CRITICAL
AND
HISTORICAL ESSAYS

Lectures delivered at Columbia University
BY
EDWARD MACDOWELL

EDITED BY
W.J. BALTZELL

London

ELKIN & CO., Ltd.,
8 & 10 Beak Street,
Regent Street, W.

CONSTABLE & CO., Ltd.,
10 Orange Street,
Leicester Square, W.C.

Boston, U.S.A., ARTHUR P. SCHMIDT

Copyright, 1912, by ARTHUR P. SCHMIDT
A.P.S. 9384

Stanhope Press
F.H. GILSON COMPANY
BOSTON, U.S.A.

PREFACE

The
present work places before the public a phase of the
professional activity of Edward MacDowell quite different
from that through which his name became a household
word in musical circles, that is, his work as a composer.
In the chapters that follow we become acquainted with
him in the capacity of a writer on phases of the history
and æsthetics of music.

It was in 1896 that the authorities of Columbia University
offered to him the newly created Chair of Music,
for which he had been strongly recommended as one of
the leading composers of America. After much thought
he accepted the position, and entered upon his duties
with the hope of accomplishing much for his art in the
favorable environment which he fully expected to find.
The aim of the instruction, as he planned it, was: “First,
to teach music scientifically and technically, with a view
to training musicians who shall be competent to teach and
compose. Second, to treat music historically and æsthetically
as an element of liberal culture.” In carrying out
his plans he conducted a course, which, while “outlining
the purely technical side of music,” was intended to give
a “general idea of music from its historical and æsthetic
side.” Supplementing this, as an advanced course, he
also gave one which took up the development of musical
forms, piano music, modern orchestration and symphonic

forms, impressionism, the relationship of music to the
other arts, with much other material necessary to form
an adequate basis for music criticism.

It is a matter for sincere regret that Mr. MacDowell
put in permanent form only a portion of the lectures
prepared for the two courses just mentioned. While
some were read from manuscript, others were given from
notes and illustrated with musical quotations. This was
the case, very largely, with the lectures prepared for the
advanced course, which included extremely valuable and
individual treatment of the subject of the piano, its literature
and composers, modern music, etc.

A point of view which the lecturer brought to bear
upon his subject was that of a composer to whom there
were no secrets as to the processes by which music is made.
It was possible for him to enter into the spirit in which
the composers both of the earlier and later periods conceived
their works, and to value the completed compositions
according to the way in which he found that they
had followed the canons of the best and purest art. It is
this unique attitude which makes the lectures so valuable
to the musician as well as to the student.

The Editor would also call attention to the intellectual
qualities of Mr. MacDowell, which determined his attitude
toward any subject. He was a poet who chose to
express himself through the medium of music rather than
in some other way. For example, he had great natural
facility in the use of the pencil and the brush, and was
strongly advised to take up painting as a career. The
volume of his poetical writings, issued several years ago,

is proof of his power of expression in verse and lyric forms.
Above these and animating them were what Mr. Lawrence
Gilman terms “his uncommon faculties of vision and
imagination.” What he thought, what he said, what he
wrote, was determined by the poet’s point of view, and
this is evident on nearly every page of these lectures.

He was a wide reader, one who, from natural bent,
dipped into the curious and out-of-the-way corners of
literature, as will be noticed in his references to other
works in the course of the lectures, particularly to Rowbotham’s
picturesque and fascinating story of the formative
period of music. Withal he was always in touch with
contemporary affairs. With the true outlook of the poet
he was fearless, individual, and even radical in his views.
This spirit, as indicated before, he carried into his lectures,
for he demanded of his pupils that above all they
should be prepared to do their own thinking and reach
their own conclusions. He was accustomed to say that
we need in the United States, a public that shall be
independent in its judgment on art and art products, that
shall not be tied down to verdicts based on tradition and
convention, but shall be prepared to reach conclusions
through knowledge and sincerity.

That these lectures may aid in this splendid educational
purpose is the wish of those who are responsible for
placing them before the public.

W. J. BALTZELL.

CONTENTS

CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL ESSAYS

I

THE ORIGIN OF MUSIC

Darwin’s
theory that music had its origin “in the
sounds made by the half-human progenitors of man during
the season of courtship” seems for many reasons to
be inadequate and untenable. A much more plausible
explanation, it seems to me, is to be found in the theory
of Theophrastus, in which the origin of music is attributed
to the whole range of human emotion.

When an animal utters a cry of joy or pain it expresses
its emotions in more or less definite tones; and at some
remote period of the earth’s history all primeval mankind
must have expressed its emotions in much the same
manner. When this inarticulate speech developed into
the use of certain sounds as symbols for emotions—emotions
that otherwise would have been expressed by the
natural sounds occasioned by them—then we have the
beginnings of speech as distinguished from music, which is
still the universal language. In other words, intellectual
development begins with articulate speech, leaving
music for the expression of the emotions.

To symbolize the sounds used to express emotion, if
I may so put it, is to weaken that expression, and it

would naturally be the strongest emotion that would
first feel the inadequacy of the new-found speech. Now
what is mankind’s strongest emotion? Even in the
nineteenth century Goethe could say, “’Tis fear that
constitutes the god-like in man.” Certainly before the
Christian era the soul of mankind had its roots in fear.
In our superstition we were like children beneath a great
tree of which the upper part was as a vague and fascinating
mystery, but the roots holding it firmly to the ground
were tangible, palpable facts. We feared—we knew not
what. Love was human, all the other emotions were
human; fear alone was indefinable.

The primeval savage, looking at the world subjectively,
was merely part of it. He might love, hate, threaten,
kill, if he willed; every other creature could do the same.
But the wind was a great spirit to him; lightning and
thunder threatened him as they did the rest of the world;
the flood would destroy him as ruthlessly as it tore the
trees asunder. The elements were animate powers that
had nothing in common with him; for what the intellect
cannot explain the imagination magnifies.

Fear, then, was the strongest emotion. Therefore
auxiliary aids to express and cause fear were necessary
when the speech symbols for fear, drifting further and
further away from expressing the actual thing, became
words, and words were inadequate to express and
cause fear. In that vague groping for sound symbols
which would cause and express fear far better than mere
words, we have the beginning of what is gradually to
develop into music.

We all know that savage nations accompany their
dances by striking one object with another, sometimes by
a clanking of stones, the pounding of wood, or perhaps
the clashing of stone spearheads against wooden shields
(a custom which extended until the time when shields
and spears were discarded), meaning thus to express
something that words cannot. This meaning changed
naturally from its original one of being the simple expression
of fear to that of welcoming a chieftain; and, if one
wishes to push the theory to excess, we may still see a
shadowy reminiscence of it in the manner in which the
violinists of an orchestra applaud an honoured guest—perchance
some famous virtuoso—at one of our symphony
concerts by striking the backs of their violins with
their bows.

To go back to the savages. While this clashing of one
object against another could not be called the beginning
of music, and while it could not be said to originate a
musical instrument, it did, nevertheless, bring into existence
music’s greatest prop, rhythm, an ally without
which music would seem to be impossible. It is hardly
necessary to go into this point in detail. Suffice it to say
that the sense of rhythm is highly developed even among
those savage tribes which stand the lowest in the scale
of civilization to-day, for instance, the Andaman Islanders,
of whom I shall speak later; the same may be said of the
Tierra del Fuegians and the now extinct aborigines of
Tasmania; it is the same with the Semangs of the Malay
Peninsula, the Ajitas of the Philippines, and the savages
inhabiting the interior of Borneo.

As I have said, this more or less rhythmic clanking of
stones together, the striking of wooden paddles against
the side of a canoe, or the clashing of stone spearheads
against wooden shields, could not constitute the first
musical instrument. But when some savage first struck
a hollow tree and found that it gave forth a sound peculiar
to itself, when he found a hollow log and filled up the open
ends, first with wood, and then—possibly getting the idea
from his hide-covered shield—stretched skins across the
two open ends, then he had completed the first musical
instrument known to man, namely, the drum. And such
as it was then, so is it now, with but few modifications.

Up to this point it is reasonable to assume that primeval
man looked upon the world purely subjectively. He considered
himself merely a unit in the world, and felt on a
plane with the other creatures inhabiting it. But from
the moment he had invented the first musical instrument,
the drum, he had created something outside of nature, a
voice that to himself and to all other living creatures was
intangible, an idol that spoke when it was touched, something
that he could call into life, something that shared
the supernatural in common with the elements. A God
had come to live with man, and thus was unfolded the
first leaf in that noble tree of life which we call religion.
Man now began to feel himself something apart from the
world, and to look at it objectively instead of subjectively.

To treat primitive mankind as a type, to put it under
one head, to make one theorem cover all mankind, as it
were, seems almost an unwarranted boldness. But I
think it is warranted when we consider that, aside from

language, music is the very first sign of the dawn of civilization.
There is even the most convincingly direct
testimony in its favour. For instance:

In the Bay of Bengal, about six hundred miles from the
Hoogly mouth of the Ganges, lie the Andaman Islands.
The savages inhabiting these islands have the unenviable
reputation of being, in common with several other tribes,
the nearest approach to primeval man in existence. These
islands and their inhabitants have been known and
feared since time immemorial; our old friend Sinbad the
Sailor, of “Arabian Nights” fame, undoubtedly touched
there on one of his voyages. These savages have no
religion whatever, except the vaguest superstition, in
other words, fear, and they have no musical instruments
of any kind. They have reached only the rhythm stage,
and accompany such dances as they have by clapping
their hands or by stamping on the ground. Let us now
look to Patagonia, some thousands of miles distant.
The Tierra del Fuegians have precisely the same characteristics,
no religion, and no musical instruments of any
kind. Retracing our steps to the Antipodes we find
among the Weddahs or “wild hunters” of Ceylon exactly
the same state of things. The same description applies
without distinction equally well to the natives in the
interior of Borneo, to the Semangs of the Malay Peninsula,
and to the now extinct aborigines of Tasmania.
According to Virchow their dance is demon worship of a
purely anthropomorphic character; no musical instrument
of any kind was known to them. Even the simple
expression of emotions by the voice, which we have seen

is its most primitive medium, has not been replaced to
any extent among these races since their discovery of
speech, for the Tierra del Fuegians, Andamans, and
Weddahs have but one sound to represent emotion,
namely, a cry to express joy; having no other means
for the expression of sorrow, they paint themselves when
mourning.

It is granted that all this, in itself, is not conclusive;
but it will be found that no matter in what wilderness
one may hear of a savage beating a drum, there also will
be a well-defined religion.

Proofs of the theory that the drum antedates all other
musical instruments are to be found on every hand. For
wherever in the anthropological history of the world we
hear of the trumpet, horn, flute, or other instrument of
the pipe species, it will be found that the drum and its
derivatives were already well known. The same may be
said of the lyre species of instrument, the forerunner of
our guitar (kithara), tebuni or Egyptian harp, and generally
all stringed instruments, with this difference, namely,
that wherever the lyre species was known, both pipe and
drum had preceded it. We never find the lyre without
the drum, or the pipe without the drum; neither do we
find the lyre and the drum without the pipe. On the
other hand, we often find the drum alone, or the drum and
pipe without the lyre. This certainly proves the antiquity
of the drum and its derivatives.

I have spoken of the purely rhythmical nature of the
pre-drum period, and pointed out, in contrast, the musical
quality of the drum. This may seem somewhat strange,

accustomed as we are to think of the drum as a purely
rhythmical instrument. The sounds given out by it
seem at best vague in tone and more or less uniform in
quality. We forget that all instruments of percussion,
as they are called, are direct descendants of the drum.
The bells that hang in our church towers are but modifications
of the drum; for what is a bell but a metal drum
with one end left open and the drum stick hung inside?

Strange to say, as showing the marvellous potency of
primeval instincts, bells placed in church towers were
supposed to have much of the supernatural power that
the savage in his wilderness ascribed to the drum. We
all know something of the bell legends of the Middle
Ages, how the tolling of a bell was supposed to clear the
air of the plague, to calm the storm, and to shed a blessing
on all who heard it. And this superstition was to a
certain extent ratified by the religious ceremonies attending
the casting of church bells and the inscriptions moulded
in them. For instance, the mid-day bell of Strasburg,
taken down during the French Revolution, bore the
motto

“I am the voice of life.”

Another one in Strasburg:

“I ring out the bad, ring in the good.”

Others read

“My voice on high dispels the storm.”

“I am called Ave Maria
I drive away storms.”

“I who call to thee am the Rose of the World
and am called Ave Maria.”

The Egyptian sistrum, which in Roman times played
an important rôle in the worship of Isis, was shaped somewhat
like a tennis racquet, with four wire strings on which
rattles were strung. The sound of it must have been
akin to that of our modern tambourine, and it served
much the same purpose as the primitive drum, namely,
to drive away Typhon or Set, the god of evil. Dead kings
were called “Osiris” when placed in their tombs, and sistri
put with them in order to drive away Set.

Beside bells and rattles we must include all instruments
of the tambourine and gong species in the drum
category. While there are many different forms of the
same instrument, there are evidences of their all having
at some time served the same purpose, even down to that
strange instrument about which Du Chaillu tells us in
his “Equatorial Africa”, a bell of leopard skin, with a
clapper of fur, which was rung by the wizard doctor when
entering a hut where someone was ill or dying. The
leopard skin and fur clapper seem to have been devised
to make no noise, so as not to anger the demon that was
to be cast out. This reminds us strangely of the custom
of ringing a bell as the priest goes to administer the last
rites.

It is said that first impressions are the strongest and
most lasting; certain it is that humanity, through all its
social and racial evolutions, has retained remnants of
certain primitive ideas to the present day. The army
death reveille, the minute gun, the tolling of bells for the
dead, the tocsin, etc., all have their roots in the attributes
assigned to the primitive drum; for, as I have already

pointed out, the more civilized a people becomes, the more
the word-symbols degenerate. It is this continual drifting
away of the word-symbols from the natural sounds
which are occasioned by emotions that creates the necessity
for auxiliary means of expression, and thus gives us instrumental
music.

Since the advent of the drum a great stride toward
civilization had been made. Mankind no longer lived in
caves but built huts and even temples, and the conditions
under which he lived must have been similar to those
of the natives of Central Africa before travellers opened
up the Dark Continent to the caravan of the European
trader. If we look up the subject in the narratives of
Livingstone or Stanley we find that these people lived in
groups of coarsely-thatched huts, the village being almost
invariably surrounded by a kind of stockade. Now this
manner of living is identically the same as that of all
savage tribes which have not passed beyond the drum
state of civilization, namely, a few huts huddled together
and surrounded by a palisade of bamboo or cane. Since
the pith would decompose in a short time, we should
probably find that the wind, whirling across such a
palisade of pipes—for that is what our bamboos would
have turned to—would produce musical sounds, in fact,
exactly the sounds that a large set of Pan’s pipes would
produce. For after all what we call Pan’s pipes are simply
pieces of bamboo or cane of different lengths tied together
and made to sound by blowing across the open tops.

The theory may be objected to on the ground that it
scarcely proves the antiquity of the pipe to be less than

that of the drum; but the objection is hardly of importance
when we consider that the drum was known long before
mankind had reached the “hut” stage of civilization.
Under the head of pipe, the trumpet and all its derivatives
must be accepted. On this point there has been much
controversy. But it seems reasonable to believe that
once it was found that sound could be produced by blowing
across the top of a hollow pipe, the most natural
thing to do would be to try the same effect on all hollow
things differing in shape and material from the original
bamboo. This would account for the conch shells of the
Amazons which, according to travellers’ tales, were used
to proclaim an attack in war; in Africa the tusks of elephants
were used; in North America the instrument did
not rise above the whistle made from the small bones
of a deer or of a turkey’s leg.

