubilee, when fifteen hundred residents of the composer’s native town are said to have entered Rome in three companies, singing his works, and led by himself. The story is a severe tax on the credulity of anyone whose ideas of chorus-singing are based on modern methods.

In character Palestrina was devout, pious, frugal, and industrious. Though so few records exist, we can guess his industry from the mass of the work he achieved, and his honor and sense of responsibility from his anxiety when the support of his family seemed in danger. As to his piety, all his music is one eloquent demonstration of it. Nor is it without verbal testimony in the dedications and inscriptions on his manuscripts. In dedicating his first book of motets to Cardinal d’Este he expressed his artistic convictions as follows: “Music exerts a great influence on the minds of mankind, and is intended not only to cheer these, but also to guide and control them, a statement which has not only been made by the ancients, but which is found equally true to-day. The sharper blame, therefore, do those deserve who misemploy so great and splendid a gift of God in light or unworthy things, and thereby excite men, who of themselves are inclined to all evil, to sin and misdoing. As regards myself, I have from youth been affrighted at such misuse, and anxiously have I avoided giving forth anything which could lead anyone to become more wicked or godless. All the more should I, now that I have attained to riper years, and am not far removed from old age, place my entire thoughts on lofty, earnest things, such as are worthy of a Christian.” When, in 1594, Palestrina died, almost his last words, whispered to his son Igino, directed the publication of his latest manuscript works, “to the glory of the most high God, and the worship of his holy temple.”

A sentence in the dedication by Palestrina just cited affords us as serviceable a key as we could desire to the fundamental temper or mood of mind which underlay the type of art he represents. The technical peculiarities of this art already traced in the foregoing pages, do not in themselves explain it; they are, indeed, but manifestations of a deeper spirit underneath, a spirit that was as characteristic of the mediæval mind as idealism is of the modern mind. Incommensurate as were the technical resources of the mediæval composer with ours, their whole mental temper and outlook upon life was in even more striking contrast with the modern attitude. We have, therefore, next to ask: What was the most characteristic peculiarity of this age? What was its most pervasive general trait? What was the one dominant quality in which most of Palestrina’s contemporaries, for all their minor differences, were alike?

Palestrina himself suggests the answer to such questions. “The sharper blame, therefore,” he writes, “do those deserve who misemploy so great and splendid a gift of God in light or unworthy things, and thereby excite men, who of themselves are inclined to all evil, to sin and misdoing.” This setting in antithesis of “men, who of themselves are inclined to all evil,” with the attribution of a “great and splendid gift” to a God conceived as remote from men though beneficent to them, exemplifies the essence of that mediæval view of life which we wish to understand, and for which perhaps the best single name is mysticism. The mystic begins his philosophy with a sharp sundering of himself, considered as an individual existing in time and space, with earthly body, finite mind, and human passions, from what he considers supreme, formless, and eternal good. In common with other men, he has his instinctive perceptions of the divine; but unlike other men he cuts off very sharply the divine thus perceived from the real world in which he eats and drinks, works and plays, lives and dies. His is a world of strong contrasts, of extreme antithesis—the world that mystical terminology divides into “apparent and real,” “divine and carnal,” “temporal and eternal.” His intuition of what is beyond the veil of mortality, absolute, permanent, serves only to emphasize more poignantly his own frailty, partiality, and transience. He not only hypostatizes his own ideal, his dream and aspiration of what ought to be, making of it, as all men do, a real objective existence, but he then cuts it off from himself, makes it a touchstone of all the dross that in him exists alongside the pure gold, and while he attributes all virtue to this “other” or “beyond” projected by his unconscious imagination, reserves to his present actual self, as directly known, all wickedness, sin, and failure. God is perfect, but remote; man is near—and base.

This was the characteristic attitude of religious-minded men in the middle ages. If to us it may seem pathetically childish and superstitious, we should not judge it without remembering the epoch of which it was a part. When we reconstruct in imagination that historic moment, that peculiar inheritance and environment of the sixteenth century Europeans, it is hard to conceive how else they could have interpreted the world. Theirs was an age, we must remind ourselves, of violence and bloodshed, of greed, hypocrisy, lust, and faithlessness. Craft and cruelty reigned in places of power, and the minds of the common people groped in the obscurity of gross ignorance, made even darker by fitful flashes of superstition. The poor were ground down by tyrannies and oppressions, the powerful were tormented by constant dread of treachery and assassination. Plagues and pestilence, war and famine and drought, made physical existence miserable; priestly bigotry and dogmatism crushed all mental initiative. It is not surprising that humanity, in the midst of such conditions, failed to recognize, as the source of its beliefs, its own latent virtue; the wonder is rather that it succeeded in rising at all to the intuition of a holiness which, by a natural error, it conceived as entirely severed from itself. It was much to arrive at this point. The object of the present analysis is not to discredit the mediæval conception of the world, but, by pointing out its peculiarities, to throw light on the music which was one of its profoundest utterances.

The most familiar, and in some respects the most characteristic, element of mysticism is its ecstatic, devout attitude towards the deity or Absolute it worships. The mystic throws himself on the ground before his God, so to speak, in an ecstasy of complete self-abandonment and surrender. He is utterly prone, passive, will-less. His worship is the most complete, the most devoted worship of which there is record. The Greek pagans might sacrifice a lamb or an ox at the altars of their gods, the mystic sacrifices nothing less than himself, his very personality. He desires no reciprocal relations with his deity, makes no reservations in his commerce with it, retains no claim to independence, seeks no special favors; what he longs for, whole-heartedly and with a passionate fervor, is complete absorption, utter annihilation. In the trances of the devotees, consciousness dwindles to a point, all sense of individuality lapses, perception, sensation, thought even, flag and cease, and there remains only a vast, vague sense of the infinite self in which the human self is dissolved and obliterated.

So prominent a feature in this longing or absorption in the infinite, however, was the characteristic mystical condemnation of the finite, that an account of the relations of mystical belief and practice to the affairs of actual life reduces itself largely to a series of negative statements. Closely connected with the dogma of the supreme worth of the absolute, and producing even more conspicuous effects than that, was the obverse dogma of the worthlessness of the immediate, of whatever could be called “this,” “now,” or “here.” Love of God was considered to involve contempt of man, and since man was nearer, more immediate in experience, than God, mysticism expressed itself, historically, very largely in negations. It acted, in all departments of life, and on all planes—the physical, the intellectual, and the emotional or spiritual—as an anti-naturalistic force, for which, perhaps, the best general name is asceticism.

On the physical plane, asceticism took the form of abstinence and mortification of the flesh. In its milder phases it prompted merely the refusal of all the natural calls of instinct and appetite. Because it was natural to hunger, asceticism required men to fast; because to sleep was natural, it counselled vigils; because men naturally enjoy women’s love, material well-being, and personal initiative, monastic orders imposed the triple oath of celibacy, poverty, and obedience. Of course it is true that there were positive benefits to be derived from all these modes of discipline, and that much could be argued in their favor by mere common-sense; but over and above their positive virtues there was about them an opposition to nature, a violence to human instincts, that even more irresistibly commended them to true ascetics. A still further application of the same principle was mortification of the flesh. Indian Jogis, Mohammedan dervishes and fakirs, Christian cenobites and anchorites, all, in a word, who held the mystical doctrine of the absolute opposition of body and spirit, believed that to mortify the flesh was to vivify the soul, and carried out their belief with the help of a thousand engines of penance.

On the intellectual plane, the same distrust of man and of nature prompted an agelong opposition to science, to independent metaphysical or religious thinking, and indeed to all forms of free mental activity. The story of Galileo summoned before the seven cardinals at Rome and forced to deny his belief in the heretical doctrine that the earth revolved round the sun is typical of the experiences of almost all venturesome thinkers in the middle age. The application of human intellect to the unravelling of the august mysteries of God was zealously punished as a blasphemy; the only authorized channel of knowledge was revelation. The rational and systematic questioning of nature that has given us modern science was by the true mystical mind held in horror, first because the intelligence is a human and therefore corrupt instrument, and secondly because nature itself is an illusion, a pitfall for unwary feet that falter in their search for heaven.

An asceticism which saw in the physical and intellectual activities of the natural man more evil than good, could hardly be expected to look more leniently on his emotional life, which is, perhaps, the most intensely human and natural part of him, and of which the organized expression is art. Ordinary human feelings, exercised spontaneously in the present world, and not as mere offerings to the beyond, seemed to the ascetic as unworthy of a God-fearing man as sensuous pleasures and intellectual quests. And especially abhorrent to him was their free embodiment in art. As religion is the expression of man’s consciousness of the supernatural, so art is the expression of his delight and joy in the natural. Its work is to build, out of primitive sensations, utterances of feeling and monuments of beauty. But these sensations are all ultimately physical. These feelings are the simple, instinctive feelings of humanity, and this beauty is one that is apprehended by no metaphysical faculty, but by ordinary human powers—by the senses, the heart, and the mind. Art is the most radically and inexorably human of all man’s interests. And since the whole bias of asceticism was against the free development or expression of merely human powers, it was inevitable that mysticism, in which the ascetic element is so considerable, should be even more restrictive than helpful in its influence on art. While it did indeed foster the purely devout and adoring element in artistic expression, it discouraged that full appeal to the whole man by which alone art attains its maturity.

The music of Palestrina’s age is probably the most consummate expression in the whole history of art of this peculiar type of feeling, with all its characteristic qualities and limitations. “No other form of chorus music has existed,” writes Mr. Edward Dickinson,[14] “so objective and impersonal, so free from the stress and stir of passion, so plainly reflecting an exalted, spiritualized state of feeling. This music is singularly adapted to reinforce the impression of the Catholic mysteries by reason of its technical form and its peculiar emotional appeal.... It is as far as possible removed from profane suggestion; in its ineffable calmness, and an indescribable tone of chastened exultation, pure from every trace of struggle, with which it vibrates, it is the most adequate emblem of that eternal repose toward which the believer yearns.”

It was, we must now once more insist, these peculiar qualities of feeling to be expressed in mystical art, that reacted to determine the peculiarities of the technique in which they had to be embodied, just as a man’s spirit reacts to determine the nature of the body in which its purposes have to be wrought out. That “ineffable calmness,” that “chastened exultation,” of the mystical temper, could be voiced in sound only through the medium of clear, ethereal vocal tones, combined in chords prevailingly consonant and void of harshness. Such a translucent fabric of tones as was produced by human voices, singing, without instrumental accompaniment, the purest consonances, was best fitted to merge with the vast, cool arch of the cathedral, with the unlocalized murmur and reverberation that stirred in it, and with the somnolent fumes of incense, to form a background apt for mystical contemplation. And then, against this background, the phrases of aspiring but unimpassioned melody which one by one sounded above the general murmur, traced, as it were, arabesques of more definite human feeling. One by one they rose into momentary prominence, to hover above the other voices as prayers hover among the tranquil thoughts of simple and devout minds. There was about them a celestial clarity, an unearthly plangency of accent, but no turmoil or confusion, no hint of mortal pain.

Complete impersonality was attained by the exclusion of dissonance and of meter. The emotional function of dissonance is to suggest, by its harshness, and by its sharp contrast with the consonances by which it is surrounded, the struggle and the fragmentariness of all finite existence. Like a cry of incompleteness yearning to be completed, it is eloquent to us of our loneliness and bitter self-consciousness. Meter similarly insists on reminding us of our petty human selves by stimulating us to make those gestures and motions that bring into full activity our muscular expression, with all its mental consequents. To hear a strong rhythm is to be irresistibly reminded of all those active impulses in us which underlie our sense of finite personality. It was, then, by its negative peculiarities, by its avoidance of all harmonic mordancy and definition, and of all rhythmic vigor, that Palestrina’s music secured its impersonality, its freedom from “profane suggestion,” and from “every trace of struggle.” Its positive and negative qualities thus cooperated so efficiently as to make it an incomparable exponent of the mystical mood. It not only could induce that rapt attitude of worship which was the kernel of mysticism, but it also skilfully avoided all disturbing hints of personal, finite, and secular activities. It comes to our modern ears like a voice from some grey mediæval cloister, tremulous with a divine passion, but utterly void of all those earthly passions in which the sweet is subtly mingled with the bitter, and human pathos is more audible than heavenly peace.

Palestrina marked the culmination of his school; the pure polyphonic style ended with him. Was this merely because his younger contemporaries, overawed by his perfect skill, dared not enter the lists in rivalry with such a master? Or was it rather that men’s minds had arrived at the period of a fresh insight, and that the time was ripe for an obliteration of hard and fast distinctions between sacred and secular, spiritual and carnal, eternal and temporal, and for a proclamation of the native dignity and worth of man himself, in the fullness of his sensuous, intellectual, and emotional life?

FOOTNOTES:

[7] “Renaissance in Italy.” Part III. The Fine Arts, p. 6.

[8] See, for a complete description of the Church ritual, Mr. Edward Dickinson’s “History of Music in the Western Church,” Chapters III and IV.

[9] Op. cit., p. 96.

[10] See Chapter I, p. 25.

[11]

[[audio/mpeg]]

FIGURE I. RANGE OF SOPRANOS AND TENORS. (D to G.)

RANGE OF CONTRALTOS AND BASSES. (G to C.)

[12] See page 61.

[13] The word counterpoint, from the Latin “punctus contra punctum,” meaning note (or point) against note, describes that mode of writing in which various melodies progress simultaneously, or one against another.

[14] Op. cit., p. 178.

CHAPTER III
THE MODERN SPIRIT

CHAPTER III
THE MODERN SPIRIT

The need of mastering life, of reducing its multitudinous, thronging details to some sort of order, that shall lack neither the unity which alone can satisfy the mind, nor the variety requisite to do justice to the complexity of experience, is the one perennial need of humanity. The aim of all the chief human undertakings is to find schemes of order: physical science is the quest of order in the material world; morality is the quest of coordination and balance between many individual wills; religion is the search for the One Spirit which contains and fuses together all finite souls; art is the pursuit of that organization of diverse elements, of whatever sort, in one sensible whole, in which we perceive beauty. But since experience is bewilderingly many-sided and complex, one scheme after another is made only to be discarded as inadequate, and progress entails the constant substitution of more inclusive for less inclusive syntheses. Our most catholic formulas are provisional and temporary; “opinions are but stages on the road to truth.”

Such a word as “modern” can therefore have but a relative meaning. What is modern to-day will be archaic a hundred years hence. Our contemporary ideas are more liberal than those of our grandfathers, but they will likely appear as the rigid superstitions of a dark age to our still more enlightened descendants. When we speak of the modern spirit we say nothing in regard to the future; we name simply the attitude of mind which characterizes the present as contrasted with the past. That new vision or intuition or instinct of truth by which we of to-day reinterpret in more liberal wise the elements of experience either interpreted too narrowly or quite ignored by the earlier generations—that is the “modern spirit.”

We have been considering at some length, in the foregoing chapter, the characteristic mystical attitude of the mediæval mind. We have seen how the typical thinkers of the middle age, aware of good but unable to identify it with an actual world so full of evil, made a sharp division, a total breach, between the actual and the divine. The mystic cut the Gordian knot of the world-problem by rejecting the actual altogether from his house of life. His scheme had its own harmony, unity, rationality; but being built upon an exclusion, it had in the nature of things to give place in course of time to a scheme less disregardful of the true wealth and reality of experience. The modern mind turned away from mysticism, envisaged the world afresh, and reinterpreted truth in terms of idealism.

Idealism is, in essence, a belief in the possibility of attaining the divine through a selective manipulation of the actual. In the respect it pays to finite life lies its sharp contrast with mysticism. It has gone far to obliterate the breach between the actual and the divine which the mystic had made so wide; it has tried to find the eternal in the temporal, and to nourish the spirit by guiding and developing, rather than by mortifying, the flesh.[15] Mysticism spurned the “this,” the “here,” the “now;” idealism, on the contrary, is on its hither side, so to speak, identical with realism. The idealist believes in the immediate, and loves the finite, as much as the crassest realist. He finds in it the point of departure of all desirable truths, the scaffolding for all mansions of the spirit. But he differs from the realist in that he does not stop with the real, but, using it as material for idealism, selects from it the elements of his heart’s desire. The actual world is to him a sort of keyboard on which he strikes those chords, and those only, which he wishes to hear. He is, indeed, an artist in life, and his method is the true artistic method of selection and synthesis. But on the other hand, he differs even more radically from the mystic, in that he makes the very materials of his Celestial City out of those earthly, momentary, and finite experiences that the latter rejects as dross. All three types of thought find themselves confronted by the opposition between actual facts and spiritual desires which is so characteristic of our world: the mystic repudiates the facts; the realist discredits the desires; the idealist sets out to win, by a selective or artistic manipulation of the facts, the satisfaction of the desires.

Characteristic of idealism is therefore its respect for the actual, in all its phases. It respects, to begin with, the human body. The tendency of modern thought is towards a wise paganism in physical life, towards a substitution of hygiene for mortification, of moderation for abstinence, of the liberal conception of “mens sana in corpore sano” for the monkish ideal of a soul gradually burning up and sloughing off its tenement. Development of the body is increasingly manifesting its true relation to the spiritual enterprises of men—a relation that repression of it only obscured and distorted. The Hermit of Carmel, in the poem of that name,[16] spends his days in a painful, endless, and futile struggle to eradicate fleshly lusts; the young knight knows another sort of purity, more joyful and bountiful, the purity of the lover who remembers his beloved. Idealism, like that happy knight, remembers that it is the mission and destiny of flesh to wait on spirit.

Again, idealism respects the intellect. The great development of the physical sciences, generally considered the most striking fact in nineteenth century history, is the necessary result of an idealistic faith in the powers of human observation and reason. The modern mind, believing in its own ability to interrogate nature, has done so with tireless energy, recording the answers obtained in half a hundred special “sciences,” ranging from histology to psychology. It has applied the same method introspectively to such good purpose that metaphysics, in the hands of Kant and his successors, has radically altered our conception of how we know truth, and what sort of truth it is that we know. Nor have the contributions of the enfranchised intellect stopped with philosophy; they have immensely deepened and vivified religion. The doctrine of evolution, for example, a product of the most remarkable keenness, liberality, and patience in intellectual research, has substituted for the childish anthropomorphic doctrine of creation the wondrously vital modern conception of a God not remote and detached, but nearer than thought and more enveloping than the atmosphere, incarnate in every atom and regnant in every mind.