That the Pan’s pipes are the originals of all these species
seems hardly open to doubt. Even among the Greeks
and Romans we see traces of them in the double trumpet
and the double pipe. These trumpets became larger and
larger in form, and the force required to play them was
such that the player had to adopt a kind of leather harness
to strengthen his cheeks. Before this development
had been reached, however, I have no doubt that all
wind instruments were of the Pan’s pipes variety; that is
to say, the instruments consisted of a hollow tube shut
at one end, the sound being produced by the breath
catching on the open edge of the tube.

Direct blowing into the tube doubtless came later. In
this case the tube was open at both ends, and the sound

was determined by its length and by the force given to
the breath in playing. There is good reason for admitting
this new instrument to be a descendant of the Pan’s
pipes, for it was evidently played by the nose at first.
This would preclude its being considered as an originally
forcible instrument, such as the trumpet.

Now that we have traced the history of the pipe and
considered the different types of the instrument, we can
see immediately that it brought no great new truth home
to man as did the drum.

The savage who first climbed secretly to the top of the
stockade around his village to investigate the cause of
the mysterious sounds would naturally say that the
Great Spirit had revealed a mystery to him; and he
would also claim to be a wonder worker. But while his
pipe would be accepted to a certain degree, it was nevertheless
second in the field and could hardly replace the
drum. Besides, mankind had already commenced to
think on a higher plane, and the pipe was reduced to
filling what gaps it could in the language of the emotions.

The second strongest emotion of the race is love. All
over the world, wherever we find the pipe in its softer,
earlier form, we find it connected with love songs. In
time it degenerated into a synonym for something contemptibly
slothful and worthless, so much so that Plato
wished to banish it from his “Republic,” saying that
the Lydian pipe should not have a place in a decent
community.

On the other hand, the trumpet branch of the family
developed into something quite different. At the very

beginning it was used for war, and as its object was to
frighten, it became larger and larger in form, and more
formidable in sound. In this respect it only kept pace
with the drum, for we read of Assyrian and Thibetan
trumpets two or three yards long, and of the Aztec war
drum which reached the enormous height of ten feet, and
could be heard for miles.

Now this, the trumpet species of pipe, we find also
used as an auxiliary “spiritual” help to the drum. We
are told by M. Huc, in his “Travels in Thibet,” that the
llamas of Thibet have a custom of assembling on the
roofs of Lhassa at a stated period and blowing enormous
trumpets, making the most hideous midnight din imaginable.
The reason given for this was that in former days
the city was terrorized by demons who rose from a deep
ravine and crept through all the houses, working evil
everywhere. After the priests had exorcised them by
blowing these trumpets, the town was troubled no more.
In Africa the same demonstration of trumpet blowing
occurs at an eclipse of the moon; and, to draw the theory
out to a thin thread, anyone who has lived in a small
German Protestant town will remember the chorals which
are so often played before sunrise by a band of trumpets,
horns, and trombones from the belfry of some church tower.
Almost up to the end of the last century trombones were
intimately connected with the church service; and if we
look back to Zoroaster we find the sacerdotal character
of this species of instrument very plainly indicated.

Now let us turn back to the Pan’s pipes and its direct
descendants, the flute, the clarinet, and the oboe. We

shall find that they had no connection whatever with
religious observances. Even in the nineteenth century
novel we are familiar with the kind of hero who played
the flute—a very sentimental gentleman always in love.
If he had played the clarinet he would have been very
sorrowful and discouraged; and if it had been the oboe
(which, to the best of my knowledge, has never been
attempted in fiction) he would have needed to be a very
ill man indeed.

Now we never hear of these latter kinds of pipes being
considered fit for anything but the dance, love songs, or
love charms. In the beginning of the seventeenth century
Garcilaso de la Vega, the historian of Peru, tells of
the astonishing power of a love song played on a flute.
We find so-called “courting” flutes in Formosa and Peru,
and Catlin tells of the Winnebago courting flute. The
same instrument was known in Java, as the old Dutch
settlers have told us. But we never hear of it as creating
awe, or as being thought a fit instrument to use with the
drum or trumpet in connection with religious rites.
Leonardo da Vinci had a flute player make music while
he painted his picture of Mona Lisa, thinking that it
gave her the expression he wished to catch—that
strange smile reproduced in the Louvre painting. The
flute member of the pipe species, therefore, was more or
less an emblem of eroticism, and, as I have already said,
has never been even remotely identified with religious
mysticism, with perhaps the one exception of Indra’s
flute, which, however, never seems to have been able to
retain a place among religious symbols. The trumpet,

on the other hand, has retained something of a mystical
character even to our day. The most powerful illustration
of this known to me is in the “Requiem” by Berlioz.
The effect of those tremendous trumpet calls from
the four corners of the orchestra is an overwhelming one,
of crushing power and majesty, much of which is due to
the rhythm.

To sum up. We may regard rhythm as the intellectual
side of music, melody as its sensuous side. The pipe is
the one instrument that seems to affect animals—hooded
cobras, lizards, fish, etc. Animals’ natures are
purely sensuous, therefore the pipe, or to put it more
broadly, melody, affects them. To rhythm, on the other
hand, they are indifferent; it appeals to the intellect, and
therefore only to man.

This theory would certainly account for much of the
potency of what we moderns call music. All that aims
to be dramatic, tragic, supernatural in our modern music,
derives its impressiveness directly from rhythm. 1  What
would that shudder of horror in Weber’s “Freischütz”
be without that throb of the basses? Merely a diminished
chord of the seventh. Add the pizzicato in the basses
and the chord sinks into something fearsome; one has a
sudden choking sensation, as if one were listening in fear,
or as if the heart had almost stopped beating. All through
Wagner’s music dramas this powerful effect is employed,

from “The Flying Dutchman” to “Parsifal.” Every
composer from Beethoven to Nicodé has used the same
means to express the same emotions; it is the medium
that pre-historic man first knew; it produced the same
sensation of fear in him that it does in us at the present
day.

Rhythm denotes a thought; it is the expression of a
purpose. There is will behind it; its vital part is intention,
power; it is an act. Melody, on the other hand, is
an almost unconscious expression of the senses; it translates
feeling into sound. It is the natural outlet for
sensation. In anger we raise the voice; in sadness we
lower it. In talking we give expression to the emotions
in sound. In a sentence in which fury alternates
with sorrow, we have the limits of the melody of speech.
Add to this rhythm, and the very height of expression is
reached; for by it the intellect will dominate the sensuous.

 1 
The strength of the “Fate” motive in Beethoven’s fifth symphony
undoubtedly lies in the succession of the four notes at equal
intervals of time. Beethoven himself marked it So pocht das Schicksal
an die Pforte.

II

ORIGIN OF SONG vs. ORIGIN OF INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC

Emerson
characterized language as “fossil poetry,”
but “fossil music” would have described it even better;
for as Darwin says, man sang before he became human.

Gerber, in his “Sprache als Kunst,” describing the
degeneration of sound symbols, says “the saving point
of language is that the original material meanings of
words have become forgotten or lost in their acquired
ideal meaning.” This applies with special force to the
languages of China, Egypt, and India. Up to the last
two centuries our written music was held in bondage, was
“fossil music,” so to speak. Only certain progressions
of sounds were allowed, for religion controlled music.
In the Middle Ages folk song was used by the Church,
and a certain amount of control was exercised over it;
even up to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the use
of sharps and flats was frowned upon in church music.
But gradually music began to break loose from its old
chains, and in our own century we see Beethoven snap
the last thread of that powerful restraint which had held
it so long.

The vital germ of music, as we know it, lay in the fact
that it had always found a home in the hearts of the common
people of all nations. While from time immemorial

theory, mostly in the form of mathematical problems,
was being fought over, and while laws were being laid
down by religions and governments of all nations as to
what music must be and what music was forbidden to
be, the vital spark of the divine art was being kept alive
deep beneath the ashes of life in the hearts of the oppressed
common folk. They still sang as they felt; when the mood
was sad the song mirrored the sorrow; if it were gay
the song echoed it, despite the disputes of philosophers
and the commands of governments and religion. Montaigne,
in speaking of language, said with truth, “’Tis
folly to attempt to fight custom with theories.” This
folk song, to use a Germanism, we can hardly take into
account at the present moment, though later we shall
see that spark fanned into fire by Beethoven, and carried
by Richard Wagner as a flaming torch through the very
home of the gods, “Walhalla.”

Let us go back to our dust heap. Words have been
called “decayed sentences,” that is to say, every word
was once a small sentence complete in itself. This
theory seems true enough when we remember that mankind
has three languages, each complementing the other. For
even now we say many words in one, when that word
is reinforced and completed by our vocabulary of sounds
and expression, which, in turn, has its shadow, gesture.
These shadow languages, which accompany all our words,
give to the latter vitality and raise them from mere abstract
symbols to living representatives of the idea. Indeed, in
certain languages, this auxiliary expression even overshadows
the spoken word. For instance, in Chinese, the

theng or intonation of words is much more important
than the actual words themselves. Thus the third
intonation or theng, as it is called in the Pekin dialect,
is an upward inflection of the voice. A word with this
upward inflection would be unintelligible if given the
fourth theng or downward inflection. For instance, the
word “kwai” with a downward inflection means “honourable,”
but give it an upward inflection “kwai” and it
means “devil.”

Just as a word was originally a sentence, so was a tone
in music something of a melody. One of the first things
that impresses us in studying examples of savage music
is the monotonic nature of the melodies; indeed some of
the music consists almost entirely of one oft-repeated
sound. Those who have heard this music say that the
actual effect is not one of a steady repetition of a single
tone, but rather that there seems to be an almost imperceptible
rising and falling of the voice. The primitive
savage is unable to sing a tone clearly and cleanly, the
pitch invariably wavering. From this almost imperceptible
rising and falling of the voice above and below
one tone we are able to gauge more or less the state of
civilization of the nation to which the song belongs.
This phrase-tone corresponds, therefore, to the sentence-word,
and like it, gradually loses its meaning as a phrase
and fades into a tone which, in turn, will be used in new
phrases as mankind mounts the ladder of civilization.

At last then we have a single tone clearly uttered, and
recognizable as a musical tone. We can even make a
plausible guess as to what that tone was. Gardiner, in

his “Music of Nature,” tells of experiments he made in
order to determine the normal pitch of the human voice.
By going often to the gallery of the London Stock Exchange
he found that the roar of voices invariably amalgamated
into one long note, which was always F. If we look
over the various examples of monotonic savage music
quoted by Fletcher, Fillmore, Baker, Wilkes, Catlin,
and others, we find additional corroboration of the statement;
song after song, it will be noticed, is composed
entirely of F, G, and even F alone or G alone. Such
songs are generally ancient ones, and have been crystallized
and held intact by religion, in much the same way that
the chanting heard in the Roman Catholic service has
been preserved.

Let us assume then that the normal tone of the human
voice in speaking is F or G

for men, and for
women the octave higher. This tone does very well
for our everyday life; perhaps a pleasant impression may
raise it somewhat, ennui may depress it slightly; but the
average tone of our “commonplace” talk, if I may call
it that, will be about F. But let some sudden emotion
come, and we find monotone speech abandoned for impassioned
speech, as it has been called. Instead of keeping
the voice evenly on one or two notes, we speak much
higher or lower than our normal pitch.

And these sounds may be measured and classified to a
certain extent according to the emotions which cause
them, although it must be borne in mind that we are
looking at the matter collectively; that is to say, without

reckoning on individual idiosyncrasies of expression in
speech. Of course we know that joy is apt to make us
raise the voice and sadness to lower it. For instance, we
have all heard gruesome stories, and have noticed how
naturally the voice sinks in the telling. A ghost story
told with an upward inflection might easily become
humourous, so instinctively do we associate the upward
inflection with a non-pessimistic trend of thought. Under
stress of emotion we emphasize words strongly, and with
this emphasis we almost invariably raise the voice a
fifth or depress it a fifth; with yet stronger emotion the
interval of change will be an octave. We raise the voice
almost to a scream or drop it to a whisper. Strangely
enough these primitive notes of music correspond to the
first two of those harmonics which are part and parcel
of every musical sound. Generally speaking, we may say
that the ascending inflection carries something of joy or
hope with it, while the downward inflection has something
of the sinister and fearful. To be sure, we raise our
voices in anger and in pain, but even then the inflection
is almost always downward; in other words, we pitch our
voices higher and let them fall slightly. For instance,
if we heard a person cry “Ah/” we might doubt its
being a cry of pain, but if it were “Ah\” we should at
once know that it was caused by pain, either mental or
physical.

The declamation at the end of Schubert’s “Erlking”
would have been absolutely false if the penultimate note
had ascended to the tonic instead of descending a fifth.
“The child lay dead.”

How fatally hopeless would be the opening measures of
“Tristan and Isolde” without that upward inflection which
comes like a sunbeam through a rift in the cloud; with a
downward inflection the effect would be that of unrelieved
gloom. In the Prelude to “Lohengrin,” Wagner pictures
his angels in dazzling white. He uses the highest vibrating
sounds at his command. But for the dwarfs who live
in the gloom of Niebelheim he chooses deep shades of
red, the lowest vibrating colour of the solar spectrum.
For it is in the nature of the spiritual part of mankind
to shrink from the earth, to aspire to something higher;
a bird soaring in the blue above us has something of the
ethereal; we give wings to our angels. On the other hand, a
serpent impresses us as something sinister. Trees, with
their strange fight against all the laws of gravity, striving
upward unceasingly, bring us something of hope and
faith; the sight of them cheers us. A land without trees
is depressing and gloomy. As Ruskin says, “The sea
wave, with all its beneficence, is yet devouring and terrible;
but the silent wave of the blue mountain is lifted towards
Heaven in a stillness of perpetual mercy; and while the
one surges unfathomable in its darkness, the other is
unshaken in its faithfulness.”

And yet so strange is human nature that that which
we call civilization strives unceasingly to nullify emotion.
The almost childlike faith which made our church spires
point heavenward also gave us Gothic architecture, that
emblem of frail humanity striving towards the ideal.
It is a long leap from that childlike faith to the present
day of skyscrapers. For so is the world constituted.

A great truth too often becomes gradually a truism,
then a merely tolerated and uninteresting theory; gradually
it becomes obsolete and sometimes even degenerates
into a symbol of sarcasm or a servant of utilitarianism.
This we are illustrating every day of our lives.
We speak of a person’s being “silly,” and yet the word
comes from “sælig,” old English for “blessed”; to act
“sheepishly” once had reference to divine resignation,
“even as a sheep led to the slaughter,” and so on ad infinitum.
We build but few great cathedrals now. Our tall
buildings generally point to utilitarianism and the almighty
dollar.

But in the new art, music, we have found a new domain
in which impulses have retained their freshness and warmth,
in which, to quote Goethe, “first comes the act, then the
word”; first the expression of emotion, then the theory
that classifies it; a domain in which words cannot lose
their original meanings entirely, as in speech. For in
spite of the strange twistings of ultra modern music, a
simple melody still embodies the same pathos for us that
it did for our grandparents. To be sure the poignancy
of harmony in our day has been heightened to an incredible
degree. We deal in gorgeous colouring and mighty
sound masses which would have been amazing in the last
century; but still through it all we find in Händel, Beethoven,
and Schubert, up to Wagner, the same great truths
of declamation that I have tried to explain to you.

Herbert Spencer, in an essay on “The Origin and
Functions of Music,” speaks of speech as the parent of
music. He says, “utterance, which when languaged is

speech, gave rise to music.” The definition is incomplete,
for “languaged utterance,” as he calls it, which is speech,
is a duality, is either an expression of emotion or a mere
symbol of emotion, and as such has gradually sunk to
the level of the commonplace. As Rowbotham points
out, impassioned speech is the parent of music, while
unimpassioned speech has remained the vehicle for the
smaller emotions of life, the everyday expression of everyday
emotions.