The emotional or spiritual essence in man is as much respected by idealism as his body and his intellect. Loyalty to actual feelings as they well up spontaneously in the heart, rather than mere conformity to custom, is the modern attitude in all spheres of voluntary life. Personal conduct is a truer mirror of individual feeling than it used to be. What a contrast the student of literature observes between the conventional worldliness of eighteenth-century manners and morals and the intense individualism of the early nineteenth-century poets in England and of our own transcendentalist writers—an individualism which was the logical outcome of the idealist’s championship of human emotion in and for itself. The greatest men are of course always ahead of their age, but such sturdy, independent lives as Thoreau’s, Whitman’s, Darwin’s, George Eliot’s, Stevenson’s, would have created even more consternation in the eighteenth century than they did in the nineteenth, dimly stirred to freer ideals. The same regard for emotional verities that has so deepened individual life is producing a revolution in all social relations. They are constantly becoming more spontaneous and genuine—less matters of tradition. Class boundaries are being obliterated, a man’s success and position coming to depend less on family and station, more on the man himself. Women’s economic progress, combined with an increasing sense in both women and men of the real sacredness and responsibility of love between the sexes, is making marriage, in many ways the most vital of all social relations, a free and joyful bond between equals, rather than a yoke imposed by egotism and endured by helplessness. In sum, the democratic ideal is substituting, in all social relations, the genuine inner cohesion for the artificial mortar and cement of external usage. Finally, it is the same regard for inner realities, so characteristic of idealism, that is giving to men’s religious experience a new profundity. When once the heart is awakened, it needs no longer the assurance of antique books that God exists, and it can worship him no longer as a mere formula, universal because featureless. Intuition supplants revelation, and men enter into a personal relation with the God they had before conceived as austere, characterless, and remote. Modern nonconformity is an indication of the reality of modern religious feeling.

In countless ways we thus discern the working of the idealistic impulse in our contemporary life. Independence in personal conduct and thought, democracy in social relations, nonconformity in religion, stand out as salient features of the modern world, especially when we contrast them with the conventionality, paternalism, and ecclesiasticism of the mediæval.

The foregoing remarks, together with the reflections they will suggest to the reader, may perhaps suffice to show that idealism has met at least one of the requirements of human progress, by filling the mind with a vastly richer and more various mass of contents than mysticism admitted. The realities it takes account of are far less pathetically inadequate to match the actual richness of experience than the thin, impalpable, and austere conceptions of the mystic. Compared with his, the world of the idealist is a breathing, moving world, not entirely void of the infinite tragedy and comedy of life itself. Something of passion and pathos it has, and it is held in shape by the tough fibres of commonplace—for even the trivial is not excluded. All this increase of complexity, however, would be quite nugatory were a principle of unity lacking. The complexity must be built into an order if it is to be truly a synthesis, satisfying to the mind as well as to the sense of reality.

It is, therefore, a fact of capital importance, that idealism does succeed in unifying, as well as in enriching, our conceptions of life. It systematizes, at the same time that it broadens, our views. Much as it insists on the variety of experience, even more does it assert its organic unity. Indeed, the central ideal of idealism, its very heart of hearts, is its belief in the wholeness, the organized integrity, of the universe. It respects the body, the mind, and the soul of man; but even more it respects the whole man, in just balance and full inward cooperation of functions. Believing man to be an organism, it sets supreme store by his full or organic activity, and deplores undue prominence in any element of his life, as injuring the harmony of the whole. Ardently as it champions individual initiative, it demonstrates, through philosophy, that the very consciousness of the individual is dependent on his social relations.[17] It recognizes that democracy can exist only through mutual service, and that freedom is based on a universal sense of responsibility. It is clearly aware that a personal relation with God comes only to him who is willing to obey God, not in a spirit of passive endurance, but with active joy, as a part serving the whole in which it has its being. This recognition of a just relation to the whole as the supreme ideal of all partial existences is testified to most strikingly by our very vocabulary, the natural repository of our beliefs. The word “health,” denoting physical well-being, is derived from the Anglo-Saxon “hal,” or whole; “sanity,” signifying mental well-being, is from the Latin word for the same idea, “sanus;” and we name the most indispensable of moral traits “integrity.” True idealism is in no way more certainly to be distinguished from its sentimental counterfeits than by its constant recognition that the preservation of the wholeness, as well as the fullness, of man’s nature, is the sine qua non of human welfare. It values every least manifestation of his nature, because it considers each one sacred; but it values even more the coordination and harmony of all.

Turning from the consideration of idealism in its general effect on modern life to examine its more special effect upon art, we recognize at once its importance as an æsthetic force. Art is the expression of man’s physical, emotional, and spiritual life, in organized fullness. Wherever there is direct, complete, and beautiful expression of what seems to man precious, there is art. Wherever, on the contrary, there is suppression of any genuine human impulse, in fancied service to some other, as in the case of mediæval mysticism, there is artistic immaturity or arrest; and wherever there is an exaggerated development of any one impulse, at the expense of others and of the balance or symmetry of all, as in the cases of modern French realistic literature and of program music, for example, there is artistic decadence. And since idealism insists both on the claims of all legitimate human impulses to recognition, and on their submission to adjustment in the interests of a rounded human nature, idealism is a potent stimulus to true art.

All this is amply illustrated in that great development of art under the spur of idealism which we name the Renaissance. By renaissance, or rebirth, is meant a reawakening of the human spirit to fuller activity, an increased recognition of its native dignity and value as transcending all artificial sanctions and limits. The renaissance period was, as it were, the adolescence of humanity. It was the time of putting away childish things—passive dependence on authority, superstition, timorous conventionality—and of asserting the freedom and the responsibilities of men. In the race, as in the individual, it was primarily an internal event, which reached external expression only with difficulty and after a struggle. The youth has his vague internal sense of the sacredness of his convictions long before he can work these out into the fabric of actual life. A long fight with stubborn customs, with indifferent circumstances, must take place before ideals can become actualities. Just so, the idealism of the race had to meet in mortal combat a thousand opposing conditions, had to conquer its foes and acquire its ways and means, before it could victoriously express itself in art. In other words, feeling had to enter into and transform technique in order that the art might voice fully the impulse that animated it. When we speak of the renaissance, therefore, we mean no narrow, special period of time, precisely dated, like a battle or a treaty. We mean a new spirit of liberty and self-respect in the human mind, which expressed itself in one way at one time, in another at another, according to the facility and promptitude with which it acquired mastery over these ways. The expression followed the effort only after a long interval, and different expressions came at different epochs, far apart in time. In a general way we may say that the Renaissance has occupied the centuries of our era from the fourteenth to the one in which we live. But each art has also had its special period of development, reaching in its own good time the goal of its own particular efforts, under the conditions of its own peculiar medium.

There are as a rule several successive stages in the evolution an art thus undergoes under the spur of idealism. First there is the vague inner sense of a new weight of meaning to be expressed, fresh insight or intuition that demands utterance. Men awake to the true value of those inner impressions and feelings which have so long been smothered under conventions and the worship of the external. They know not what to do with them, how to voice them; but they have at least what Stevenson calls “that impotent sense of his own value, as of a ship aground, which is one of the agonies of youth.” This may be called the period of the fresh insight. Then comes the period in which some sort of technical medium is arduously developed for the expression of the new impulse. This period, in which a vast work must be done by patient experiment, by slow adaptation, without standards and without models, is necessarily long and laborious. Often the prompting insight is almost forgotten in the toil, and the initial passion seems to be lost in dry formalism and pedantry. But all the while ways and means are being invented, problems solved, and traditions established, even as, while the youth toils at desk or plough or counter, forgetful, for the moment, of the ideals that sent him thither, habits are being formed, mastery is being acquired. The period of technical equipment, then, if it be properly conducted, leads over into the period of achievement, in which the original impulses are adequately expressed by means of the acquired skill. This is the time of consummation, of maturity, of balance between the means and the ends of expression. Such was the age of Pericles in Greek sculpture, the age of Sophocles in Greek drama, the Elizabethan age in English drama, the age of Leonardo and Michelangelo in Italian painting, the age of Wordsworth and Keats in English lyric poetry. Unfortunately, the period of maturity is generally followed by still another period, in which the original impulse overshoots its mark and becomes embodied in distorted, grotesque, and unbeautiful forms. So weak is human nature that it can seldom recognize justly its own value without going further, without precipitating itself into the pitfall of over-valuation, pride, and arrogant self-assertion. The balance of all the elements of art to which idealism aspires is then lost; special elements become preponderant, special effects are made fetishes, and degeneration ensues. Ripeness leads over into decay; wholeness or sanity is lost, and partiality paves the way to disintegration.

Mediæval painting, for example, was exceedingly rigid, dry, and conventional. The effort of the ecclesiastical painters was merely to symbolize religious truths; they were like chroniclers, who aim at narrating facts, rather than like ballad-writers and minstrels who are interested also in the beauty of their language, the richness, charm, and intrinsic appeal of their images and phraseology. But by imperceptible degrees, led on by the natural human delight in shapeliness of form and luxury of color, and learning to make the skill acquired in delineation subserve the higher and more immediate purposes of art, the painters of the Renaissance gradually substituted for this merely symbolic treatment a broader one, in which human beauty was as much sought as religious edification. The nude figure was lovingly studied, not because the saints happened to be men, but because men are beautiful. Garments, draperies, fabrics received a new attention, in the interests, not of historical accuracy, but of the intrinsic pleasantness of textures and tints. Postures were softened, adjusted, made less angular and uncompromising than in the almost chart-like early frescoes. Atmosphere, chiaroscuro, composition, balance, were deemed worthy of the efforts of painters who considered art an end in itself. Eventually, by the great pictures of the Venetian, Florentine, and Neapolitan masters, all the human faculties were called into harmonious activity; the eye was delighted, the feelings were wooed and stimulated, the imagination was touched and informed. “Instead of riveting the fetters of ecclesiastical authority,” says J. A. Symonds,[18] “instead of enforcing mysticism and asceticism, [art] really restored to humanity the sense of its own dignity and beauty, and helped to prove the untenability of the mediæval standpoint; for art is essentially and uncontrollably free, and, what is more, is free precisely in that realm of sensuous delightfulness from which cloistral religion turns aside to seek her own ecstatic liberty of contemplation.” Whether painting, which thus by insistence on the intrinsic values of its medium attained maturity, then carried the process too far, and lost roundness and balance by prizing mere richness of color above all else, whether, in a word, its consummation was followed by a decadence, is a question too large for discussion here. But it is beyond doubt that painting went through the first three phases of growth pointed out as the results in art of an idealistic impulse.