In studying the music of different nations we are confronted
by one fact which seems to be part and parcel
of almost every nationality, namely, the constant recurrence
of what is called the five tone (pentatonic) scale.
We find it in primitive forms of music all the world over,
in China and in Scotland, among the Burmese, and again
in North America. Why it is so seems almost doomed
to remain a mystery. The following theory may nevertheless
be advanced as being at least plausible:

Vocal music, as we understand it, and as I have already
explained, began when the first tone could be given
clearly; that is to say, when the sound sentence had amalgamated
into the single musical tone. The pitch being
sometimes F, sometimes G, sudden emotion gives us the
fifth, C or D, and the strongest emotion the octave, F or
G. Thus we have already the following sounds in our
first musical scale.

We know how singers slur from one tone to another. It
is a fault that caused the fathers of harmony to prohibit

what are called hidden fifths in vocal music. The jump
from G to C in the above scale fragment would be slurred,
for we must remember that the intoning of clear individual
sounds was still a novelty to the savage. Now the
distance from G to C is too small to admit two tones
such as the savage knew; consequently, for the sake of
uniformity, he would try to put but one tone between,
singing a mixture of A and B♭, which sound in time fell
definitely to A, leaving the mystery of the half-tone
unsolved. This addition of the third would thus fall in
with the law of harmonics again. First we have the keynote;
next in importance comes the fifth; and last of all
the third. Thus again is the absence of the major seventh
in our primitive scale perfectly logical; we may search
in vain in our list of harmonics for the tone which forms
that interval.

Now that we have traced the influence of passionate
utterance on music, it still remains for us to consider the
influence of something very different. The dance played
an important rôle in the shaping of the art of music;
for to it music owes periodicity, form, the shaping of
phrases into measures, even its rests. And in this music
is not the only debtor, for poetry owes its very “feet” to
the dance.

Now the dance was, and is, an irresponsible thing.
It had no raison d’être except purely physical enjoyment.
This rhythmic swaying of the body and light tapping of
the feet have always had a mysterious attraction and
fascination for mankind, and music and poetry were
caught in its swaying measures early in the dawn of art.

When a man walks, he takes either long steps or short
steps, he walks fast or slow. But when he takes one
long step and one short one, when one step is slow and the
other fast, he no longer walks, he dances. Thus we may
say with reasonable certainty that triple time arose directly
from the dance, for triple time is simply one strong, long
beat followed by a short, light one, viz.:

or



,
the “trochee” in our poetry.
,
Iambic.
The spondee

or



,
which is the rhythm of
prose, we already possessed; for when we walk it is in
spondees, namely, in groups of two equal steps. Now
imagine dancing to spondees! At first the steps will be
equal, but the body rests on the first beat; little by little
the second beat, being thus relegated to a position of
relative unimportance, becomes shorter and shorter, and
we rest longer on the first beat. The result is the trochaic
rhythm. We can see that this result is inevitable, even
if only the question of physical fatigue is considered. And,
to carry on our theory, this very question of fatigue still
further develops rhythm. The strong beat always coming
on one foot, and the light beat on the other, would soon
tire the dancer; therefore some way must be found to
make the strong beat alternate from one foot to the other.
The simplest, and in fact almost the only way to do this,
is to insert an additional short beat before the light beat.
This gives us





or
,
the dactyl in poetry.

We have, moreover, here discovered the beginning of
form, and have begun to group our musical tones in

measures and phrases; for our second dactyl is slightly
different from the first, because the right foot begins the
first and the left foot the second. We have two measures

and one phrase, for after the second
measure the right foot will again have the beat and will
begin another phrase of two measures.

Carry this theory still further, and we shall make new
discoveries. If we dance in the open air, unless we would
dance over the horizon, we must turn somewhere; and if
we have but a small space in which to dance, the turns
must come sooner and oftener. Even if we danced in a
circle we should need to reverse the motion occasionally,
in order to avoid giddiness; and this would measure off
our phrases into periods and sections.

Thus we see music dividing into two classes, one purely
emotional, the other sensuous; the one arising from the
language of heroes, the other from the swaying of the
body and the patter of feet. To both of these elements,
if we may call them so, metre and melody brought their
power; to declamation, metre brought its potent vitality;
to the dance, melody added its soft charm and lulling
rhyme. The intellectual in music, namely, rhythm and
declamation, thus joined forces, as did the purely sensuous
elements, melody and metre (dance). At the first
glance it would seem as if the dance with its rhythms
contradicted the theory of rhythm as being one of the
two vital factors in music; but when we consider the fact
that dance-rhythms are merely regular pulsations (once
commenced they pulsate regularly to the end, without

break or change), and when we consider that just this
unbroken regularity is the very antithesis of what we
mean by rhythm, the purely sensuous nature of the
dance is manifest. Strauss was the first to recognize
this defect in the waltz, and he remedied it, so far as it
lay within human skill, by a marvellous use of counter-rhythms,
thus infusing into the dance a simulation of
intellectuality.

The weaving together of these elements into one art-fabric
has been the ideal of all poets from Homer to
Wagner. The Greeks idealized their dances; that is to
say, they made their dances fit their declamation. In
the last two centuries, and especially in the middle of the
nineteenth, we have danced our highest flights of impassioned
speech. For what is the symphony, sonata, etc.,
but a remnant of the dance form? The choric dances of
Stesichorus and Pindar came strangely near our modern
forms, but it was because the form fitted the poem. In
our modern days, we too often, Procrustes-like, make our
ideas to fit the forms. We put our guest, the poetic
thought, that comes to us like a homing bird from out the
mystery of the blue sky—we put this confiding stranger
straightway into that iron bed, the “sonata form,” or
perhaps even the third rondo form, for we have quite an
assortment. Should the idea survive and grow too large
for the bed, and if we have learned to love it too much to
cut off its feet and thus make it fit (as did that old robber
of Attica), why we run the risk of having some critic
wise in his theoretical knowledge, say, as was and is said
of Chopin, “He is weak in sonata form!”

There are two ways of looking at music: first, as impassioned
speech, the nearest psychologically-complete utterance
of emotion known to man; second, as the dance,
comprising as it does all that appeals to our nature. And
there is much that is lovely in this idea of nature—for
do not the seasons dance, and is it not in that ancient
measure we have already spoken of, the trochaic? Long
Winter comes with heavy foot, and Spring is the light-footed.
Again, Summer is long, and Autumn short and
cheery; and so our phrase begins again and again. We
all know with what periodicity everything in nature dances,
and how the smallest flower is a marvel of recurring
rhymes and rhythms, with perfume for a melody. How
Shakespeare’s Beatrice charms us when she says, “There
a star danced, and under that was I born.”

And yet man is not part of Nature. Even in the
depths of the primeval forest, that poor savage, whom we
found listening fearfully to the sound of his drum, knew
better. Mankind lives in isolation, and Nature is a thing
for him to conquer. For Nature is a thing that exists,
while man thinks. Nature is that which passively lives
while man actively wills. It is the strain of Nature in
man that gave him the dance, and it is his godlike
fight against Nature that gave him impassioned speech;
beauty of form and motion on one side, all that is divine
in man on the other; on one side materialism, on the
other idealism.

We have traced the origin of the drum, pipe, and the
voice in music. It still remains for us to speak of the
lyre and the lute, the ancestors of our modern stringed

instruments. The relative antiquity of the lyre and the
lute as compared with the harp has been much discussed,
the main contention against the lyre being that it is a
more artificial instrument than the harp; the harp was
played with the fingers alone, while the lyre was played
with a plectrum (a small piece of metal, wood, or ivory).
Perhaps it would be safer to take the lute as the earliest
form of the stringed instrument, for, from the very first,
we find two species of instruments with strings, one played
with the fingers, the prototype of our modern harps,
banjos, guitars, etc., the other played with the plectrum,
the ancestor of all our modern stringed instruments played
by means of bows and hammers, such as violins, pianos,
etc.

However this may be, one thing is certain, the possession
of these instruments implies already a considerable
measure of culture, for they were not haphazard things.
They were made for a purpose, were invented to fill a gap
in the ever-increasing needs of expression. In Homer we
find a description of the making of a lyre by Hermes,
how this making of a lyre from the shell of a tortoise that
happened to pass before the entrance to the grotto of
his mother, Maïa, was his first exploit; and that he made
it to accompany his song in praise of his father Zeus.
We must accept this explanation of the origin of the lyre,
namely, that it was deliberately invented to accompany
the voice. For the lyre in its primitive state was never
a solo instrument; the tone was weak and its powers of
expression were exceedingly limited. On the other hand,
it furnished an excellent background for the voice and,

which was still more to the point, the singer could accompany
himself. The drum had too vague a pitch, and the
flute or pipe necessitated another performer, besides
having too much similarity of tone to the voice to give
sufficient contrast. Granted then that the lyre was
invented to accompany the voice, and without wasting
time with surmises as to whether the first idea of stringed
instruments was received from the twanging of a bowstring
or the finding of a tortoise shell with the half-dessicated
tendons of the animal still stretching across
it, let us find when the instrument was seemingly first
used.

That the lyre and lute are of Asiatic origin is generally
conceded, and even in comparatively modern times,
Asia seems to be the home of its descendants. The
Tartars have been called the troubadours of Asia—and
of Asia in the widest sense of the word—penetrating
into the heart of the Caucasus on the west and reaching
through the country eastward to the shores of the Yellow
Sea. Marco Polo, the celebrated Venetian traveller, and
M. Huc, a French missionary to China and Thibet, as
well as Spencer, Atkinson, and many others, speak of the
wandering bards of Asia. Marco Polo’s account of how
Jenghiz Kahn, the great Mongol conqueror, sent an expedition
composed entirely of minstrels against Mien, a city
of 30,000 inhabitants, has often been quoted to show
what an abundance—or perhaps superfluity would be
the better word—of musicians he had at his court.

That the lyre could not be of Greek origin is proved
by the fact that no root has been discovered in the language

for lyra, although there are many special names for
varieties of the instrument. Leaving aside the question
of the geographical origin of the instrument, we may say,
broadly, that wherever we find a nation with even the
smallest approach to a history, there we shall find bards
singing of the exploits of heroes, and always to the
accompaniment of the lyre or the lute. For at last, by
means of these instruments, impassioned speech was
able to lift itself permanently above the level of everyday
life, and its lofty song could dispense with the soft,
sensuous lull of the flute. And we shall see later how
these bards became seers, and how even our very angels
received harps, so closely did the instrument become
associated with what I have called impassioned speech,
which, in other words, is the highest expression of what
we consider godlike in man.

III

THE MUSIC OF THE HEBREWS AND THE HINDUS

The
music of the Hebrews presents one of the most
interesting subjects in musical history, although it has an
unfortunate defect in common with so many kindred
subjects, namely, that the most learned dissertation must
invariably end with a question mark. When we read in
Josephus that Solomon had 200,000 singers, 40,000
harpers, 40,000 sistrum players, and 200,000 trumpeters,
we simply do not believe it. Then too there is lack of
unanimity in the matter of the essential facts. One
authority, describing the machol, says it is a stringed instrument
resembling a modern viola; another describes it
as a wind instrument somewhat like a bagpipe; still
another says it is a metal ring with a bell attachment
like an Egyptian sistrum; and finally an equally respected
authority claims that the machol was not an instrument
at all, but a dance. Similarly the maanim has been described
as a trumpet, a kind of rattle box with metal
clappers, and we even have a full account in which it
figures as a violin.

The temple songs which we know have evidently been
much changed by surrounding influences, just as in
modern synagogues the architecture has not held fast
to ancient Hebrew models but has been greatly influenced

by different countries and peoples. David may be considered
the founder of Hebrew music, and his reign has
been well called an “idyllic episode in the otherwise rather
grim history of Israel.”

Of the instruments named in the Scriptures, that called
the harp in our English translation was probably the
kinnor, a kind of lyre played by means of a plectrum,
which was a small piece of metal, wood, or bone. The
psaltery or nebel (which was of course derived from the
Egyptian nabla, just as the kinnor probably was in some
mysterious manner derived from the Chinese kin) was a
kind of dulcimer or zither, an oblong box with strings
which were struck by small hammers. The timbrel
corresponds to our modern tambourine. The schofar
and keren were horns. The former was the well-known
ram’s horn which is still blown on the occasion of the
Jewish New Year.

In the Talmud mention is made of an organ consisting
of ten pipes which could give one hundred different sounds,
each pipe being able to produce ten tones. This mysterious
instrument was called magrepha, and although but
one Levite (the Levites were the professional musicians
among the Hebrews) was required to play it, and although
it was only about three feet in length, its sound was
so tremendous that it could be heard ten miles away.
Hieronymus speaks of having heard it on the Mount of
Olives when it was played in the Temple at Jerusalem.
To add to the mystery surrounding this instrument, it
has been proved by several learned authorities that it
was merely a large drum; and, to cap the climax, other

equally respected writers have declared that this instrument
was simply a large shovel which, after being used
for the sacrificial fire in the temple, was thrown to the
ground with a great noise, to inform the people that the
sacrifice was consummated.

It is reasonably certain that the seemingly incongruous
titles to the Psalms were merely given to denote the
tune to which they were to be sung, just as in our modern
hymns we use the words Canterbury, Old Hundredth,
China, etc.

The word selah has never been satisfactorily explained,
some readings giving as its meaning “forever,” “hallelujah,”
etc., while others say that it means repeat, an
inflection of the voice, a modulation to another key, an
instrumental interlude, a rest, and so on without end.

Of one thing we may be certain regarding the ancient
Hebrews, namely, that their religion brought something
into the world that can never again be lost. It fostered
idealism, and gave mankind something pure and noble
to live for, a religion over which Christianity shed the
sunshine of divine mercy and hope. That the change
which was to be wrought in life was sharply defined may
be seen by comparing the great songs of the different
nations. For up to that time a song of praise meant
praise of a King. He was the sun that warmed men’s
hearts, the being from whom all wisdom came, and to
whom men looked for mercy. If we compare the Egyptian
hymns with those of the Hebrews, the difference is
very striking. On the walls of the great temples of
Luxor and the Ramesseum at Thebes, as well as on the

wall of the temple of Abydos and in the main hall of the
great rock-hewn temple of Abu-Simbel, in Nubia, is
carved the “Epic of Pentaur,” the royal Egyptian scribe
of Rameses II:

My king, his arms are mighty, his heart is firm. He bends his
bow and none can resist him. Mightier than a hundred thousand
men he marches forward. His counsel is wise and when he wears
the royal crown, Alef, and declares his will, he is the protector of
his people. His heart is like a mountain of iron. Such is King
Rameses.

If we turn to the Hebrew prophets, this is their song:

The mountains melted from before the Lord and before Him
went the pestilence; burning coals went forth at His feet. Hell is
naked before Him and destruction hath no covering. He hangeth
the earth upon nothing and the pillars of heaven tremble and are
astonished at His reproof. Though He slay me, yet will I trust in
Him. For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and at the last day
He shall stand upon the earth.

As with the Hebrews, music among the Hindus was
closely bound to religion. When, 3000 years before the
Christian era, that wonderful, tall, white Aryan race of
men descended upon India from the north, its poets
already sang of the gods, and the Aryan gods were of a
different order from those known to that part of the
world; for they were beautiful in shape, and friendly to
man, in great contrast to the gods of the Davidians, the
pre-Aryan race and stock of the Deccan. These songs
formed the Rig-Veda, and are the nucleus from which all
Hindu religion and art emanate.