In the same way, the story of music from the beginning of the seventeenth century up to Beethoven, or throughout that section of its history in which we are at present interested, was essentially the story of a renaissance, or novel artistic development, under the spur of idealism. Looking at it from the vantage-point now reached, we easily trace its evolution through the several regular stages. In the Florentine reformers’ abandonment of old conventions and their half-conscious aspiration towards a new utterance, we discern the first stage of the movement, that of the novel impulse; in the steadfast and efficient delving away at technical methods, at the involutions of harmony, counterpoint, and form, which characterized many of the later composers of the seventeenth century, and occupied much of the attention of even such men as Haydn and Mozart, we trace the second stage, that of equipment; and in the glorious works of Beethoven, who set the keystone in the arch, we find the stage of consummation and fulfilment. Springing from the foundation of the mystical art of Palestrina much as modern Italian painting sprang from the foundation of mediæval religious delineation, the art of Pure Music reached, in the masterpieces of Beethoven, its maturity.

Now, as we saw in the first chapter, the mature art of Pure Music, which may be defined as the art of combining pure tones, without words, into forms expressive of our fundamental emotional life, and congruous with one another, or beautiful, necessarily possesses three kinds of value, or modes of effect, to which we have assigned the descriptive labels “sensuous,” “expressive,” and “æsthetic.” Music has sensuous value in proportion to the actual physical gratification afforded us by the tones that compose it; it has expressive value proportional to the degree in which it excites in us, by association and suggestion, the fundamental emotions or feelings; it has æsthetic value proportional to its success in assimilating or organizing all its various effects into clear unity, thus giving us that sense of ordered richness which we call beauty. If it be true, then, that music, during the seventeenth century, under the spur of the idealistic or modern spirit, developed from a primitive into a mature art, it is obvious that this development must have rested on progress made in all three kinds of effect; and it becomes a matter of much interest to trace at least some of the chief phases of this three-fold blossoming. In the remaining portion of the present chapter, accordingly, we shall study the most striking features of the progress made during the seventeenth century in sensuous charm and in expressive power; and in the following chapter we shall examine those principles of pure music which underlie its highest, most indispensable quality of all—that of beauty, or final unity and harmony of impression.

Remarkable, in the first place, is the development the mere material medium of music underwent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The sensuous fact at the bottom of all music being the tone, the sensuous value of music depends on the kind of tones employed and on the modes of their combination, just as the sensuous value of a painting depends on the purity and richness of the pigments used and on the harmoniousness of their arrangement. So long as composers dealt either with choirs of human voices alone, or with a few crude instruments like the organs of Bach’s predecessors, the violins of the early sixteenth century, and the spinets and clavichords of the same period, they could get little variety or sonority of tonal color. But in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was made a wonderful mechanical advance. The violin, the most important of all instruments, not only because of its inimitable beauty and expressiveness of tone but because it is the nucleus of the orchestra and of the string quartet, was brought, by the Amatis, Giuseppe Guarneri, and Antonio Stradivari, the famous Cremonese violin-makers who flourished from about 1550 to 1737, to a degree of perfection which the utmost modern ingenuity has been unable to exceed. The organ, which in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was so cumbersome that each key had to be struck by the entire fist, came by 1600 to something like its modern condition, as may be seen by looking at the pieces written for it by Frescobaldi (1583-1644) and Buxtehude (1637-1707). The prototypes of the modern piano were rather slower to develop. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the clavichord was a smallish oblong box without legs, placed on a table when played; its compass was somewhat over four octaves; one set of strings had to suffice for several keys, each key being provided with a metal tangent or tongue that not only sounded the string, but at the same time “stopped” it at the requisite point for producing the desired tone. The “damping” or silencing of the strings, entrusted in the modern piano to the felt dampers, was often done by the left hand of the player. The spinet differed from the clavichord in that its tones were produced by a hard piece of quill that plucked the string. Both instruments gave but weak, short, and rather characterless sounds. But all through the period we are considering they were being experimented upon and slowly improved in sonority, variety, and color of tone.

But even after they are provided with perfected instruments, men are still much restricted in their search for lovely effects of tone unless they have also a well-developed tonal technique, or science of harmony. The tools are not enough; the use of them must also be known. As we have seen, however, the harmony of Palestrina and his school was for all its purity somewhat colorless and flat. A harmonic fabric made up exclusively of consonant chords is like a picture painted altogether with pure, light colors; it is wonderfully bright and transparent, but its very purity makes it lack force. For the sake of contrast an admixture of dissonances is required, much as shadow is required in a picture, or harshness and irregularity in a poem. The entirely sweet, soft, and mellifluous series of chords at first charms, but finally cloys.

One of the important tasks of seventeenth century composers, therefore, was to find out how to introduce dissonances in such a way as to invigorate without disrupting the fabric. Their harshness must not be obtruded, but it must be used. The Florentine reformers and their successors showed great skill in solving the problem. They learned how to “prepare” a dissonance, that is, to let one of its constituent tones appear in a consonance and then hold over while other voices moved to dissonant intervals; they experimented in harsher and harsher dissonances, admitting them only with great circumspection, but using their characteristic qualities with striking effect; and they established, as cadences, conventional formulæ of chords containing dissonant intervals, which became by mere force of repetition acceptable and familiar. In this way they introduced into the material of music a variety and range of color that consonances alone could never give. “Monteverde,” says Mr. R. A. Streatfield, “with his orchestra of thirty-nine instruments—brass, wood and strings complete—his rich and brilliant harmony, sounding so strangely beautiful to ears accustomed only to the severity of the polyphonic school, and his delicious and affecting melodies, sometimes rising almost to the dignity of an Aria, must have seemed something more than human to the eager Venetians as they listened for the first time to music as rich in color as the gleaming marbles of the Cà d’Ora or the radiant canvases of Titian and Giorgione.” If we could disabuse our minds of all emotional and æsthetic perceptions while listening to modern music, we should still find it vastly superior to the choral art of the middle ages in its purely sensuous richness. Sensuously it is a kaleidoscope of shifting effects, now harsh, now sweet, now resonant and sibilant, the next moment infinitely wooing and grateful; and through all ever changing its outlines and melting from color to color like the iridescent film of a soap-bubble.

But of course we cannot disabuse our minds of emotional and æsthetic perceptions; no human being can divest himself of such essential parts of his nature; and indeed it was even more in obedience to higher requirements than for the sake of mere sensuous richness that the musicians of the renaissance period so radically remodelled their art. The essence of their reforms is to be looked for, not in the increase of the first or sensuous value of music, but in the enhancement of its expressiveness, and of its plastic beauty.

Expression, in general, may be defined as the presentation of a feeling or idea by means of an impression. The impression may act either directly, calling up the specific idea or feeling by virtue of a long-established association between them, or more generally, by simply inducing a state of mind congruous with the expression desired, and so tending to generate it. The former is the case in verbal expression (language), where certain definite symbols, words, are immemorially coupled in our minds with certain ideas, conceptions, or feelings, so that when we hear the word we immediately think the thing. Musical expression differs from verbal expression in that in does not act by this direct arbitrary symbolism, but rather by the more subtle general process which instills a feeling by setting up its appropriate atmosphere or milieu. It is much vaguer and more general, and for that very reason far more potent. The word “love,” for example, arbitrarily denotes a certain idea, not because it is anything like the idea, but because we all agree that that word is to mean that thing.[19] An amorous piece of music, on the contrary, utters no definite symbol; it makes our heart beat faster and deeper, it makes our blood circulate, it ravishes our senses and our minds, until whether we will or not we know what it says, though for our lives we could not put its burden into words.

It is by this direct establishment in us of a congruous or favorable state of mind that the consonances of the mediæval music express religious peace; and it is no otherwise that dissonance, that powerful engine of the modern musician, expresses the inward division, the struggle and sweet torment, of idealistic states of feeling. The harshness, disagreeable in itself but essential to a process in which it is organically linked with sweetness and rest, arouses by an association of ideas a sense of the stern beauty, the tragic splendor, of the experience of the human heart. It reproduces in the sphere of sound that same series of states, that pain merging into joy, which we recognize in the sphere of our consciousness as so deeply characteristic of finite life. And so doing, it suggests or shadows forth the very essence of our nature, it echoes the utterance of our very hearts. It is no expurgated reading of the book of life: it is the full text, with all its shuddering horror and all its celestial joy.

Probably of all the employers of dissonance for the purpose of emotional expression, in the whole course of the seventeenth century, when the aims of musicians were so tentative that it required courage to brave convention, the most daring was Claudio Monteverde. “As Monteverde most frankly of all musicians of his time,” writes Sir Hubert Parry,[20] “regarded music as an art of expression, and discords as the most poignant means of representing human feeling, he very soon began to rouse the ire of those who were not prepared to sacrifice the teaching of centuries and their own feeling of what really was artistic without protest. That he should presume to write such simple things as ninths and sevenths without duly sounding them first as concordant notes[21] was so completely at variance with the whole intention of their art that it struck them with consternation. And well it might, for small as these first steps were they presaged the inevitable end of the placid devotional music. The suddenness of the poignancy which unprepared discords conveyed to the mind implied a quality of passionate feeling which musicians had never hitherto regarded as within the legitimate scope of musical art. They had never hitherto even looked through the door which opened upon the domains of human passion. Once it was opened, the subjective art of the church school, and the submissive devotionalism of the church composers, was bound to come rapidly to an end. Men tasted of the tree of knowledge, and the paradise of innocence was thenceforth forbidden them. Monteverde was the man who first tasted and gave his fellow men to eat of the fruit; and from the accounts given of the effect it produced upon them they ate with avidity and craved for more.”

Parry gives in illustration of Monteverde’s style a fragment known as “Ariadne’s Lament,” from the opera “Arianna,” so characteristic that it must be reprinted here:

[[audio/mpeg]]

FIGURE IV. “ARIADNE’S LAMENT,” BY MONTEVERDE.

Lasciatemi morire!
Lasciatemi morire!
E che volete voi.... che mi conforte

In cosi dura sorte, in cosi gran martire?
Lasciatemi morire! lasciatemi morire!

In studying this remarkable fragment, the reader will not only note the striking unprepared dissonances of measures 2, 5, 11 and 13 (the latter peculiarly poignant), but if he will take the trouble to compare the effect of the passage as a whole with that of the bit of Palestrina given in Fig. III., he will be amazed at the increase in expressiveness, especially if it be remembered that “Arianna” was produced probably in 1607, or only thirteen years after Palestrina’s death. The “Lament” is reported to have moved everyone who heard it to tears. Its pathos is largely due to the skilful way in which harsh dissonances are made to alternate with the consonances into which they naturally and inevitably lead—a process which, though not directly expressive of the facts of human emotion, in the sense in which the word is directly symbolic of the thing which usage has coupled with it, is yet indirectly and generally expressive, in that it reproduces in tones a series of impressions identical with the series of feelings we everywhere experience in actual life. Pain linked to pleasure by an organic bond—that is the universal experience of everyone who cherishes an ideal, since an ideal is a yearning for something which now is not, but which must eventually come to be.

The melodic character of the “Lament” is as impressive as its harmonic style. In its short and poignant phrases the accent of passion is unmistakably heard. And this is true not only of Monteverde’s work as a whole, but of that of all the other composers of the Florentine “new music.” As early as the year 1600 Jacopo Peri wrote an opera on the subject of Euridice, to be performed at the wedding of Henry IV of France to Maria Medici. A study of the passages in which he tried to express the grief of Orpheus at the loss of Euridice, and his joy in their reunion, brings home forcibly to the mind the advance that composers had even at that time made in eloquence of expression. They are as follows:

[[audio/mpeg]]

O mio core O mio speme
O pace O vita
Ohime Chi mi t’ha tolto
Chimi t’ha tolto
Ohime...... deve segita

FIGURE V. TWO PASSAGES FROM PERI’S “EURIDICE.”

Gioite al canto mio
selve frondo se
Gioite amati
coli e d’ogni intorno.
Ecco rimbombi dalle valle ascose.

In spite of the primitiveness of the style, there is considerable force and even definiteness of expression here. As Sir Hubert Parry points out: “the phrases which express bereavement and sorrow are tortuous, irregular, spasmodic—broken with catching breath and wailing accent; whereas the expression of joy is flowing, easy and continuous.” It was in fact the aim of the inventors of the type of operatic recitative here exemplified, to imitate, while idealizing, the actual cadence of the voice in emotional speech. The music of the choral epoch had carefully avoided the impression of passionate feeling; the new music as persistently sought it. The old music had been written for chorus, which by mere virtue of numbers is quite impersonal; the new was put into the mouths of individuals. The melodic style of the former was dignified, formal, severe; that of the latter was mobile, flexible, constantly adaptable to the most subtle changes of mood. Here again, then, we see the effect of the idealistic impulse on music. Idealism, insisting on the worth of finite experience, focusses man’s attention on himself, on his actual feelings, petty as well as universal, base and noble alike, and makes him, whether for good or evil, vividly self-conscious. It believes in the hopes and fears, the aspirations and disappointments, of men and women; believes that in human beings, in spite of their pathetic weakness, there is a unique original value, not to be denied without crippling that august whole of which they are the minute but essential parts. The music of Peri, Caccini, and Cavaliere, and later of Monteverde, succeeded in voicing, at first dimly but with increasing eloquence, the primitive human emotions that mysticism had disdained as worldly; the tendency they initiated gathered force apace, and passed with Cavalli and Lulli into France, where it culminated in the work of Gluck. The great contribution of early modern opera to pure music was the accent of genuine and various human feeling.

A third tendency toward distinctively modern methods that was steadily gaining ground throughout this period was the tendency toward metrical and rhythmic vigor. We have seen how vigorous meter, in music, serves to express our active impulses, how it grows out of that ordered gesticulation we name dance.[22] We have seen how devoid was the mediæval choral music of meter,[23] and indeed how inappropriate to its peculiar genius metrical qualities would have been.[24] The moment men’s attitude toward their own ordinary activities changed, however, and they began to see in them life rather than death, their expression in art became a desideratum. And it is a fact that very early in the sixteenth century, even before the pure choral music had reached its perfect maturity, some composers had begun to write simple dances for unaccompanied instruments, generally a combination of strings with harpsichord.

For a long while these efforts remained tentative and inchoate, because the men who made them were neither very clearly aware what they were trying to do, nor acquainted with technical means for doing it. But the scheme of treating dances as the basis of instrumental movements, the chief expression of which was that of energy, vitality, the more active and effervescent emotions, was afterwards elaborated by more trained masters, and eventually bore fruit in the innumerable suites and partitas, or bundles of dances, of the eighteenth century, and in the symphonic minuet and scherzo.

The mere fact that composers of the seventeenth century paid respectful attention to the popular minstrelsy, which had been treated with such scant courtesy by ecclesiastical masters, and that they so persistently imitated its methods, is in itself strong testimony to the change of attitude that was taking place. The songs and dances of the people are the most spontaneous expressions of purely personal feeling in the entire range of music. They were upwellings of primitive emotion, as instinctive and unsophisticated as the cries and gestures from which they were developed. And for these reasons they were norms of the proper expression of naïve feeling in music—all music, so far as it aims to express personal feeling at all, makes use of the melodic phrases derived from the cry, and of the dance-rhythms derived from the gesture. Consequently, so soon as musical artists became inspired with the new ideal of personal expression, they turned to the popular music for inspiration and methods.

Thus in all ways the tendency of music in the seventeenth century was toward a fuller, more varied, and more poignant emotional expressiveness. Men were willing to forego without a murmur all the advantages of the perfected technique of the earlier choral age, and to trust themselves on the pathless sea of the New Music, because, like the pilgrims who in the same century left European civilization behind them to seek a larger if more difficult life in an uncharted country, they were inspired by a love of the human spirit in its fullness and freedom. All arbitrary limitations and denials of it, no matter how hallowed by long usage, were to them not religious, but sacrilegious. To them, as to Terence, “nothing human was alien”; and they might have cried, with Whitman, to every human trait, however trivial, ignoble, or commonplace, “Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you.”

We need not wonder that for a while they paused helpless before the task of assimilating into an order all these rich materials that their humanism had evoked out of chaos. At first they were more discoverers than artists. But genuine progress, as we say, takes place only when a richer variety is stamped with a broader but still obvious unity. Art is not merely expression, of howsoever varied and penetrative a quality; it is congruous, harmonious expression, delighting us not only mediately by what it says, but immediately by what it is. In other words, it rises from the plane of interest to the plane of beauty, and becomes genuine art, only by the possession of that third or æsthetic value which depends on the ultimate unity of all the various factors of effect. This highest value music came, in the course of time, to possess; and the conquest of new forms, intrinsically beautiful, in which all the novel sensuous and expressive effects could be embodied, was of all the achievements of the seventeenth century the most important.

It remains, therefore, to study, in another chapter, the means by which musicians learned, after long trial and patient experiment, to give shape and integral life to all this motley array of feelings and effects that they had summoned out of the depths of the human spirit. Their task, as may easily be believed, was an arduous one. We need not follow all the steps they took on that long road. It will suffice to examine some of the more important stages of their progress, to get before our minds the general artistic principles which underlay their practices, and to see what point they had reached by the time Haydn, the first great forerunner of Beethoven, came to take his share in their great enterprise.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] “Vice,” says Mr. George Bernard Shaw in his brilliant, paradoxical way, “is waste of life. Poverty, obedience, and celibacy are the canonical vices.”

[16] “The Hermit of Carmel, and Other Poems,” by George Santayana, New York, 1901.

[17] See the writings of Royce, Baldwin, and other writers on the social genesis of consciousness.

[18] “The Renaissance in Italy.”

[19] In the case of onomatopoetic words, of course, the general expression is added to the specific one—the word does sound like the thing.

[20] “The Oxford History of Music,” vol. III, p. 45.

[21] “Preparation”: see above, page 104.

[22] See Chap. I, p. 9.

[23] See Chap. II, p. 12.

[24] See Chap. II, p. 26.

CHAPTER IV
THE PRINCIPLES OF PURE MUSIC

CHAPTER IV
THE PRINCIPLES OF PURE MUSIC

Just as success in the intellectual and moral worlds results from power to shape ideas and conduct, to make syntheses which combine the most various elements in unity, so artistic success results from the power to shape into a single organism the various elements of artistic effect. Art may make a deep appeal to us by the richness of its sensuous charm, and a still deeper by the eloquence of its emotional expression; the deepest of all appeals it will not make, we have asserted, unless, by marshalling its materials into an obvious order, it adds to its sensuous and expressive charms the æsthetic charm, the greatest of all—beauty. Art, we hinted, was beautiful in the proportion of its unified variety; and we set ourselves to see what methods men gradually worked out, in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, by which the wonderfully various effects of their new music could be stamped with final unity.