We already know that when the auxiliary speech which
we call music was first discovered, or, to use the language

of all primitive nations, when it was first bestowed on
man by the gods, it retained much of the supernatural
potency that its origin would suggest. In India, music
was invested with divine power, and certain hymns—especially
the prayer or chant of Vashishtha—were,
according to the Rig-Veda, all powerful in battle. Such
a magic song, or chant, was called a brahma, and he who
sang it a brahmin. Thus the very foundation of Brahminism,
from which rose Buddhism in the sixth century
B.C., can be traced back to the music of the sacred songs
of the Rig-Veda of India. The priestly or Brahmin
caste grew therefore from the singers of the Vedic hymns.
The Brahmins were not merely the keepers of the sacred
books, or Vedas, the philosophy, science, and laws of the
ancient Hindus (for that is how the power of the caste
developed), but they were also the creators and custodians
of its secular literature and art. Two and a half thousand
years later Prince Gautama or Buddha died, after a life
of self-sacrifice and sanctity. On his death five hundred
of his disciples met in a cave near Rajagriha to gather
together his sayings, and chanted the lessons of their
great master. These songs became the bible of Buddhism,
just as the Vedas are the bible of Brahminism, for the
Hindu word for a Buddhist council means literally “a
singing together.”

Besides the sacred songs of the Brahmins and Buddhists,
the Hindus had many others, some of which partook of
the occult powers of the hymns, occult powers that were
as strongly marked as those of Hebrew music. For
while the latter are revealed in the playing of David

before Saul, in the influence of music on prophecy, the
falling of the walls of Jericho at the sound of the trumpets
of Joshua, etc., in India the same supernatural power
was ascribed to certain songs. For instance, there were
songs that could be sung only by the gods, and one of
them, so the legend runs, if sung by a mortal, would
envelop the singer in flames. The last instance of the
singing of this song was during the reign of Akbar, the
great Mogul emperor (about 1575 A.D.). At his command
the singer sang it standing up to his neck in the
river Djaumna, which, however, did not save him, for,
according to the account, the water around him boiled,
and he was finally consumed by a flame of fire. Another
of Akbar’s singers caused the palace to be wrapped in
darkness by means of one of these magic songs, and
another averted a famine by causing rain to fall when
the country was threatened by drought. Animals were
also tamed by means of certain songs, the only relic of
which is found in the serpent charmers’ melodies, which,
played on a kind of pipe, seem to possess the power of
controlling cobras and the other snakes exhibited by the
Indian fakirs.

Many years before Gautama’s time, the brahmas or
singers of sacred songs of ancient India formed themselves
into a caste or priesthood; and the word “Brahma,” from
meaning a sacred singer, became the name of the supreme
deity; in time, as the nation grew, other gods were taken
into the religion. Thus we find in pre-Buddha times the
trinity of gods: Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, with their
wives, Sarasvati or learning, Lakshmi or beauty, and

Paravati, who was also called Kali, Durga, and Mahadevi,
and was practically the goddess of evil. Of these gods
Brahma’s consort, Sarasvati, the goddess of speech and
learning, brought to earth the art of music, and gave to
mankind the Vina.

This instrument is still in use and may be called the
national instrument of India. It is composed of a cylindrical
pipe, often bamboo, about three and a half feet
long, at each end of which is fixed a hollow gourd to
increase the tone. It is strung lengthwise with seven
metal wires held up by nineteen wooden bridges, just as
the violin strings are supported by a bridge. The scale of
the instrument proceeds in half tones from

The tones are produced by plucking the strings with the
fingers (which are covered with a kind of metal thimble),
and the instrument is held so that one of the gourds hangs
over the left shoulder, just as one would hold a very long-necked
banjo.

It is to the Krishna incarnation of Vishnu that the
Hindu scale is ascribed. According to the legend, Krishna
or Vishnu came to earth and took the form of a shepherd,
and the nymphs sang to him in many thousand different
keys, of which from twenty-four to thirty-six are known
and form the basis of Hindu music. To be sure these
keys, being formed by different successions of quarter-tones,
are practically inexhaustible, and the 16,000 keys
of Krishna are quite practicable. The differences in
tone, however, were so very slight that only a few, of
them have been retained to the present time.

The Hindus get their flute from the god Indra, who,
from being originally the all-powerful deity, was relegated
by Brahminism to the chief place among the minor gods—from
being the god of light and air he came to be the god
of music. His retinue consisted of the gandharvas, and
apsaras, or celestial musicians and nymphs, who sang
magic songs. After the rise and downfall of Buddhism
in India the term raga degenerated to a name for a merely
improvised chant to which no occult power was ascribed.

The principal characteristics in modern Hindu music
are a seemingly instinctive sense of harmony; and although
the actual chords are absent, the melodic formation
of the songs plainly indicates a feeling for modern
harmony, and even form. The actual scale resembles
our European scale of twelve semitones (twenty-two
s’rutis, quarter-tones), but the modal development of these
sounds has been extraordinary. Now a “mode” is the
manner in which the notes of a scale are arranged. For
instance, in our major mode the scale is arranged as follows:
tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone.
In India there are at present seventy-two modes in use
which are produced by making seventy-two different
arrangements of the scale by means of sharps and flats,
the only rule being that each degree of the scale must be
represented; for instance, one of the modes Dehrásan-Karabhárna
corresponds to our major scale. Our minor
(harmonic) scale figures as Kyravâni. Tânarupi corresponds
to the following succession of notes,

Gavambódi, to

Máya-Mâlavagaula, to

It can thus easily be seen how the seventy-two modes are
possible and practicable. Observe that the seven degrees
of the scale are all represented in these modes, the difference
between them being in the placing of half-tones by
means of sharps or flats. Not content with the complexity
that this modal system brought into their music, the
Hindus have increased it still more by inventing a number
of formulæ called ragas (not to be confounded with
those rhapsodical songs, the modern descendant of the
magic chants, previously mentioned).

In making a Hindu melody (which of course must be
in one of the seventy-two modes, just as in English we
should say that a melody must be in one of our two
modes, either major or minor) one would have to conform
to one of the ragas, that is to say, the melodic outline
would have to conform to certain rules, both in ascending
and descending. These rules consist of omitting notes
of the modes, in one manner when the melody ascends,
and in another when it descends. Thus, in the raga
called Mohànna, in ascending the notes must be arranged
in the following order: 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8; in descending it
is 8, 7, 5, 4, 2, 1. Thus if we wished to write a melody
in the mode Tânarupi—raga Mohànna—we could
never use the fourth, F, or the seventh, B, if our melody
ascended; if our melody descended we should have to
avoid the sixth, A♯, and the third, E♭♭. As one can

easily perceive, many strange melodic effects are produced
by these means. For instance, in the raga Mohànna,
in which the fourth and seventh degrees of the
scale are avoided in ascending, if it were employed in
the mode Dehrásin-Karabhárna, which corresponds to our
own major scale, it would have a pronounced Scotch
tinge so long as the melody ascended; but let it descend
and the Scotch element is deserted for a decided North
American Indian, notably Sioux tinge. The Hindus are
an imaginative race, and invest all these ragas and modes
with mysterious attributes, such as anger, love, fear,
and so on. They were even personified as supernatural
beings; each had his or her special name and history. It
was proper to use some of them only at midday, some in
the morning, and some at night. If the mode or raga
is changed during a piece, it is expressed in words, by
saying, for instance, that “Mohànna” (the new “raga”)
is here introduced to the family of Tânarupi. The
melodies formed from these modes and ragas are divided
into four classes, Rektah, Teranah, Tuppah, and Ragni.
The Rektah is in character light and flowing. It falls
naturally into regular periods, and resembles the Teranah,
with the exception that the latter is only sung by men.
The character of the Tuppah is not very clear, but the
Ragni is a direct descendant of the old magic songs and
incantations; in character it is rhapsodical and spasmodic.

IV

THE MUSIC OF THE EGYPTIANS, ASSYRIANS, AND CHINESE

In
speaking of the music of antiquity we are seriously
hampered by the fact that there is practically no actual
music in existence which dates back farther than the
eighth or tenth century of the present era. Even those
well-known specimens of Greek music, as they are claimed
to be, the hymns to Apollo, Nemesis, and Calliope, do not
date farther back than the third or fourth century, and
even these are by no means generally considered authentic.
Therefore, so far as actual sounds go, all music of
which we have any practical knowledge dates from about
the twelfth century.

Theoretically, we have the most minute knowledge of
the scientific aspect of music, dating from more than
five hundred years before the Christian era. This knowledge,
however, is worse than valueless, for it is misleading.
For instance, it would be a very difficult thing for posterity
to form any idea as to what our music was like if
all the actual music in the world at the present time
were destroyed, and only certain scientific works such
as that of Helmholtz on acoustics and a few theoretical
treatises on harmony, form, counterpoint and fugue were
saved.

From Helmholtz’s analysis of sounds one would get the
idea that the so-called tempered scale of our pianos caused
thirds and sixths to sound discordantly.

From the books on harmony one would gather that
consecutive fifths and octaves and a number of other
things were never indulged in by composers, and to cap
the climax one would naturally accept the harmony
exercises contained in the books as being the very acme
of what we loved best in music. Thus we see that any
investigation into the music of antiquity must be more
or less conjectural.

Let us begin with the music of the Egyptians. The
oldest existing musical instrument of which we have any
knowledge is an Egyptian lyre to be found in the Berlin
Royal Museum. It is about four thousand years old,
dating from the period just before the expulsion of the
Hyksos or “Shepherd” kings.

At that time (the beginning of the eighteenth dynasty,
1500–2000 B.C.) Egypt was just recovering from her
five hundred years of bondage, and music must already
have reached a wonderful state of development. In
wall paintings of the eighteenth dynasty we see flutes,
double flutes, and harps of all sizes, from the small one
carried in the hand, to the great harps, almost seven feet
high, with twenty-one strings; the never-failing sistrum
(a kind of rattle); kitharas, the ancestors of our modern
guitars; lutes and lyres, the very first in the line of instruments
culminating in the modern piano.

One hesitates to class the trumpets of the Egyptians in
the same category, for they were war instruments, the

tone of which was probably always forced, for Herodotus
says that they sounded like the braying of a donkey.
The fact that the cheeks of the trumpeter were reinforced
with leather straps would further indicate that the instruments
were used only for loud signalling.

According to the mural paintings and sculptures in
the tombs of the Egyptians, all these instruments were
played together, and accompanied the voice. It has long
been maintained that harmony was unknown to the
ancients because of the mathematical measurement of
sounds. This might be plausible for strings, but pipes
could be cut to any size. The positions of the hands of
the executants on the harps and lyres, as well as the use of
short and long pipes, make it appear probable that something
of what we call harmony was known to the Egyptians.

We must also consider that their paintings and sculptures
were eminently symbolic. When one carves an
explanation in hard granite it is apt to be done in shorthand,
as it were. Thus, a tree meant a forest, a prisoner
meant a whole army; therefore, two sculptured harpists
or flute players may stand for twenty or two hundred.
Athenæus, who lived at the end of the second and beginning
of the third century, A.D., speaks of orchestras of
six hundred in Ptolemy Philadelphus’s time (300 B.C.),
and says that three hundred of the players were harpers,
in which number he probably includes players on other
stringed instruments, such as lutes and lyres. It is therefore
to be inferred that the other three hundred played wind
and percussion instruments. This is an additional reason
for conjecturing that they used chords in their music; for

six hundred players, not to count the singers, would hardly
play entirely in unison or in octaves. The very nature
of the harp is chordal, and the sculptures always depict
the performer playing with both hands, the fingers being
more or less outstretched. That the music must have
been of a deep, sonorous character, we may gather from
the great size of the harps and the thickness of their
strings. As for the flutes, they also are pictured as being
very long; therefore they must have been low in pitch.
The reed pipes, judging from the pictures and sculptures,
were no higher in pitch than our oboes, of which
the highest note is D and E above the treble staff.

It is claimed that so far as the harps were concerned,
the music must have been strictly diatonic in character.
To quote Rowbotham, “the harp, which was the foundation
of the Egyptian orchestra, is an essentially non-chromatic
instrument, and could therefore only play a
straight up and down diatonic scale.” Continuing he
says, “It is plain therefore that the Egyptian harmony
was purely diatonic; such a thing as modern modulation
was unknown, and every piece from beginning to end was
played in the same key.” That this position is utterly
untenable is very evident, for there was nothing to prevent
the Egyptians from tuning their harps in the same
order of tones and half tones as is used for our modern
pianos. That this is even probable may be assumed
from the scale of a flute dating back to the eighteenth
or nineteenth century B.C. (1700 or 1600 B.C.), which
was found in the royal tombs at Thebes, and which is
now in the Florence Museum.

Its scale was

The only thing about which we may be reasonably
certain in regard to Egyptian music is that, like Egyptian
architecture, it must have been very massive, on account
of the preponderance in the orchestra of the low tones of
the stringed instruments.

The sistrum was, properly speaking, not considered a
musical instrument at all. It was used only in religious
ceremonies, and may be considered as the ancestor of the
bell that is rung at the elevation of the Host in Roman
Catholic churches. Herodotus (born 485 B.C.) tells us
much about Egyptian music, how the great festival at Bubastis
in honour of the Egyptian Diana (Bast or Pascht), to
whom the cat was sacred, was attended yearly by 700,000
people who came by water, the boats resounding with the
clatter of castanets, the clapping of hands, and the soft
tones of thousands of flutes. Again he tells us of music
played during banquets, and speaks of a mournful song
called Maneros. This, the oldest song of the Egyptians
(dating back to the first dynasty), was symbolical of the
passing away of life, and was sung in connection with that
gruesome custom of bringing in, towards the end of a banquet,
an effigy of a corpse to remind the guests that death
is the birthright of all mankind, a custom which was
adopted later by the Romans.

Herodotus also gives us a vague but very suggestive
glimpse of what may have been the genesis of Greek
tragedy, for he was permitted to see a kind of nocturnal
Egyptian passion play, in which evidently the tragedy
of Osiris was enacted with ghastly realism. Osiris, who
represents the light, is hunted by Set or Typhon, the god
of darkness, and finally torn to pieces by the followers
of Set, and buried beneath the waters of the lake; Horus,
the son of Osiris, avenges his death by subduing Set, and
Osiris appears again as the ruler of the shadowland of
death.

This strange tragedy took place at night, on the shore
of the lake behind the great temple at Saïs. Osiris was
dressed royally, in white, and after the horrible pursuit
and his murder by Set and his sinister band, Horus,
the rising sun, dispels the gloom, and a glorious new god
of light appears. Set and his followers are driven back
to the gloomy temple where, perhaps, there was another
scene showing the shade of Osiris, enthroned and ruling
the dead. We have no means of knowing the character
of the music which accompanied this mystery play; but
certainly the deep tones of the harps and the flutes,
together with the chanting of men’s voices, must have
been appropriate. Add to these the almost silent rattle
of the sistrum, which, for the Egyptians, possessed something
of the supernatural, and we have an orchestral
colouring which is suggestive, to say the least.

With this we will leave Egyptian music, simply calling
attention to the works of Resellini, Lepsius, Wilkinson,
and Petri, which contain copies of mural paintings and

temple and tomb sculptures relating to music. For
instance, pages 103, 106, and 111 of Lepsius’s third
book, “Die Denkmäler aus Ægypten und Æthiopen,”
will be found very interesting, particularly page 106, which
shows some of the rooms of the palace of Amenotep IV,
of the eighteenth dynasty (about 1500 or 1600 B.C.),
in which dancing and music is being taught. In the
same work, second book, on pages 52 and 53, are pictures
taken from a tomb near Gizeh, showing harp and flute
players and singers. The position of the hands of the
singers—they hold them behind their ears—is a manner
of illustrating the act of hearing, and arises from the
hieroglyphic double way of putting things; for instance,
in writing hieroglyphics the word is often first spelled out,
then comes another sign for the pronunciation, then sometimes
even two other signs to emphasize its meaning.