In the fact that they attain beauty through the presentation of variety in unity, all the arts are alike; yet they differ much in the way they accomplish this end, because of their differing conditions. Those arts, notably sculpture, painting, and architecture, which adjust their materials in space, necessarily use methods quite different from those of the temporal arts of literature and music, which, existing solely in time, have no spatial relations of any sort. The spatial arts, presenting all their elements simultaneously, differentiate and at the same time interlink them by means of relative position, size, and prominence. In a well designed figure or group of figures, in sculpture, there is always a balance of masses, by which the whole work, however diverse in detail, is knit into unity. The centre of gravity is kept well in toward the centre of the entire mass; all the features at the extreme edges lead the eye back to the middle to rest; there is centralization of effect, balance, poise. In a good picture, all spots of high light, all prominent lines, all striking lineaments of every sort, are similarly contrived to equalize the tensions of the eye, to keep it in that state of attentive rest, or anchored discursiveness, which is so indescribably delightful. The same is true of all well-proportioned buildings and other architectural monuments. Activity of eye and mind are stimulated, but also governed and directed. Howsoever the eye, in looking at any good picture, statue or piece of architecture, may quest and rove, it is constantly brought, by the gentle power of good design, back to the centre of rest; the sense of interesting variety is always wedded with the sense of ultimate completeness and repose.

In the temporal arts of literature and music the same effect is gained by quite different means. Here the elements are not presented simultaneously, spread out for the attention to wander from and revert to at will. Each is presented but for a moment, after which it exists only in the memory. Nevertheless all literature and music worthy the name of art give us, in common with the spatial arts, the sense of symmetrical shape, of ordered profusion. Though we are aware of each single lineament but for an instant, after which it is supplanted by the next, yet we know that all combine into just as complete and satisfying a scheme as that of the well-designed statuary group, the well-composed picture, or the well-proportioned building. This consciousness of form or design in a series of momentary impressions, on which all the high æsthetic value of the temporal arts depends, is made possible to us by our mental powers of memory and recognition. Literature and music deal with memorable units, which are repeated. Familiarity with their methods quickly accustoms us to expect the repetitions; whereupon there arises a succession of expectations, followed by their fulfilments, by which the so fleeting impressions are arranged in our minds in a fixed and satisfying order. And so arises the sense of beauty in the contemplation of a poem or a piece of music.

In poetry two different modes of repetition are utilized, each arousing its own peculiar expectation, which combines with its fulfilment to give the sense of order. The first mode is that of metrical repetition, the establishment and reiteration of a certain scheme of accentuation of syllables practically equal in duration. In heroic verse, for example, the scheme is a succession of ten syllables, every alternate one accented, and beginning with an unaccented. When a single line of this sort is heard, it forms a pattern in the mind, and arouses an expectation of another of the same sort. The fulfilment of the expectation gives rise to the sense of form. In rhymed verse, a second kind of repetition is added to this fundamental metrical one, namely, the repetition of the terminal sound of the line. When we read “’Tis not enough no harshness gives offence,” the obviously regular character of it in respect of accent leads us to expect very confidently another line of the same metrical structure; and our familiarity with rhyme disposes us to think it highly probable that the new line will moreover end with a sound similar to the final one in “offence;” so that when the line comes—“The sound must seem an echo to the sense,”—it fulfils both of our expectations, and we get a double sense of design in it. The rhythm, or reiteration of the metrical scheme, is supplemented by the rhyme, or repetition of the terminal sound. In the more complex forms of verse the two schemes of design not only become far more subtle in their single application, but are made to cooperate and reinforce each other in all sorts of ingenious ways. The couplet, the ordinary quatrain, the Omar Khayyam quatrain, terza rima, the rondeau, the rondel, the triolet, and all the stanza forms, are simply different schemes of combining rhythm and rhyme, the two fundamental formative devices of all poetry.

Like poetry, music welds its elements by means of two modes of arousing and fulfilling our expectations; but these, though they are somewhat analogous to poetic rhythm and rhyme, are so much less close to our ordinary experience that they will need a slightly more detailed explanation.

All modern music is divided up into beats, or equal time divisions, arranged into groups or measures by some regular system of accentuation. The accented beats, like the accented syllables in verse, impress the mind as goals of movement, in reference to which the light beats are felt as transitions or preparations. The regularity of the alternation of transition and goal is such that the mind quickly forms the habit of expecting each goal beforehand, and of taking a proportionate satisfaction in it when it arrives. This process of expectation and fulfillment links the successive beats together in an organism, which we may call the musical foot, after its analogy with the poetic foot.[25] So limited is the mental span that it is practically impossible for us to group more than three beats together in this way into a single organism; and all music consequently consists of combinations of either duple feet (one light beat followed by a heavy), or triple feet (two lights followed by a heavy) or complex arrangements of both sorts together. After this fundamental grouping of the time-elements is made, the mind instantly proceeds to recombine the groups into larger groups called phrases or sections. This it does by the same device of accentuation, either actual or ideal. It conceives one measure or foot as heavier or more significant than another, and so leaves one as a transition, to approach another as a goal. Thus groups of simple elements become themselves the compound elements of a larger synthesis, and the entire musical fabric gains definiteness and organization through the process of aroused and fulfilled expectation. Any metrical formula, like that of a bugle call, interrupted at any note before the last, gives us as vivid a sense of incompleteness as a statue with arms and legs broken off, or a ruined building, or a mutilated picture.

Metrical structure in music is thus, obviously enough, fairly analogous with metrical structure in verse, with its grouping of syllables into feet, of feet into verses, and of verses into couplets or stanzas. When we pass to the second sort of musical structure, however, which we may call tonal or harmonic structure, the parallel analogy with poetic rhyme is much less satisfactory. It is true that harmony and rhyme both act by presenting similar sounds at given points in the series of impressions; but harmony is a far more subtle, various, and potent organizing agent than rhyme. Harmony depends on the fact that the tones, or pitch elements, used in music, can be distinguished into unrestful and restful, or into transitional and final, just as the metrical or time-elements are. In primitive music, in which but one tone sounded at a time, the matter was almost absurdly simple: high notes were unrestful, because they involved muscular tension;[26] low notes were restful, because they meant relaxation of vocal effort. Consequently, a descent of the voice meant a transition to a goal, and songs were divided off into sections by successive falls of the voice or cadences. The word “cadence,” so important in musical terminology, preserves in itself the record of this phase of musical growth; from the Latin cado, to fall, it means primarily a sinking or lapsing, and hence, in general, a coming to rest.

As soon as two or more melodies were sounded together, however, the sense of rest following activity, the universal generator of design in a temporal series of impressions, could be produced in a far more subtle way. It could be produced by making the melodies pass through an inharmonious or dissonant chord or series of chords, to a harmonious one. As soon as dissonance came into general use, in other words, the sense of unrest, of impulsion toward something else, of progressive movement, that it imparted to music, was so potent that cadences could be made upward as well as downward; whenever dissonance resolved into consonance the effect of cadence ensued. And as dissonances are of all conceivable degrees of harshness, cadences could be made of any desired degree of finality. Moreover, as the tonal material of music grew more and more systematized, the feeling of key sprang up in men’s minds; all music was felt to be in a certain key, that is, grouped about a certain tone, the centre and goal of all the others; and then cadences came to have even greater variety in the degree of finality they seemed to assert, dependent not only on the strength of the dissonances they followed, but also on the remoteness or nearness of their final chord to the key-note of the piece. All this meant greater and greater resources for building up music into complex and yet perfectly definite organisms; and as harmonic form constantly interacted more and more subtly with metrical form the capacities of design became practically infinite.

Lest the reader get lost in the maze of technical details, however, it will be well now to revert to the general principles underlying all these musical phenomena, and to sum up, before passing on, the essential points we have been trying to come at. Those arts which, like poetry and music, present their matter to us in a temporal series, depend for that organization of variety into unity which is beauty (and the sine qua non of all art) on the arousal in us of expectations, which are presently fulfilled. By first leading us to expect something, and then presenting it, they enable us to group our impressions, to feel that they are interrelated and mutually dependent, to get, in short, the sense of design or order. Music effects this by means of metrical and harmonic form, which act is the same way so far as they present unrestful, followed by restful, impressions, though in different ways so far as the technical basis of these impressions is concerned. Psychologically speaking, metrical and harmonic form cooperate to give music definite structure in our minds; to reclaim it from the condition of a mere sensuous or emotional stimulus, and engraft upon it the final and supreme beauty of order.

All absolute or pure music depends for its structure on these two great formative agents of metrical and harmonic design; but the mode of their application progressed from simplicity to comparative complexity as music evolved from the choral song of the sixteenth century, out of which it grew, to the modern sonata and symphony. It would be quite impossible to examine in detail, here, all the stages of that progress. Our effort must be rather to define three well-marked phases of the many-sided growth in general and summary terms, taking for granted, meanwhile, the minor variations and modifications which elude our somewhat rough analysis. These three phases have in common certain essential traits. In each we see music making up its elementary units of effect, out of unorganized tones, by the aid of metrical and harmonic form; in each we see it combining these units into complex designs by means of the principles of variated repetition of them. The difference between the phases is that in the later ones the units are larger and more definite, and are combined into broader, more complex organisms.

The first phase is that in which short musical “subjects,” called motifs, are made the elements of contrapuntal forms such as the canon, free prelude, invention, madrigal, and fugue. This phase, in which pure music makes its first appearance, emerging from the choral music which needed no musical principles of design because it took its shape and meaning from words, grew naturally out of the choral music which preceded it. Imagine any bit of melody springing into existence in connection with a verbal phrase or sentence; then fancy it sounded without the words which gave it reason for being: it is easy to see that the only way it can now be given significance is by being made the subject of a musical design, that is, by being repeated, either literally or in modified form. Even the most primitive savages have always felt this. In Sir Hubert Parry’s book on “The Evolution of the Art of Music” we find many examples of formulas of notes used by savages as motifs, and developed simply by endless repetition. Such formulas as the following, for example, become, by mere repetition, true music of a primitive type:

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FIGURE VI. FROM PARRY’S “EVOLUTION OF THE ART OF MUSIC,” p. 49.

The earliest attempts at pure music, though infinitely more advanced than these childish forms, were, like them, built up out of short motifs, of anywhere from two to a dozen tones, given definiteness by fixed metrical and harmonic relationships, and developed by means of repetition. All through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries such contrapuntal forms were being developed to a high pitch of perfection, and they reached their culmination in the great fugues of J. S. Bach (1685-1750). Let us, then, instead of poring painfully over the obscure steps by which this vantage-point in art was reached, make a brief analysis of the consummated fugue-form, as it was treated by this supreme master.

The fugue of Bach, as it is represented, for example, in the forty-eight fugues of his “Well-Tempered Clavichord,” is a contrapuntal or polyphonic form; that is, it is made up of from two to five voices or parts, progressing with complete melodic independence of one another, yet in entire harmony. It is based on, or proceeds out of, a short motif or subject, often but a measure or two in length, but subjected to the most ingenious, varied, and exhaustive manipulation. It has certain structural divisions, and always ends in the key in which it began; yet its form does not, strictly speaking, depend on its sectional structure, as is the case with the song, dance, and sonata forms, but rather on the logical exploitation of the motif. The motif, in a word, is the primary fact of the fugue, the seed from which is germinated all the luxuriant florescent life of the subsequent music.

Since the motif is the animating force of the entire fugue, it is obvious that upon its pointedness, variety, and interest will depend the vitality of the composition as a whole. Bach accordingly spares no pains in the construction of his motifs. Much as they differ in length, expression, and style, all are brimful of interest. Each embodies some striking musical idea; some persuasive or emphatic rhythm, some definite tonal design which either by its oddness or by its utter naturalness and inevitability lays firm hold upon the attention at once, and coerces interest whenever it recurs. Here are a few motifs from the “Well-Tempered Clavichord”:

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FIGURE VII.

The variety is wonderful, even in these five subjects; and it will be seen at once how provocative of musical thought they are, like condensed aphorisms, packed with suggestions that send the mind questing through endless vistas of imagination.

As for the further treatment of the fugal motif, the actual formal rules, despite the awe they have immemorially aroused in the popular mind, are few and simple. After the first announcement of the subject by a single voice, it is answered by a second voice, at an interval of a fifth above;[27] then again stated by a third voice, and answered by a fourth. This process goes on until each voice has had a chance to enunciate the motif, after which the conversation goes on more freely; the subject is announced in divers keys, by divers voices; episodes, in a congruous style, vary the monotony; at last the subject is emphatically asserted by the various voices in quick succession (“stretto”) and with some little display or grandiloquence the piece comes to an end. But simple as is this scheme, it gives the composer ample opportunity to develop his theme with the utmost ingenuity, to subject it to the most surprising metamorphoses, and to place it in ever new lights and postures.

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FIGURE VIII.

Practically all the possibilities of developing a motif were exploited by Bach in his marvelous fugues. The development of the motif means, in the most general terms, the repetition of it in forms sufficiently like the original one to be recognizable, yet sufficiently unlike it to be novel and interesting, to exhibit it, as has just been said, in “new lights and postures.” Now, since the identity of the motif depends on the fixed metrical and harmonic relations of its constituent tones, it is obvious that variation of it will have to consist in slight alterations of these metrical or of these harmonic relations, or of both, managed with such skill that they do in effect vary, without disintegrating, the motif. Our next task, then, will be to describe the chief means, both metrical and harmonic, by which the motif, in the hands of Bach and of all his successors, is modified without being destroyed.

Mere repetition, of course, is not, strictly speaking, development, however efficient it may be as a means of building up musical structures. With the repetition of the motif at a different place in the scale, however, such as is used in the “answer,” we have a true development, though an elementary one. Here all the metrical and harmonic relations of the motif are kept intact, at the same time that the bodily shifting of it in the scale throws upon it, so to speak, a new light. This will be felt at once by any musical person who will play over attentively the two subjects and answers of Figure VIII. A much more radical change is effected when the motif is changed from major to minor, or vice versa, or presented in some key other than the dominant and more remote, or presented with new harmonization. Still, even in such cases, the metrical and fundamental harmonic form of the subject remains unaltered.

In the device called “inversion,” much used by Bach, we have an essential change. The metrical form of the subject, remaining unchanged, ensures recognizability, but the harmonic relations, while remaining identical in respect of size, are exactly reversed in respect of direction; in other words, the subject is turned upside down. A few examples will explain this better than many words.

In Fugue VIII, Book I, W-T.C.,

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becomes

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In Fugue XX, Book I, W.-T.C.,

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becomes

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FIGURE IX. EXAMPLES OF INVERSION.

Many other examples might be given, for Bach is endlessly ingenious in his use of inversion, and all the composers who followed him have used it. Its effect, as will be seen from the examples, is most stimulating; the mind easily perceives the likeness to the original subject, since the rhythm is retained intact; yet the turning upside down of all the pitch relations produces most unexpected and interesting features.

So much for modifications dependent on altered tonal relationships. Those produced by metrical alterations are if anything even more serviceable to the composer. The simplest metrical change possible is produced by increasing or decreasing the actual duration of all the tones in the motif, while retaining jealously their proportionate duration. Thus the identity of the motif is not tampered with, but it is made to bear a new relation to its musical context. This device is named augmentation or diminution, according as the time-values of the motif are augmented or diminished.

In Fugue VIII, Book I, W.-T.C.,

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becomes by augmentation,

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In Fugue II, Book II, W.-T.C.,

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is treated as follows:

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In Fugue IX, Book II, W.-T.C.,

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becomes by diminution,

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FIGURE X. EXAMPLES OF AUGMENTATION AND DIMINUTION.

It will be well worth the reader’s while to play through the entire fugues cited, noting the marvelous skill and subtlety with which Bach weaves his fabric.

In augmentation and diminution the original accents of the motif are for the most part retained—it is only the durations that are altered. More transformative still, therefore, are those devices which actually shift the accents of the motif, its most salient and identifying features. The most important of these, which we may call “shifted rhythm,” is seldom found in Bach; for its frequent and exhaustive application we must look to Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms. As its name indicates, “shifted rhythm” consists in bodily shifting or transposing the motif in such a manner that its heavy beats become light, and its light ones heavy. In order to complete our account of the chief means of exploiting motifs, a few examples of shifted rhythm may find place here, even though they are not taken from Bach.

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FIGURE XI. EXAMPLES OF SHIFTED RHYTHM. From the Minuet of MOZART’S String Quartet in C-Major.

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From the First Movement of BEETHOVEN’S Eighth Symphony.

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From the First Movement of BRAHMS’S Second Symphony.

The foregoing discussion and examples will serve to give a slight idea of the wonderfully varied means of manipulating short motifs or musical subjects which composers derive from the peculiarities of metrical and harmonic organization. These means were utilized by Bach in the fugue with tireless industry and inexhaustible imagination. The fugue became in his hands the most perfect in its orderly complexity of all the forms of pure music; for sheer intellectual interest of a highly abstract kind his fugues have never been surpassed. Nor are they, as those unfamiliar with their intricacies are apt to suppose, devoid of emotional expression. The profundity, poignancy, and variety of the feeling they express are as marvelous as their consummate beauty of structure. They voice every mood, from the most earnest and impassioned gravity to the lightest banter. They are the first great independent monuments of pure music; and wherever future musicians may wander in the quest of new forms and new potencies of expression, Bach’s fugues will always stand magnificent on the horizon, marking the unassailable eastern heights from which pilgrimage was begun.

It is true, nevertheless, not only that the fugue form makes the severest demands on the attention and intelligence of the listener, but also that, because of its ecclesiastical origin and polyphonic style, it is incapable of the kind of highly personal, secular expression that it was in the spirit of the seventeenth century to demand. The prototypes of secular expression are the popular dance and song, and as soon as learned musicians had discovered means to give to dance and song movements the completeness, breadth, and organic coherence requisite to large beauty, they began to turn their attention away from the austere if noble contrapuntal forms, and to base their art on more popular models. The result was that even in the age of Bach the suite of dance and song movements began to be cultivated almost as sedulously as the fugue, and Bach himself wrote suites which in their way are quite as good as his more polyphonic works. The second great phase in the application to pure music of the principles of metrical and harmonic design is represented by the Suite.

As practiced by Bach, the suite is a series of dances and songs, written in a style partly polyphonic and partly monodic (that is, consisting of a single melody with subsidiary accompaniment). His introductory movements, allemandes in the French suites, preludes in the English, are stately or energetic contrapuntal pieces, intended to commence the suite with an impression of dignity. They are followed by courantes, bourrées, sarabandes, minuets, airs, and gavottes, all more or less definitely rhythmical and animated; and the concluding movement is generally a rollicking gigue. These suites of Bach may be considered perfect models of the form.

Now, when we contrast the suite with the fugue, the first difference that strikes us is that while the fugue, of polyphonic and ecclesiastical origin, is not definitely rhythmical, but proceeds somewhat amblingly and without division into segments of definite duration, the suite movements, owing their origin as they do either to songs intended to be sung to verses of equal length, or to dances intended to accompany symmetrical motions of the body, are markedly rhythmical—are made up, in fact, of phrases of equal length, balancing one another and giving an impression of complete symmetry. A fugue proceeds like a prose sentence; a gavotte or a bourrée or a minuet sounds more like a stanza of verses. In short, the fundamental element in a dance or song is not a fragmentary motif, but a complete phrase, filling, as a rule, two measures, though sometimes four, eight, or even three or five. The phrase begins with a motif, but fills it out with additional matter rounded off by some kind of cadence. That the phrase is thus a more complex and extended unit than the motif, a few examples from Bach will make clear.

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FIGURE XII. EXAMPLES OF PHRASES. Gavotte from BACH’S Fifth French Suite.