The music of the Assyrians may be summed up very
briefly. All that can be gathered from the bas-relief
sculptures is that shrill tones and acute pitch must have
characterized their music. As Rowbotham says, alluding
to the Sardanapalus wall sculpture now in the British
Museum in London, “What can one think of the musical
delicacy of a nation the King of which, dining alone with
his queen, chooses to be regaled with the sounds of a
lyre and a big drum close at his elbow?” The instruments
represented in these bas-reliefs, aside from the
drum, are high-pitched: flutes, pipes, trumpets, cymbals,
and the smaller stringed instruments. These were all
portable, and some, such as drums and dulcimers, were
strapped to the body, all of which points to the eminently

warlike character of the people. Instead of clapping the
hands to mark the time as did the Egyptians, they stamped
their feet. The dulcimer was somewhat like a modern
zither, and may be said to contain the germ of our piano;
for it was in the form of a flat case, strapped to the body
and held horizontally in front of the player. The strings
were struck with a kind of plectrum, held in the right
hand, and were touched with the left hand immediately
afterwards to stop the vibration, just as the dampers in
the pianoforte fall on the string the moment the key is
released. There existed among the Chaldeans a science
of music, which, of course, is a very different thing from
practical music, but it was so imbued with astronomical
symbolism that it seems hardly worth while to consider
it here. The art of Babylonia and Assyria culminated
in architecture and bas-relief sculpture, and it is chiefly
valuable as being the germ from which Greek art was
developed.

In considering Chinese music one has somewhat the
same feeling as one would have in looking across a flat
plain. There are no mountains in Chinese music, and there
is nothing in its history to make us think that it was ever
anything but a more or less puerile playing with sound;
therefore there is no separating modern Chinese music
from that of antiquity. To be sure, Confucius (about
500 B.C.) said that to be well governed a nation must
possess good music. Pythagoras, Aristotle, and Plato, in
Greece, said the same thing, and their maxims proved a
very important factor in the music of ancient times, for
the simple reason that an art controlled by government

can have nothing very vital about it. Hebrew music
was utterly annihilated by laws, and the poetic imagination
thus pent up found its vent in poetry, the result
being some of the most wonderful works the world
has ever known. In Egypt, this current of inspiration
from the very beginning was turned toward architecture.
In Greece, music became a mere stage accessory or a
subject for the dissecting table of mathematics; in China,
we have the dead level of an obstinate adherence to
tradition, thus proving Sir Thomas Browne’s saying,
“The mortallest enemy unto knowledge, and that which
hath done the greatest execution upon truth, hath been a
peremptory adhesion unto tradition, and more especially
the establishing of our own belief upon the dictates of
antiquity.”

The Chinese theory is that there are eight different
musical sounds in nature, namely:

1. The sound of skin.
2. The sound of stone.
3. The sound of metal.
4. The sound of clay.
5. The sound of silk.
6. The sound of wood.
7. The sound of bamboo.
8. The sound of gourd.

The sound of skin has a number of varieties, all different
kinds of drums.

The sound of stone is held by the Chinese to be the
most beautiful among sounds, one between that of metal
and of wood. The principal instrument in this category

is the king, and in mythology it is the chosen instrument
of Kouei, the Chinese Orpheus. This instrument has a
large framework on which are hung sixteen stones of
different sizes, which are struck, like drums, with a kind
of hammer. According to Amiot, only a certain kind of
stone found near the banks of the river Tee will serve for
the making of these instruments, and in the year 2200 B.C.
the Emperor Yu assessed the different provinces so many
stones each for the palace instruments, in place of tribute.

The sound of metal is embodied in the various kinds
of bells, which are arranged in many different series,
sometimes after the patterns of the king, while sometimes
they are played separately.

The sound of clay, or baked earth, is given by a kind
of round egg made of porcelain—for that is what it
amounts to—pierced with five holes and a mouthpiece,
upon blowing through which the sound is produced—an
instrument somewhat suggestive of our ocarina.

The sound of silk is given by two instruments: one
a kind of flat harp with seven strings, called che, the
other with twenty-five strings, called kin, in size from
seven to nine feet long. The ancient form of this instrument
is said to have had fifty strings.

The sound of wood is a strange element in a Chinese
orchestra, for it is produced in three different ways:
first, by an instrument in the form of a square wooden
box with a hole in one of its sides through which the
hand, holding a small mallet, is inserted, the sound of
wood being produced by hammering with the mallet on
the inside walls of the box, just as the clapper strikes a

bell. This box is placed at the northeast corner of the
orchestra, and begins every piece. Second, by a set of
strips of wood strung on a strap or cord, the sound of which
is obtained by beating the palm of the hand with them.
The third is the strangest of all, for the instrument consists
of a life-size wooden tiger. It has a number of teeth
or pegs along the ridge of its back, and it is “played”
by stroking these pegs rapidly with a wooden staff, and
then striking the tiger on the head. This is the prescribed
end of every Chinese orchestral composition, and
is supposed to be a symbol of man’s supremacy over
brute creation. The tiger has its place in the northwest
corner of the orchestra.

The sound of bamboo is represented in the familiar
form of Pan’s pipes, and various forms of flutes which
hardly need further description.

And finally the sound of the gourd. The gourd is a kind
of squash, hollowed out, in which from thirteen to twenty-four
pipes of bamboo or metal are inserted; each one of these
pipes contains a metal reed, the vibration of which causes
the sound. Below the reed are cut small holes in the pipes,
and there is a pipe with a mouthpiece to keep the gourd,
which is practically an air reservoir, full of air. The air
rushing out through the bamboo pipes will naturally
escape through the holes cut below the reeds, making no
sound, but if the finger stops one or more of these holes,
the air is forced up through the reeds, thus giving a musical
sound, the pitch of which will be dependent on the
length of the pipes and the force with which the air passes
through the reed.

Other instruments of the Chinese are gongs of all
sizes, trumpets, and several stringed instruments somewhat
akin to our guitars and mandolins. Neither the
Chinese nor the Japanese have ever seemed to consider
the voice as partaking of the nature of music. This is
strange, for the language of the Chinese depends on
flexibility of the voice to make it even intelligible. As a
matter of fact, singing, in our sense of the word, is unknown
to them.

V

THE MUSIC OF THE CHINESE (Continued)

Having
described the musical instruments in use in
China we still have for consideration the music itself,
and the conditions which led up to it.

Among the Chinese instruments mentioned in the preceding
chapter, the preponderance of instruments of
percussion, such as drums, gongs, bells, etc., has probably
been noticed. In connection with the last named
we meet with one of the two cases in Chinese art in which
we see the same undercurrent of feeling, or rather superstition,
as that found among western nations. We read
in the writings of Mencius, the Chinese philosopher (350
B.C.), the following bit of gossip about the king Senen
of Tse.

“The king,” said he, “was sitting aloft in the hall, when
a man appeared, leading an ox past the lower part of it.
The king saw him, and asked, ‘Where is the ox going?’

“The man replied, ‘We are going to consecrate a bell
with its blood.’

“The king said, ‘Let it go. I cannot bear its frightened
appearance as if it were an innocent person going to the
place of death.’

“The man answered, ‘Shall we then omit the consecration
of the bell?’

“The king said, ‘How can that be omitted? Change
the ox for a sheep.’”

As stated before, this is one of the few cases in which
Chinese superstition coincides with that of the West;
for our own church bells were once consecrated in very
much the same manner, a survival of that ancient universal
custom of sacrifice. With the exception of this
resemblance, which, however, has nothing to do with
actual music, everything in Chinese art is exactly the
opposite of our western ideas on the subject.

The Chinese orchestra is composed of about sixteen
different types of percussion instruments and four kinds of
wind and stringed instruments, whereas in our European
orchestras the ratio is exactly reversed. Their orchestras
are placed at the back of the stage, ours in front of it.
The human voice is not even mentioned in their list of
musical sounds (sound of metal, baked clay, wood,
skin, bamboo, etc)., whereas we consider it the most
nearly perfect instrument existing. This strange perversity
once caused much discussion in days when we knew
less of China than we do at present, as to whether the
Chinese organs of hearing were not entirely different
from those of western nations. We now know that this
contradiction runs through all their habits of life. With
them white is the colour indicative of mourning; the
place of honour is on the left hand; the seat of intellect
is in the stomach; to take off one’s hat is considered an
insolent gesture; the magnetic needle of the Chinese compass
is reckoned as pointing south, instead of north; even
up to the middle of the nineteenth century the chief weapon

in war was the bow and arrow, although they were long before
acquainted with gunpowder—and so on, ad infinitum.

We are aware that the drum is the most primitive instrument
known to man. If all our knowledge of the Chinese
were included in a simple list of their orchestral instruments,
we should recognize at once that the possession
of the gourd, mouth-organ, and lute indicates a nation
which has reached a high state of civilization; on the
other hand, the great preponderance of bells, gongs, drums,
etc., points unmistakably to the fact that veneration of
the laws and traditions of the past (a past of savage barbarism),
and a blind acquiescence in them, must constitute
the principal factor in that civilization. The writings
of Chinese philosophers are full of wise sayings about
music, but in practice the music itself becomes almost
unbearable. For instance, in the Confucian Analects we
read, “The Master
(Confucius) 2 
said: ‘How to play music
may be known. At the commencement of the piece, all
the parts should sound together. As it proceeds, they
should be in harmony, severally distinct, and flowing
without a break, and thus on to the conclusion.’” The
definition is certainly remarkable when one considers
that it was given about five hundred years before our
era. In practice, however, the Chinese do not distinguish
between musical combinations of sound and noise; therefore
the above definition must be taken in a very different
sense from that which ordinarily would be the case. By
harmony, Confucius evidently means similarity of noises,

and by “melody flowing without a break” he means
absolute monotony of rhythm. We know this from the
hymns to the ancestors which, with the hymns to the
Deity, are the sacred songs of China, songs which have
come down from time immemorial.

According to Amiot one of the great court functions
is the singing of the “Hymn to the Ancestors,” which is
conducted by the Emperor. Outside the hall where this
ceremony takes place are stationed a number of bell and
gong players who may not enter, but who, from time to
time, according to fixed laws, join in the music played and
sung inside. In the hall the orchestra is arranged in the
order prescribed by law: the ou, or wooden tiger, which
ends every piece, is placed at the northwest end of the
orchestra, and the tschou, or wooden box-drum, which
begins the music, at the northeast; in the middle are
placed the singers who accompany the hymn by posturing
as well as by chanting. At the back of the hall are
pictures of the ancestors, or merely tablets inscribed
with their names, before which is a kind of altar, bearing
flowers and offerings. The first verse of the hymn consists
of eight lines in praise of the godlike virtues of the ancestors,
whose spirits are supposed to descend from Heaven
and enter the hall during the singing of this verse by
the chorus. Then the Emperor prostrates himself three
times before the altar, touching his head to the earth
each time. As he offers the libations and burns the perfumes
on the altar, the chorus sings the second verse of
eight lines, in which the spirits are thanked for answering
the prayer and entreated to accept the offerings. The

Emperor then prostrates himself nine times, after which
he resumes his position before the altar, while the last
verse of eight lines, eulogistic of the ancestors, is being
chanted; during this the spirits are supposed to ascend
again to Heaven. The hymn ends with the scraping of
the tiger’s back and striking it on the head.

We can imagine the partial gloom of this species of
chapel, lighted by many burning, smoky joss-sticks, with
its glint of many-coloured silks, and gold embroidery; the
whining, nasal, half-spoken, monotonous drone of the
singers with their writhing figures bespangled with gold
and vivid colour; the incessant stream of shrill tones from
the wind instruments; the wavering, light clatter of the
musical stones broken by the steady crash of gongs and
the deep booming of large drums; while from outside, the
most monstrous bell-like noises vaguely penetrate the
smoke-laden atmosphere. The ceremony must be barbarously
impressive; the strange magnificence of it all, together
with the belief in the actual presence of the spirits,
which the vague white wreaths of joss-stick smoke help to
suggest, seem to lend it dignity. From the point of view
of what we call music, the hymn is childish enough; but
we must keep in mind the definition of Confucius. According
to the Chinese, music includes that phase of sound
which we call mere noise, and the harmonizing of this
noise is Chinese art. We must admit, therefore, that
from this point of view their orchestra is well balanced,
for what will rhyme better with noise than more noise?
The gong is best answered by the drum, and the tomtom
by the great bell.

China also has its folk song, which seems to be an
irrepressible flower of the field in all countries. This also
follows the precepts of the sages in using only the five-note
or pentatonic scale found among so many other
nationalities. It differs, however, from the official or
religious music, inasmuch as that unrhythmic perfection
of monotony, so loved by Confucius, Mencius, and their
followers, is discarded in favour of a style more naturally
in touch with human emotion. These folk songs have a
strong similarity to Scotch and Irish songs, owing to the
absence of the fourth and seventh degrees of the scale.
If they were really sung to the accompaniment of chords,
the resemblance would be very striking. The Chinese
singing voice, however, is not sonorous, the quality
commonly used being a kind of high, nasal whine, very far
removed from what we call music. The accompaniment
of the songs is of a character most discordant to European
ears, consisting as it does mainly of constant drum or
gong beats interspersed with the shrill notes of the kin,
the principal Chinese stringed instrument. Ambros, the
historian, quotes a number of these melodies, but falls
into a strange mistake, for his version of a folk song
called “Tsin-fa” is as follows:

[MIDI]

Now this is exactly as if a Chinaman, wishing to give his
countrymen an idea of a Beethoven sonata, were to eliminate
all the harmony and leave only the bare melody
accompanied by indiscriminate beats on the gong and a
steady banging on two or three drums of different sizes.
This is certainly the manner in which the little melody
just quoted would be accompanied, and not by European
chords and rhythms.

If we could eliminate from our minds all thoughts of
music and bring ourselves to listen only to the texture
of sounds, we could better understand the Chinese ideal
of musical art. For instance, if in listening to the deep,
slow vibrations of a large gong we ignore completely all
thought of pitch, fixing our attention only upon the
roundness and fullness of the sound and the way it gradually
diminishes in volume without losing any of its pulsating
colour, we should then realize what the Chinese
call music. Confucius said, “When the music master

Che first entered on his office, the finish with the Kwan-Ts’eu
(Pan’s-pipes) was magnificent—how it filled the
ears!” And that is just what Chinese music aims to
do, it “fills the ears” and therefore is
“magnificent.” 3 

With their views as to what constitutes the beautiful
in music it is not strange that the Chinese find our music
detestable. It goes too fast for them. They ask, “Why
play another entirely different kind of sound until one
has already enjoyed to the full what has gone before?”
As they told Père Amiot many years ago: “Our music
penetrates through the ear to the heart, and from the
heart to the soul; that your music cannot do.” Amiot
had played on a harpsichord some pieces by Rameau
(“Les Cyclopes,” “Les Charmes,” etc.) and much flute
music, but they could make nothing of it.

According to their conception of music, sounds must
follow one another slowly, in order to pass through the

ears to the heart and thence to the soul; therefore they
went back with renewed satisfaction to their long, monotonous
chant accompanied by a pulsating fog of clangour.

Some years ago, at the time of that sudden desire of
China, or more particularly of Li Hung Chang, to know
more of occidental civilization, some Chinese students
were sent by their government to Berlin to study music.
After about a month’s residence in Berlin these students
wrote to the Chinese government asking to be recalled,
as they said it would be folly to remain in a barbarous
country where even the most elementary principles of
music had not yet been grasped.

To go deeply into the more technical side of Chinese
music would be a thankless task, for in the Chinese character
the practical is entirely overshadowed by the speculative.
All kinds of fanciful names are given to the
different tones, and many strange ideas associated with
them. Although our modern chromatic scale (all but
the last half-tone) is familiar to them, they have never
risen to a practical use of it even to this day. The Chinese
scale is now, as it always has been, one of five notes to
the octave, that is to say, our modern major scale with
the fourth and seventh omitted.