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Bourrée, from BACH’S Third Suite for 'Cello.

It will be seen at once that in each case the second phrase answers or supplements the first. Like it in length and in general contour, it is at the same time more positive and final, so that the combined effect of the two is much like that of a couplet of verses. The first phrase, in fact, arouses in our minds an expectation, which only the second can satisfy; so that we have here a new and larger application of the now familiar device for binding together successive impressions. So characteristic is the supplementation of one phrase by another that theorists have adopted a set terminology suggested by it, calling the first phrase in all such cases the “antecedent phrase,” and the second the “consequent phrase.” It will also be noted, however, that the pair of phrases, once heard, becomes itself a unit in the mind, and arouses a new expectation of further matter to establish a still larger balance; and a reference to the pieces of Bach cited will show that Bach in each case follows up his pair of two-measure phrases by a four-measure phrase which supplements them as they supplemented each other. And so the process goes on, the piece growing ever larger and more complex by a regular accretion, until at last a phrase of definite and entire finality is reached, and the movement stands complete. All short songs and dances illustrate this progressive accretion of phrases into larger and larger units, by means of a constant unfolding of new expectations and fulfilments. To trace it out, to analyse what the composer has so ingeniously built up, is one of the most fascinating of studies; for it shows us how the simplest song is organic like a crystal, a flower, or an animal.

It is neither possible nor desirable to lay down here any rigid rules as to the metrical or harmonic relationships between the phrases. Generally, the metrical balance is fairly simple; a two-measure phrase is usually answered by another of the same length; two such phrases are often answered by a single four-measure phrase. But sometimes four measures are answered by two; and not infrequently three- or five-measure phrases appear unexpectedly but with quite satisfactory effect. The sense of balance must be given—that is all we can say: just how it shall be given will depend, as Mr. Weller would say, “on the taste and fancy of the composer.” As for the harmonic relationships, endless variety is possible. Yet we may here point out certain general principles. Every phrase, as we have seen, ends with some sort of a cadence, strong or weak according to the harshness of the dissonance it contains and the nearness of its final chord to the tonal centre, or key-note, of the piece. Now, as the salient tones of any key are its tonic and its dominant, the most obvious and natural course for the composer is to embody these in the successive phrases; and as the tonic conveys the impression of finality it is natural to use that last. A glance at Figure XII will show that Bach makes his antecedent phrase, in the first instance, end with a tonic chord, but a weak one; in the second instance, with a dominant. In both cases the consequent phrase ends with a strong tonic. Thus the harmonic as well as the metrical relations produce the effect of expectation and fulfilment, of antithesis between a transitive and a final impression. This is the general principle of all harmonic structure. The final impression is given by a strong tonic chord; the mediate impression, arousing the sense of anticipation, is given by some weaker and contrasting harmony, in the vast majority of cases the dominant chord. A full sense of the inexhaustible capabilities of this sort of harmonic structure can be gained only by a careful analysis of many pieces such as the movements of Bach’s suites. To this the reader is recommended.

When once composers had grasped the possibilities of structure by means of harmony, they quickly proceeded to work them out in the large, as applied to a complete musical form. They began to organize whole pieces by means of a grouping or ordered antithesis of different harmonic centres. Working without models and in the dark, they made many false starts and wrong moves, they tried many hybrid and unstable forms; but eventually, in the course of years of experiment, they developed two great types of structure, based on fundamental principles, and embodied, with unimportant minor modifications, in almost all the suite-movements of the seventeenth and of later centuries. The first of these two great general types of structure, called Binary Form, contained two distinct members or sections; the second, called Ternary Form, contained three sections.

The essential principle of binary form is the simplest conceivable. Every piece in binary form may be likened to a journey to a neighboring place, followed by a return home. “The King of France, with forty thousand men, marched up the hill, and then marched down again.” In the case of binary form, the king of France is the subject or theme of the piece; the forty thousand men are the variations or developments on this subject that are worked out as the piece proceeds; the hill is the progress from the tonic key to the contrasted tonal centre, generally the dominant, or, if the piece is in a minor key, its relative major; and the march down again is the return to the home key. More specifically, the first section begins with the announcement of the theme in the tonic key, and proceeds to ring changes upon it, meanwhile modulating to the contrasted key and ending with a firm and memorable cadence there. At this point the second section begins, with the theme as at first, but in the new instead of the original key; the modulation is reversed, the original key re-entered, and the same cadence already heard repeated, but now even more firmly, and with the added finality of the home key. The device is simplicity itself, yet it admits a surprising variety of detail within its perfectly obvious and satisfying unity of ultimate effect. Most of Bach’s allemandes, courantes, airs, sarabandes, and gigues, are executed in binary form.

The great disadvantage of this admirably concise and organic structure proved in the course of experience to be a certain monotony and rigidity. As movements became longer and more complex, the division into two sections, embodying but two keys in spite of momentary excursions to more remote centres, came to seem rather constricting. There was a dearth of variety about it, and a tendency to obviousness. The element of contrast, of adventure far afield, was somewhat lacking. Composers accordingly worked out, of course unconsciously, a more various but equally organic scheme of design—ternary form. In ternary form the first section is practically identical with that of binary form; but the second, instead of “marching down again,” makes the contrasting tonal centre it has reached but a starting-point for still further excursions. It modulates freely, using to the utmost the privilege of admission to all the keys of the gamut that music owes to Bach and his system of equal temperament; it plays with the theme, subjecting it to the modes of development we have already studied; it indulges in all sorts of pranks and whimsies, departing as much as possible from the set formality of the first section; in a word, it endeavors to establish a complete contrast with what has gone before, and while never violating logic, to get away as far as possible from the beaten track, from the rut of routine. Then, after this interregnum of variety, comes the third section with an emphatic reassertion of regularity, presenting once more the subject as at first, and in the tonic key, vindicating the unity of the movement of the whole, and rounding it out to orderly completeness. Splendid examples of this splendidly organic structure are most of the preludes, gavottes, bourrées, and minuets of Bach’s suites.

In the suite, then, as it was practiced by Bach and other seventeenth-century composers, we see operative a constantly broadening application of the use of expectation and fulfilment, in the interests of organic structure. Applying to artistic music those methods of metrical and harmonic form that had long determined the growth of folk-song and dance, the composers of this period gradually learned to make even wider and more intricate syntheses of their materials. So skilfully did they avail themselves of the relations between contrasting harmonic centres that they were able eventually to write whole movements as firmly organic, as deftly coordinated, as a vertebrate animal. By the ever-extending use of thematic variation and of free modulation, they made their pieces as various as they were systematic. And at last, in ternary form, they established that succession of statement, contrast, and reassertion, which seems even to-day the last word in the philosophy of general musical structure.

The gradual expansion and increase of complexity in the movements of the suite, made not only possible but logically necessary by the structural potencies of these great principles of statement, contrast, and reassertion, and of antithesis of keys, led eventually to a new phase of musical structure, the third and last in the evolution we have been tracing. The suite, in the seventeenth century the most successfully cultivated of all the forms of pure music, gave place in the eighteenth century to a still higher form, the sonata, which has held the position of supremacy ever since. The sonata form is, not only by tradition but by natural right, the norm of modern musical structure. Almost all the chief works of all the great composers from Haydn and Mozart to Brahms and Tschaïkowsky are cast in this mould, as we easily realize if we remember that not only those pieces specifically named “sonatas,” but also trios, quartets, quintets, and the like, and overtures and concertos and symphonies, are but pieces in sonata-form intended for various groups of instruments. The string quartet is a sonata for two violins, a viola, and a 'cello; the concerto is a sonata for solo instrument with orchestral accompaniment; and the symphony is a sonata on a large scale, for orchestra. This remarkable prevalence of a single type of structure in modern music means far more than the accidental survival, by inertia, of an artificial convention; it means that this type of structure is on the whole the best possible embodiment of variety and unity in tonal effects; that it is the natural outgrowth of more primitive forms; and that it is elastic enough to admit into its uniform scheme of order the most diverse expressions of individual temperaments and ideals. Tschaïkowsky’s intuition of beauty in tones is different enough from Haydn’s; and the formal medium of which both can avail themselves without violence to their genius must obviously be founded deep in universal human psychology.

The modern sonata consists, as a rule, of four movements, contrasted in character and in key, but combining to form a rational and complete whole. In expression, the movements conform deftly to the natural requirements of human nature. The first is energetic, vigorous, and complex. The second is sentimental, melancholy, noble, or profound. The third affords relief from the emotional concentration of the second; it is a dance, full of vivacity, humor, fantasy, and whimsical impulse; with Beethoven it becomes a consummate embodiment of the spirit of comedy, which is quite as essential a part of human nature as that of tragedy and earnest emotion. The fourth and last movement is again vigorous and dashing, but in a less intellectual way than the first; it ends the whole composition in a mood of simple and happy animation. As regards structure, moreover, the movements differ in conformity with the needs of the situation. The first, which is to be heard when the mind is most attentive and unfatigued, is by far the most complex,—is indeed often the only one in what is technically called “sonata-form.” The second, the interest of which is more emotional than intellectual, is usually of fairly primitive structure. The third, a dance, is in the simplest of ternary dance-forms, that of the minuet, and, as written by Haydn and Mozart, might almost be taken bodily out of a suite. The final movement is also usually of simple, obvious structure.

It is clear, then, that of all the movements of the sonata, the minuet is the nearest, in structure, to those more primitive types embodied in the suite.[28] It makes a link bridging the gap between the older form and its more highly-developed supplanter. A glance at its construction will show how near it is to those simple ternary forms already described in connection with the suite. The symphonic minuet of Haydn is built up out of phrases, welded together in the manner now so familiar to us.

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