From a technical point of view, the instruments of
bamboo attain an importance above all other Chinese
instruments. According to the legend, the Pan’s-pipes
of bamboo regulated the tuning of all other instruments,
and as a matter of fact the pipe giving the note F, the universal
tonic, is the origin of all measures also. For this
pipe, which in China is called the “musical foot,” is at

the same time a standard measure, holding exactly
twelve hundred millet seeds, and long enough for one
hundred millet seeds to stand end on end within it.

In concluding this consideration of the music of the
Chinese, I would draw attention to the unceasing repetition
which constitutes a prominent feature in all barbarous or
semi-barbarous music. In the “Hymn of the Ancestors”
this endless play on three or four notes is very marked.

[MIDI]

In other songs it is equally apparent.

[MIDI]

[MIDI]

[MIDI]

This characteristic is met with in the music of the
American Indians, also in American street songs, in fact
in all music of a primitive nature, just as our school
children draw caricatures similar to those made by great
chiefs and medicine men in the heart of Africa, and,
similarly, the celebrated “graffiti” of the Roman soldiers
were precisely of the same nature as the beginnings of
Egyptian art. In art, the child is always a barbarian
more or less, and all strong emotion acting on a naturally
weak organism or a primitive nature brings the same
result, namely, that of stubborn repetition of one idea.
An example of this is Macbeth, who, in the very height
of his passion, stops to juggle with the word “sleep,” and
in spite of the efforts of his wife, who is by far the more
civilized of the two, again and again recurs to it, even
though he is in mortal danger. When Lady Macbeth at
last breaks down, she also shows the same trait in regard
to her bloodstained hands. It is not so far from Scotland
to the Polar regions, and there we find that when Kane
captured a young Eskimo and kept him on his ship, the
only sign of life the prisoner gave was to sing over and
over to himself the following:

[MIDI]

Coming back again to civilization, we find Tennyson’s
Elaine, in her grief, repeating, incessantly the words,
“Must I then die.”

The music of the Siamese, Burmese, Javanese, and
Japanese has much in common with that of the Chinese,
the difference between the first two and the last named

being mainly in the absence of the king, or musical stones,
or rather the substitution of sets of drums in place of it.
For instance, the Burmese drum-organ, as it is called,
consists of twenty-one drums of various sizes hung inside
a great hoop. Their gong-organ consists of fifteen or
more gongs of different sizes strung inside a hoop in the
same manner. The player takes his place in the middle
of the hoop and strikes the drums or gongs with a kind of
stick. These instruments are largely used in processions,
being carried by two men, just as a sedan chair is borne;
the player, in order to strike all the gongs and bells, must
often walk backwards, or strike them behind his back.

In Javanese and Burmese music these sets of gongs
and drums are used incessantly, and form a kind of high-pitched,
sustained tone beneath which the music is played
or sung.

In Siamese music the wind instruments have a prominent
place. After having heard the Siamese Royal
Orchestra a number of times in London, I came to the
conclusion that the players on the different instruments
improvise their parts, the only rule being the general
character of the melodies to be played, and the finishing
together. The effect of the music was that of a contrapuntal
nightmare, hideous to a degree which one who has
not heard it cannot conceive. Berlioz, in his “Soirées
de l’orchestre,” well described its effect when he said:

“After the first sensation of horror which one cannot repress, one
feels impelled to laugh, and this hilarity can only be controlled by
leaving the hall. So long as these impossible sounds continue, the
fact of their being gravely produced, and in all sincerity admired
by the players, makes the ‘concert’ appear inexpressibly ‘comic.’”

The Japanese had the same Buddhistic disregard for
euphony, but they have adopted European ideas in
music and are rapidly becoming occidentalized from a
musical point of view. Their principal instruments are
the koto and the samisen. The former is similar to the
Chinese che, and is a kind of large zither with thirteen
strings, each having a movable bridge by means of
which the pitch of the string may be raised or lowered.
The samisen is a kind of small banjo, and probably
originated in the Chinese kin.

From Buddhism to sun worship, from China to Peru
and Mexico, is a marked change, but we find strange
resemblances in the music of these peoples, seeming
almost to corroborate the theory that the southern
American races may be traced back to the extreme Orient.
We remember that in the Chinese sacred chants—“official”
music as one may call it—all the notes were
of exactly the same length. Now Garcilaso de la Vega
(1550), in his “Commentarios Reales,” tells us that
unequal time was unknown in Peru, that all the notes in
a song were of exactly the same length. He further tells
us that in his time the voice was but seldom heard in
singing, and that all the songs were played on the flute,
the words being so well known that the melody of the
flute immediately suggested them. The Peruvians were
essentially a pipe race, while, on the other hand, the instruments
of the Mexicans were of the other extreme, all
kinds of drums, copper gongs, rattles, musical stones,
cymbals, bells, etc., thus completing the resemblance to
Chinese art. In Prescott’s “Conquest of Peru” we may

read of the beautiful festival of Raymi, or adoration of
the sun, held at the period of the summer solstice. It
describes how the Inca and his court, followed by the
whole population of the city, assembled at early dawn
in the great square of Cuzco, and how, at the appearance
of the first rays of the sun, a great shout would go up, and
thousands of wind instruments would break forth into a
majestic song of adoration. That the Peruvians were a
gentler nation than the Mexicans can be seen from their
principal instrument, the pipe.

While it has been strenuously denied that on such occasions
human sacrifices were offered in Peru, the Mexicans,
that race whose principal instruments were drums and
brass trumpets, not only held such sacrifices, but, strange
to say, held them in honour of a kind of god of music,
Tezcatlipoca. This festival was the most important in
Mexico, and took place at the temple or “teocalli,” a
gigantic, pyramid-like mass of stone, rising in terraces to
a height of eighty-six feet above the city, and culminating
in a small summit platform upon which the long procession
of priests and victims could be seen from all parts of
the city. Once a year the sacrifice was given additional
importance, for then the most beautiful youth in Mexico
was chosen to represent the god himself. For a year
before the sacrifice he was dressed as Tezcatlipoca, in
royal robes and white linen, with a helmet-like crown of
sea shells with white cocks’ plumes, and with an anklet
hung with twenty gold bells as a symbol of his power,
and he was married to the most beautiful maiden in
Mexico. The priests taught him to play the flute, and

whenever the people heard the sound of it they fell down
and worshipped him.

The account may be found in Bancroft’s great work
on the “Native Races of the Pacific,” also Sahagun’s
“Nueva España and Bernal Diaz,” but perhaps the most
dramatic description is that by Rowbotham:

And when the morning of the day of sacrifice arrived, he was
taken by water to the Pyramid Temple where he was to be sacrificed,
and crowds lined the banks of the river to see him in the
barge, sitting in the midst of his beautiful companions. When
the barge touched the shore, he was taken away from those companions
of his forever, and was delivered over to a band of priests, exchanging
the company of beautiful women for men clothed in black
mantles, with long hair matted with blood—their ears also were
mangled. These conducted him to the steps of the pyramid, and he
was driven up amidst a crowd of priests, with drums beating and
trumpets blowing. As he went up he broke an earthen flute on
every step to show that his love, and his delights were over. And
when he reached the top, he was sacrificed on an altar of jasper, and
the signal that the sacrifice was completed was given to the multitudes
below by the rolling of the great
sacrificial drum. 4 

 2 
Kong. His disciples called him Fu Tsee, or “the master”; Jesuit
missionaries Latinized this to Confucius.

 3 
The Chinese theatre has been called an unconscious parody of
our old-fashioned Italian opera, and there are certainly many resemblances.
In a Chinese play, when the situation becomes tragic, or
when one of the characters is seized with some strong emotion, it
finds vent in a kind of aria. The dialogue is generally given in the
most monotonous manner possible—using only high throat and
head tones, occasionally lowering or raising the voice on a word,
to express emotion. This monotonous, and to European ears,
strangely nonchalant, nasal recitative, is being continually interrupted
by gong pounding and the shrill, high sound of discordant
reed instruments. When one or more of the characters commits
suicide (which as we know is an honoured custom in China) he sings—or
rather whines—a long chant before he dies, just as his western
operatic colleagues do, as, for instance, Edgar in “Lucia di Lammermoor”
and even, to come nearer home, Siegfried in “Götterdämmerung.”

 4 
This drum was made of serpents’ skins, and the sound of it was
so loud that it could be heard eight miles away.

VI

THE MUSIC OF GREECE

The
first name of significance in Greek music is that
of Homer. The hexameters of “The Iliad” and “The
Odyssey” were quite probably chanted, but the four-stringed
lyre which we associate with the ancient Greek
singers was only used for a few preluding notes—possibly
to pitch the voice of the bard—and not during the chant
itself. For whatever melody this chant possessed, it
depended entirely upon the raising and lowering of the
voice according to the accent of the words and the dramatic
feeling of the narrative. For its rhythm it depended
upon that of the hexameter, which consists of a line of
six dactyls and spondees, the line always ending with a
spondee. Really the line should end with a dactyl
(

)
and a spondee
(
).
If a line ends with
two spondees it is a spondaic hexameter.

From this it would seem that while the pitch of the
chant would be very difficult to gauge, owing to the diversity
of opinion as to how to measure in actual sounds
the effect of emotions upon the human voice, at least the
rhythm of the chants would be well defined, owing to
the hexameter in which the latter were written. Here
again, however, we are cast adrift by theory, for in practice
nothing could be more misleading than such a deduction.
For instance, the following lines from Longfellow’s

“Evangeline” are both in this metre, although the rhythm
of one differs greatly from that of the other.

Wearing her Norman cap, and her kirtle of blue, and the earrings

and

Shielding the house from storms, on the north were the barns and the farm-yard.

Now if we think that these lines can be sung to the same
musical rhythm we are very far from the truth, although
both are hexameters, namely,

dactyls, ending with spondee.

Thus we see that metre in verse and rhythm in music
are two different things, although of course they both
had the same origin.

After all has been said, it is perhaps best to admit that,
so far as Greek music is concerned, its better part certainly
lay in poetry. In ancient times all poetry was sung or
chanted; it was what I have called impassioned speech.
The declamation of “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey”
constituted what was really the “vocal” music of the
poems. With the Greeks the word “music” (mousiké)
included all the æsthetic culture that formed part of the
education of youth; in the same general way a poet was
called a singer, and even in Roman times we find Terence,
in his “Phormio,” alluding to poets as musicians. That
Æschylus and Sophocles were not musicians, as we
understand the term, is very evident in spite of the
controversies on the subject.

Impassioned speech, then, was all that existed of vocal
music, and as such was in every way merely the audible
expression of poetry. I have no doubt that this is the
explanation of the statement that Æschylus and Sophocles
wrote what has been termed the music to their tragedies.
What they really did was to teach the chorus the proper
declamation and stage action. It is well known that at
the Dionysian Festival it was to the poet as “chorus
master” that the prize was awarded, so entirely were the
arts identified one with the other. That declamation
may often reach the power of music, it is hardly necessary
to say. Among modern poets, let any one, for instance,
look at Tennyson’s “Passing of Arthur” for an example
of this kind of music; the mere sound of the words completes
the picture. For instance, when Arthur is dying
and gives his sword, Excalibur, to Sir Bedivere with the
command to throw it into the mere, the latter twice
fails to do so, and returns to Arthur telling him that all
he saw was

“The water lapping on the crag
And the long ripple washing in the reeds.”

But when at last he throws it, the magic sword

“Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon
And flashing round and round, and whirl’d in an arch
Shot like a streamer of the northern morn.
So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur.”

Again, when Sir Bedivere, carrying the dying king,
stumbles up over the icy rocks to the shore, his armour
clashing and clanking, the verse uses all the clangour
of cr—ck, the slipping s’s too, and the vowel a is used in

all its changes; when the shore is finally reached, the verse
suddenly turns into smoothness, the long o‘s giving the
same feeling of breadth and calm that modern music
would attempt if it treated the same subject.

Here are the lines:

Dry clash’d his harness in the icy caves
And barren chasms, and all to left and right
The bare, black cliff clang’d round him as he based
His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang
Sharp-smitten with the dint of arméd heels.
And on a sudden, lo! the level lake
And the long glories of the winter moon.

When we think of the earlier Greek plays, we must
imagine the music of the words themselves, the cadenced
voices of the protagonist or solitary performer, and the
chorus, the latter keeping up a rhythmic motion with the
words. This, I am convinced, was the extent of Greek
music, so far as that which was ascribed to the older poets
is concerned.

Instrumental music was another thing, and although
we possess no authentic examples of it, we know what
its scales consisted of and what instruments were in use.
It would be interesting to pass in review the tragedies of
Æschylus and Sophocles, the odes of Sappho and Pindar,
those of the latter having a novel periodicity of form
which gives force to the suggestion that these choric
dances were the forerunners of our modern instrumental
forms.

Such matters, however, take us from our actual subject,
and we will therefore turn to Pythagoras, at Crotona,
in Italy (about 500 B.C.), whom we find already

laying down the rules forming a mathematical and scientific
basis for the Greek musical scale.

More than three centuries had passed since Homer had
chanted his “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” and in the course of
the succeeding fifty years some of the master spirits of
the world were to appear. When we think of Pythagoras,
Gautama, Buddha, Confucius, Æschylus, Sophocles, Sappho,
Pindar, Phidias, and Herodotus as contemporaries—and
this list might be vastly extended—it seems as if
some strange wave of ideality had poured over mankind.
In Greece, however, Pythagoras’s theory of metempsychosis
(doctrine of the supposed transmigration of the soul
from one body to another) was not strong enough to make
permanent headway, and his scientific theories unhappily
turned music from its natural course into the workshop
of science, from which Aristoxenus in vain attempted to
rescue it.

At that time Homer’s hexameter had begun to experience
many changes, and from the art of rhythm developed
that of rhyme and form. The old lyre, from having
four strings, was developed by Terpander, victor in the
first musical contest at the feast of Apollo Carneius, into
an instrument of seven strings, to which Pythagoras 5 

added an eighth, Theophrastus a ninth, and so on until
the number of eighteen was reached.

Flute and lyre playing had attained a high state of
excellence, for we hear that Lasus, the teacher of the
poet Pindar (himself the son of a Theban flute player),
introduced into lyre playing the runs and light passages
which, until that time, it had been thought possible to
produce only on the flute.

The dance also had undergone a wonderful development
rhythmically; for even in Homer’s time we read in “The
Odyssey” of the court of Alcinoüs at Phocæa, how two
princes danced before Ulysses and played with a scarlet
ball, one throwing it high in the air, the other always
catching it with his feet off the ground; and then changing,
they flung the ball from one to the other with such rapidity
that it made the onlookers dizzy. During the play,
Demidocus chanted a song, and accompanied the dance
with his lyre, the players never losing a step. As Aristides
(died 468 B.C.), speaking of Greek music many
centuries later said: “Metre is not a thing which concerns
the ear alone, for in the dance it is to be seen.” Even a
statue was said to have silent rhythm, and pictures were
spoken of as being musical or unmusical.

Already in Homer’s time, the Cretans had six varieties
of

time to which they danced:

The first was known as the Cretic foot, being in a way the
model or type from which the others were made; but the
others were called pæons. The “Hymn to Apollo” was
called a pæon or pæan, for the singers danced in Cretic
rhythms as they chanted it.

There were many other dances in Greece, each having
its characteristic rhythm. For instance, the Molossian
dance consisted of three long steps,



;
that of the
Laconians was the dactyl,



,
which was sometimes
reversed



.
In the latter form it was also the
chief dance of the Locrians, the step being called anapæst.
From Ionia came the two long and two short steps,



,
, or




,
which were called
Ionic feet. The Doric steps consisted primarily of a
trochee and a spondee,




or

time. These
values, however, were arranged in three other different
orders, namely,















and
were called the first, second, third, or fourth epitrite, according
to the positions of the short step. The second
epitrite was considered the most distinctly Doric.

The advent of the
Dionysian 6  festivals in Greece
threatened to destroy art, for those wild Bacchic dances,
which are to be traced back to that frenzied worship of
Bel and Astarte in Babylon, wild dances amenable only to
the impulse of the moment, seemed to carry everything
before them. Instead of that, however, the hymns to
Bacchus, who was called in Phœnicia the flute god, from
which the characteristics of his worship are indicated,

were the germs from which tragedy and comedy developed,
and the mad bacchanalian dances were tamed into dithyrambs.
For the Corybantes, priests of the goddess
Cybele, brought from Phrygia, in Asia Minor, the darker
form of this worship; they mourned for the death of
Bacchus, who was supposed to die in winter and to come
to life again in the spring. When these mournful hymns
were sung, a goat was sacrificed on the altar; thus the
origin of the word “tragedy” or “goat song” (tragos,
goat, and odos, singer). As the rite developed, the leader
of the chorus would chant the praises of Dionysus, and
sing of his adventures, to which the chorus would make
response. In time it became the custom for the leader, or
coryphæus, to be answered by one single member of the
chorus, the latter being thus used merely for the chanting
of commentaries on the narrative. The answerer was
called “hypocrite,” afterward the term for actor.

This was the material from which Æschylus created
the first tragedy, as we understand the term. Sophocles
(495–406 B.C.) followed, increasing the number of actors,
as did also Euripides (480–406 B.C.).

Comedy (komos, revel, and odos, singer) arose from the
spring and summer worship of Bacchus, when everything
was a jest and Nature smiled again.

The dithyramb (dithyrambos or Bacchic step,





)
brought a new step to the dance and therefore a new
element into poetry, for all dances were choric, that is to
say they were sung as well as danced.

Arion was the first to attempt to bring the dithyramb into
poetry, by teaching the dancers to use a slower movement

and to observe greater regularity in their various steps.
The Lydian flute, as may be supposed, was the instrument
which accompanied the dithyramb, associated with all
kinds of harsh, clashing instruments, such as cymbals,
tambourines, castanets. These Arion tried to replace by
the more dignified Grecian lyre; but it was long before
this mad dance sobered down to regular rhythm and
form. From Corinth, where Arion first laboured, we pass
to Sicyon, where the taming of the dithyramb into an
art form was accomplished by Praxilla, a poetess who
added a new charm to the lilt of this Bacchic metre,
namely, rhyme.

And this newly acquired poetic wealth was in keeping
with the increasing luxury and magnificence of the cities,
for we read in Athenæus and Diodorus that Agrigentum
sent to the Olympic games three hundred chariots,
drawn by white horses. The citizens wore garments of
cloth of gold, and even their household ornaments were of
gold and silver; in their houses they had wine cellars
which contained three hundred vats, each holding a hundred
hogsheads of wine. In Sybaris this luxury reached
its height, for the Sybarites would not allow any trade
which caused a disagreeable sound, such as that of the
blacksmith, carpenter, or mason, to be carried on in their
city limits. They dressed in garments of deep purple,
tied their hair in gold threads, and the city was famed for
its incessant banqueting and merrymaking. It was such
luxury as this that Pindar found at the court of Hiero,
at Syracuse, whither Æschylus had retired after his
defeat by Sophocles at the Dionysian Festival at Athens.

The worship of Bacchus being at its height at that time, it
may be imagined that wine formed the principal element of
their feasts. And even as the dithyramb had been pressed
into the service of poetry, so was drinking made rhythmic
by music. For even the wine was mixed with water
according to musical ratios; for instance, the pæonic or 3
to 2,



=
;
the iambic or 2 to 1,

=
;
dactylic or 2 to 2,


=
.
The master of the
feast decided the ratio, and a flute girl played a prescribed
melody while the toast to good fortune, which commenced
every banquet, was being drunk. By the time the last
note had sounded, the great cup should have gone round
the table and been returned to the master. And then
they had the game of the cottabos, which consisted of
throwing the contents of a wine cup high in the air in
such a manner that the wine would fall in a solid mass
into a metal basin. The winner was the one who produced
the clearest musical sound from the basin.

We see from all this that music was considered rather
a beautiful plaything or a mere colour. By itself it was
considered effeminate; therefore the early Greeks always
had the flute player accompanied by a singer, and the
voice was always used with the lyre to prevent the latter
appealing directly to the senses. The dance was corrected
in the same manner; for when we speak of Greek dances,
we always mean choric dances. Perhaps the nearest
approach to the effect of what we call music was made
by Æschylus, in the last scene of his “Persians,” when
Xerxes and the chorus end the play with one continued

wail of sorrow. In this instance the words take second
place, and the actual sound is depended upon for the
dramatic effect.

The rise and fall of actual instrumental music in Greece
may be placed between 500 and 400 B.C. After the
close of the Peloponnesian War (404 B.C.), when Sparta
supplanted Athens as the leader of Greece, art declined
rapidly, and at the time of Philip of Macedon (328 B.C.)
may be said to have been practically extinct. Then,
in place of the dead ashes of art, the cold fire of science
arose; for we have such men as Euclid (300 B.C.) and
his school applying mathematics to musical sounds, and
a system of cold calculation to an art that had needed
all the warmth of emotional enthusiasm to keep it alive.
Thus music became a science. Had it not been for the
little weeds of folk song which managed with difficulty
to survive at the foot of this arid dust heap, and which
were destined to be transformed and finally to bloom
into such lovely flowers in our times, we might yet
have been using the art to illustrate mathematical
calculations.

The teaching of Pythagoras was the first step in this
classification of sounds; and he went further than this,
for he also classified the emotions affected by music. It
was therefore a natural consequence that in his teaching he
should forbid music of an emotional character as injurious.
When he came to Crotona, it was to a city that vied
with Agrigentum, Sybaris, and Tarentum in luxury; its
chief magistrate wore purple garments, a golden crown
upon his head, and white shoes on his feet. It was said

of Pythagoras that he had studied twelve years with the
Magi in the temples of Babylon; had lived among the
Druids of Gaul and the Indian Brahmins; had gone among
the priests of Egypt and witnessed their most secret
temple rites. So free from care or passion was his face
that he was thought by the people to be Apollo; he was of
majestic presence, and the most beautiful man they had
ever seen. So the people accepted him as a superior
being, and his influence became supreme over science and
art, as well as manners.

He gave the Greeks their first scientific analysis of sound.
The legend runs that, passing a blacksmith’s shop and
hearing the different sounds of the hammering, he conceived
the idea that sounds could be measured by some
such means as weight is measured by scales, or distance
by the foot rule. By weighing the different hammers,
so the story goes, he obtained the knowledge of harmonics
or overtones, namely, the fundamental, octave, fifth,
third, etc. This legend, which is stated seriously in many
histories of music, is absurd, for, as we know, the hammers
would not have vibrated. The anvils would have
given the sound, but in order to produce the octave,
fifth, etc., they would have had to be of enormous proportions.
On the other hand, the monochord, with which
students in physics are familiar, was his invention; and the
first mathematical demonstrations of the effect on musical
pitch of length of cord and tension, as well as the length
of pipes and force of breath, were his.

These mathematical divisions of the monochord, however,
eventually did more to stifle music for a full thousand

years than can easily be imagined. This division of the
string made what we call harmony impossible; for by it
the major third became a larger interval than our modern
one, and the minor third smaller. Thus thirds did not
sound well together, in fact were dissonances, the only
intervals which did harmonize being the fourth, fifth,
and octave. This system of mathematically dividing
tones into equal parts held good up to the middle of the
sixteenth century, when Zarlino, who died in 1590, invented
the system in use at the present time, called the tempered
scale, which, however, did not come into general use
until one hundred years later.

Aristoxenus, a pupil of Aristotle, who lived more than
a century after Pythagoras, rejected the monochord as a
means for gauging musical sounds, believing that the ear,
not mathematical calculation, should be the judge as to
which interval sounds “perfect.” But he was unable to
formulate a system that would bring the third (and naturally
its inversion the sixth) among the harmonizing intervals
or consonants. Didymus (about 30 B.C.) first
discovered that two different-sized whole tones were necessary
in order to make the third consonant; and Ptolemy
(120 A.D.) improved on this system somewhat. But
the new theory remained without any practical effect
until nearly the seventeenth century, when the long
respected theory of the perfection of mathematical calculation
on the basis of natural phenomena was overthrown
in favour of actual effect. If Aristoxenus had
had followers able to combat the crushing influence of
Euclid and his school, music might have grown up with

the other arts. As it is, music is still in its infancy, and
has hardly left its experimental stage.

Thus Pythagoras brought order into the music as well
as into the lives of people. But whereas it ennobled the
people, it killed the music, the one vent in life through
which unbounded utterance is possible; its essence is so
interwoven with spirituality that to tear it away and
fetter it with human mathematics is to lower it to the level
of mere utilitarianism. And so it was with Greek music,
which was held subordinate to metre, to poetry, to acting,
and finally became a term of contempt. Pythagoras
wished to banish the flute, as Plato also did later, and the
name of flute player was used as a reproach. I fancy this
was because the flute, on account of its construction,
could ignore the mathematical divisions prescribed for
the stringed instruments, and therefore could indulge in
purely emotional music. Besides, the flute was the
chosen instrument of the orgiastic Bacchic cult, and its
associations were those of unbridled license. To be sure,
the voice was held by no mathematical restrictions as to
pitch; but its music was held in check by the words, and
its metre by dancing feet.

Having measured the musical intervals, there still
remained the task of classifying the different manners of
singing which existed in Greece, and using all their different
notes to form a general system. For just as in different
parts of Greece there existed different dances, the
steps of which were known as Lydian, Ionian, Locrian,
and Dorian feet, and so on, so the melodies to which
they were danced were known as being in the Lydian,

Ionian, Locrian, or Dorian scale or mode. In speaking
of Hindu music, I explained that what we call a mode
consists of a scale, and that one mode differs from another
only in the position of the semitones in this scale. Now
in ancient Greece there were in use over fifteen different
modes, each one common to the part of the country in
which it originated. At the time of Pythagoras there
were seven in general use: the Dorian, Lydian, Æolian
or Locrian, Hypo- (or low) Lydian, Phrygian, Hypo- (or
low) Phrygian, and Mixolydian or mixed Lydian. The
invention of the latter is attributed to Sappho by Plutarch,
quoting Aristoxenus.

These modes were all invested with individual characters
by the Greeks, just as in the present day we say our
major mode is happy, the minor sad. The Dorian mode
was considered the greatest, and, according to Plato, the
only one worthy of men. It was supposed to have a
dignified, martial character. The Lydian, on the other
hand, was all softness, and love songs were written in it.
The Phrygian was of a violent, ecstatic nature, and was
considered as being especially appropriate for dithyrambs,
the metre for the wild bacchanalian dances. For instance,
Aristotle tells how Philoxenus attempted to set dithyrambic
verse to the Dorian mode, and, failing, had to
return to the Phrygian. The Mixolydian, which was
Sappho’s mode, was the mode for sentiment and passion.
The Dorian, Phrygian, and Lydian were the oldest
modes.

Each mode or scale was composed of two sets of four
notes, called tetrachords, probably derived from the

ancient form of the lyre, which in Homer’s time is known
to have had four strings.

Leaving the matter of actual pitch out of the question
(for these modes might be pitched high or low, just as
our major or minor scale may be pitched in different
keys), these three modes were constructed as follows:

Thus we see that a tetrachord commencing with a half-tone
and followed by two whole tones was called a Dorian
tetrachord; one commencing with a tone, followed by
a half-tone, and again a tone, constituted a Phrygian tetrachord.
The other modes were as follows: In the Æolian
or Locrian the semitones occur between the second and
third notes, and the fifth and sixth:

Theraclides Ponticus identifies the Hypodorian with the
Æolian, but says that the name “hypo-” merely denoted a
likeness to Doric, not to pitch. Aristoxenus denies the
identity, and says that the Hypodorian was a semitone
below the Dorian or Hypolydian. In the Hypophrygian,

the semitones occur between the third and fourth, and
sixth and seventh degrees:

In the Hypolydian, the semitones occur between the fourth
and fifth, and seventh and eighth:

The Dorian (E), Phrygian (commencing on F♯ with the
fourth sharped), and the Lydian (A♭ major scale) modes
we have already explained. In the Mixolydian, the semitones
occur between the first and second, and fourth and
fifth degrees:

According to the best evidence (in the works of Ptolemy,
“Harmonics,” second book, and Aristides), these were
approximately the actual pitch of the modes as compared
one to another.

And now the difficulty was to weld all these modes
together into one scale, so that all should be represented
and yet not be complicated by what we should call accidentals.
This was accomplished in the following manner,
by simple mathematical means:

We remember that the Dorian, which was the most
greatly favoured mode in Greece, was divided into two
tetrachords of exactly the same proportions, namely,
semitone, tone, tone. By taking the lowest note of the
Mixolydian, B, and forming a Dorian tetrachord on it,
B C D E were acquired. Adding to this another Dorian

tetrachord, E F G A (commencing on the last note of
the first), and repeating the same series of tetrachords
an octave higher, we have in all four Dorian tetrachords,
two of which overlap the others. The two middle tetrachords,
constituting the original Dorian mode, were called
disjunct, the two outer ones which overlap the middle ones
were called conjunct or synemmenon tetrachords.

If we consider this new scale from octave to octave,
commencing with the lowest note, that is to say from B
to B, we find that it coincides exactly with the Mixolydian
mode; therefore this was called the Mixolydian
octave. The octave in this scale from the second note, C
to C, coincides exactly with the Lydian mode, and was
called the Lydian octave; from the third note, D, up to
its octave gives the Phrygian; from the fourth note, E,
the Dorian; from the fifth, F, the Hypolydian; from the
sixth, G, the Hypophrygian; and from the seventh, A,
the Æolian or Hypodorian octave. Add one note to the
lower end of this universal Greek scale, as it was called,
and we see that the whole tonal system was included
within two octaves. To each of the notes comprising
it was given a name partly derived from its position in
the tetrachords, and partly from the fingering employed
in lyre playing, as shown in the diagram on
page 87.

The fifteen strings of the kithara were tuned according
to this scale, and the A, recurring three times in it, acquired
something of the importance of a tonic or key
note. As yet, however, this scale allowed of no transposition
of a mode to another pitch; in order to accomplish
this the second tetrachord was used as the first of another

similar system. Thus, considering the second tetrachord,
E F G A, as first of the new scale, it would be followed
by A B♭ C D, and the two disjunct tetrachords would
be formed. Followed by the two upper conjunct tetrachords,
and the proslambanómenos added, our system on
a new pitch would be complete. This procedure has
come down almost unchanged to our times; for we have
but two modes, major and minor, which are used on every
pitch, constituting various keys. These Greek modes
are the basis on which all our modern ideas of tonality
rest; for our major mode is simply the Greek Lydian, and
our minor mode the Æolian.

LIST OF NOTES IN THE GREEK SCALE

To go into detailed explanation of the Greek enharmonic
and chromatic pitch will scarcely be worth while, and
I will therefore merely add that the instruments were
sometimes tuned differently, either to relieve the inevitable
monotony of this purely diatonic scale or for purposes of
modulation. A Dorian tetrachord is composed of semitone,
tone, tone; to make it chromatic, it was changed
as follows:

the líchanos, or index
finger string, being lowered a semitone.

The enharmonic pitch consisted of tuning the líchanos
down still further, almost a quarter-tone below the second
string, or parhýpate, thus making the tetrachord run
quarter-tone, quarter-tone, two tones. Besides this,
even in the diatonic, the Greeks used what they called
soft intervals; for example, when the tetrachord, instead
of proceeding by semitone, tone, tone (which system was
called the hard diatonic), was tuned to semitone, three-quarter-tone,
and tone and a quarter. The chromatic
pitch also had several forms, necessitating the use of small
fractional tones as well as semitones.

Our knowledge of the musical notation of the Greeks
rests entirely on the authority of Alypius, and dates
from about the fourth century A.D. That we could
not be absolutely sure of the readings of ancient Greek
melodies, even if we possessed any, is evident from the fact
that these note characters, which at first were derived
from the signs of the zodiac, and later from the letters of
the alphabet, indicate only the relative pitch of the
sounds; the rhythm is left entirely to the metrical value

of the words in the lines to be sung. Two sets of signs
were used for musical notation, the vocal system consisting
of writing the letters of the alphabet in different positions,
upside down, sideways, etc.

Of the instrumental system but little is known, and
that not trustworthy.

 5 
The fundamental doctrine of the Pythagorean philosophy was
that the essence of all things rests upon musical relations, that
numbers are the principle of all that exists, and that the world subsists
by the rhythmical order of its elements. The doctrine of the
“Harmony of the spheres” was based on the idea that the celestial
spheres were separated from each other by intervals corresponding
with the relative length of strings arranged so as to produce harmonious
tones.

 6 
Dionysus, the same as the Roman Bacchus.

VII

THE MUSIC OF THE ROMANS—THE EARLY CHURCH

The
art history of the world makes it clear to us that
when the art of a country turns to over-elaboration of
detail and mechanical dexterity, when there is a general
tendency toward vividness of impression rather than
poignancy and vitality of expression, then we have the
invariable sign of that decadence which inevitably drifts
into revolution of one kind or another. Lasus (500 B.C.),
who, as previously mentioned, was a great flute and lyre
player as well as poet, betrays this tendency, which
reached its culmination under the Romans. Lasus was
more of a virtuoso than a poet; he introduced into Greece
a new and florid style of lyre and harp playing; and it was
he who, disliking the guttural Dorian pronunciation of the
letter S, wrote many of his choric poems without using
this letter once in them. Pindar, his pupil, followed in
his footsteps. In many of his odes we find intricate
metrical devices; for instance, the first line of most of the
odes is so arranged metrically that the same order of
accents is maintained whether the line be read backward
or forward, the short and long syllables falling into
exactly the same places in either case. The line “Hercules,
the patron deity of Thebes,” may be taken as an

example,
.
Such devices occur
all through his poems. We find in them also that magnificence
of diction which is the forerunner of “virtuosity”;
for he speaks of his song as “a temple with
pillars of gold, gold that glitters like blazing fire in the
night time.”

In the hands of Aristophanes (450–380 B.C.), the
technique of poetry continued to advance. In “The
Frogs,” “The Wasps,” and “The Birds” are to be found
marvels of skill in
onomatopoetic 7 
verse. His comedies
called for many more actors than the tragedies had required,
and the chorus was increased from fifteen to twenty-four.
Purple skins were spread across the stage, and the
parabasis (or topical song) and satire vied with the noble
lines of Æschylus and Sophocles for favour with the
public.

Meanwhile, as might have been expected, instrumental
music became more and more independent, and musicians,
especially the flute players, prospered; for we read in
Suidas that they were much more proficient and sought
after than the lyre and kithara players. When they
played, they stood in a conspicuous place in the centre
of the audience. Dressed in long, feminine, saffron-coloured
robes, with veiled faces, and straps round their
cheeks to support the muscles of the mouth, they exhibited
the most startling feats of technical skill. Even women
became flute players, although this was considered disgraceful.
The Athenians even went so far that they

built a temple to the flute player Lamia, and worshipped
her as Venus. The prices paid to these flute players
surpassed even those given to virtuosi in modern times,
sometimes amounting to more than one thousand dollars
a day, and the luxury in which they lived became proverbial.

During this period, Aristophanes of Alexandria (350
B.C.), called “the grammarian,” devised a means for
indicating the inflection of the voice in speaking, by which
the cadences which orators found necessary in impassioned
speech could be classified, at least to some extent. When
the voice was to fall, a downward stroke

was placed
above the syllable; when the voice was to be raised, an
upward stroke

indicated it; and when the voice was
to rise and fall, the sign was
,
which has become our
accent in music. These three signs are found in the
French language, in the accent aigu, or high accent, as in
passé; the accent grave, or low accent, as in sincère; or
circonflexe, as in Phâon. The use of
dots 8  for punctuation
is also ascribed to Aristophanes; and our dots in
musical notation, as well as the use of commas to indicate
breathings, may be traced to this system.

As I have said, all this tended toward technical skill
and analysis; what was lacking in inventive power it was
sought to cover by wonderful execution. The mania for
flute playing, for instance, seemed to spread all over the
world; later we even hear that the king of Egypt, Ptolemy
Auletes (80–51 B.C.), Cleopatra’s father, was nicknamed
“the flute player.”

In Rome, this lack of poetic vitality seemed evident
from the beginning; for while Greece was represented by
the tragedy and comedy, the Romans’ preference was for
mere pantomime, a species of farce of which they possessed
three kinds: (1) The simple pantomime without chorus,
in which the actors made the plot clear to the audience
by means of gestures and dancing. (2) Another which
called for a band of instrumental musicians on the stage
to furnish an accompaniment to the acting of the pantomimist.
(3) The chorus pantomime, in which the chorus
and the orchestra were placed on the stage, supplementing
the gestures of the actors by singing a narrative of the
plot of the pantomime, and playing on their instruments.
The latter also were expressive of the non-ideal character
of the pantomime, as is indicated by the fact that the
orchestra was composed of cymbals, gongs, castanets,
foot castanets, rattles, flutes, bagpipes, gigantic lyres, and
a kind of shell or crockery cymbals, which were clashed
together.

The Roman theatre itself was not a place connected
with the worship of the gods, as it was with the Greeks.
The altar to Dionysus had disappeared from the centre
of the orchestra, and the chorus, or rather the band, was
placed upon the stage with the actors. The bagpipe
now appears for the first time in musical history, although
there is some question as to whether it was not known to
the Assyrians. It represents, perhaps, the only remnant of
Roman music that has survived, for the modern Italian
peasants probably play in much the same way as did
their forefathers. The Roman pipes were bound with

brass, and had about the same power of tone as was
obtained from the trumpet.

It is easy to see that an orchestra thus constituted
would be better adapted for making a great noise than
for music, while the pantomime itself was of such a brutal
nature that the degradation of art may be said to have
been complete. As the decay of art in Egypt culminated
under Ptolemy Auletes, so in Rome it culminated in the
time of Caligula (12–41 A.D.), and Nero (37–68 A.D.).

The latter, as we learn from Suetonius, competed for
prizes in the public musical contests, and was never without
a slave at his elbow to warn him against straining his
voice. In his love of magnificence he resembled a Greek
flute player, with unbounded means to gratify it. His
palace, the “Golden House,” had triple porticos a mile
in length, and enclosed a lake surrounded by buildings
which had the appearance of a city. Within its area
were corn fields, vineyards, pastures, and woods containing
many animals, both wild and tame. In other parts
it was entirely overlaid with gold, and adorned with jewels
and mother-of-pearl. The porch was so high that a colossal
statue of himself, one hundred and twenty feet in height,
stood in it. The supper rooms were vaulted, and compartments
of the ceiling, inlaid with ivory, were made to
revolve and scatter flowers; they also contained pipes
which shed perfumes upon the guests.

When the revolt under Vindex broke out (68 A.D.),
a new instrument had just been brought to Rome. Tertullian,
Suetonius, and Vitruvius agree in calling it an
organ. This instrument, which was the invention of

Ctesibus of Alexandria, consisted of a set of pipes through
which the air was made to vibrate by means of a kind of
water pump operated by iron keys. It was undoubtedly
the direct ancestor of our modern organ. Nero intended
to introduce these instruments into the Roman theatre.
In planning for his expedition against Vindex, his first
care was to provide carriages for his musical instruments;
for his intention was to sing songs of triumph after having
quelled the revolt. He publicly vowed that if his power
in the state were reestablished, he would include a performance
upon organs as well as upon flutes and bagpipes, in
the exhibitions he intended to institute in honour of his
success.

From a musical point of view, Suetonius’s biography of
Nero is interesting chiefly on account of its giving us
glimpses of the life of a professional musician of those
days. We read, together with many other details, that it
was the custom for a singer to lie on his back, with a sheet
of lead upon his breast, to correct unsteadiness in breathing,
and to abstain from food for two days together to
clear his voice, often denying himself fruit and sweet
pastry. The degraded state of the theatre may well be
imagined from the fact that under Nero the custom of
hiring professional applause was instituted. After his
death, which is so dramatically told by Suetonius, music
never revived in Rome.

In the meanwhile, however, a new kind of music had
begun; in the catacombs and underground vaults, the early
Christians were chanting their first hymns. Like all that
we call “new,” this music had its roots in the old. The

hymns sung by the Christians were mainly Hebrew temple
songs, strangely changed into an uncouth imitation of the
ancient Greek drama or worship of Dionysus; for example,
Philo of Alexandria, as well as Pliny the Younger, speaks
of the Christians as accompanying their songs with gestures,
and with steps forward and backward. This Greek
influence is still further implied by the order of one of
the earliest of the Church fathers, Clement of Alexandria
(about 300 A.D.), who forbade the use of the chromatic
style in the hymns, as tending too much toward paganism.
Some writers even go so far as to identify many of the
Christian myths and symbols with those of Greece. For
instance, they see, in the story of Daniel in the lions’ den,
another form of the legend of Orpheus taming the wild
beasts; in Jonah, they recognize Arion and the dolphin;
and the symbol of the Good Shepherd, carrying home the
stray lamb on his shoulders, is considered another form
of the familiar Greek figure of Hermes carrying the goat.

Be this as it may, it is certain that this crude beginning
of Christian music arose from a vital necessity, and was
accompanied by an indomitable faith. If we look back,
we note that until now music had either been the servant
of ignoble masters, looked upon as a mathematical problem
to be solved scientifically, or used according to methods
prescribed by the state. It had been dragged down to
the lowest depths of sensuality by the dance, and its
divine origin forgotten in lilting rhythms and soft, lulling
rhymes.

On the other hand, the mathematicians, in their cold
calculation, reduced music to the utilitarianism of algebra,

and even viewed it as a kind of medicine for the nerves
and mind. When we think of the music of Pythagoras
and his school, we seem to be in a kind of laboratory in
which all the tones are labelled and have their special
directions for use. For the legend runs that he composed
melodies in the diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic
styles as antidotes for moods such as anger, fear, sorrow,
etc., and invented new rhythms which he used to steady
and strengthen the mind, and to produce simplicity of
character in his disciples. He recommended that every
morning, after rising, they should play on the lyre and sing,
in order to clear the mind. It was inevitable that this
half mathematical, half psychologically medicinal manner
of treating music would, in falling into the hands of
Euclid (300 B.C.) and his school, degenerate into a mere
peg on which to hang mathematical theorems. On the
other hand, when we think of Greek dances, we seem to
pass into the bright, warm sunshine. We see graceful
figures holding one another by the wrist, dancing in a
circle around some altar to Dionysus, and singing to the
strange lilt of those unequal measures. We can imagine
the scheme of colour to be white and gold, framed by the
deep-blue arch of the sky, the amethyst sea flecked with
glittering silver foam, and the dark, sombre rocks of the
Cretan coast bringing a suggestion of fate into this dancing,
soulless vision. Turning now to Rome, we see that
this same music has fallen to a wretched slave’s estate,
cowering in some corner until the screams of Nero’s
living torches need to be drowned; and then, with brazen
clangour and unabashed rhythms, this brutal music flaunts

forth with swarms of dancing slaves, shrilling out the
praises of Nero; and the time for successful revolution is
at hand.

The first steps toward actually defining the new music
took place in the second century, when the Christians
were free to worship more openly, and, having wealthy
converts among them, held their meetings in public
places and basilicas which were used by magistrates and
other officials during the day. These basilicas or public
halls had a raised platform at one end, on which the
magistrate sat when in office. There were steps up to it,
and on these steps the clergy stood. The rest of the hall
was called the “nave” (ship), for the simile of “storm-tossed
mariners” was always dear to the early Christian
church. In the centre of the nave stood the reader of
the Scriptures, and on each side of him, ranged along the
wall, were the singers. The Psalms were sung antiphonally,
that is, first one side would sing and the other side
would answer. The congregations were sometimes immense,
for according to St. Jerome (340–420 A.D.) and
St. Ambrose (340–397 A.D.) “the roofs reechoed with
their cries of ‘Alleluia,’ which in sound were like the great
waves of the surging sea.”

Nevertheless this was, as yet, only sound, and not
music. Not until many centuries later did music become
distinct from chanting, which is merely intoned speech.
The disputes of the Arians and the Athanasians also
affected the music of the church, for as early as 306 A.D.,
Arius introduced many secular melodies, and had them
sung by women.

Passing over this, we find that the first actual arrangement
of Christian music into a regular system was
attempted by Pope Sylvester, in 314 A.D., when he
instituted singing schools, and when the heresy of Arius
was formally condemned.

Now this chanting or singing of hymns was more or
less a declamation, thus following the Greek tradition of
using one central note, somewhat in the nature of a
keynote.

Rhythm, distinct melody, and even metre were avoided
as retaining something of the unclean, brutal heathenism
against which the Christians had revolted. It was the
effort to keep the music of the church pure and undefiled
that caused the Council of Laodicea (367 A.D.) to exclude
from the church all singing not authorized from the pulpit.

A few years later (about 370 A.D.) Ambrose, the Archbishop
of Milan, strove to define this music more clearly,
by fixing upon the modes that were to be allowed for these
chants; for we must remember that all music was still
based upon the Greek modes, the modern major and
minor being as yet unknown. In the course of time the
ancient modes had become corrupted, and the modes that
Ambrose took for his hymns were therefore different from
those known in Greece under the same names. His
Dorian is what the ancients called Phrygian,

dominant, A; his Phrygian was the ancient Dorian,

dominant, C; his Lydian corresponded to
the old Hypolydian,

dominant, C; and his

Mixolydian to the old Hypophrygian,

dominant, D. These modes were accepted by the church
and were called the Authentic modes.

Almost two centuries later, Gregory the Great added
four more modes, which were called Plagal or side modes
(from plagios—oblique). These were as follows:

Hypodorian,

dominant, F.

Hypophrygian,

dominant, A.

Hypolydian,

dominant, A.

Hypo-mixolydian,

dominant, C.

It is easy to see that these so-called new modes are
simply new versions of the first four; although they are
lowered a fourth beneath the authentic modes (hence the
hypo), the keynote remains the same in each instance.
Still later two more modes were added to this list, the
Ionic,

dominant, G, which corresponded to
the ancient Greek Lydian; and the Æolian,

dominant, E, which, strange to say, was the only one of
these newer modes which corresponded to its Greek namesake.
Naturally these two newly admitted modes were
also accompanied by their lower pitched attendant modes,
the Hypoionic,

dominant, E, and the
Hypoæolian,

dominant, C.

SUMMARY

Mode.	Key.	Dominant.
Dorian.	D	A
Hypodorian.	D	F
Phrygian.	E	C
Hypophrygian.	E	A
Lydian.	F	C
Hypolydian.	F	A
Mixolydian.	G	D
Hypo-mixolydian.	G	C
Æolian.	A	E
Hypoæolian.	A	C
Ionian.	C	G
Hypoionian.	C	E

Now all these lower, or derived modes, Hypodorian,
Hypophrygian, Hypolydian, etc., received the name Plagal
modes, because there was but one tonic or keynote in
the scale; consequently a melody starting on any degree
of the scale would invariably return to the same tonic
or keynote. They differed from the authentic modes,
inasmuch as in the latter a melody might end either on
the upper or lower tonic or keynote. Thus the melody
itself was said to be either authentic or plagal, according
to whether it had one or two tonics. The theme of
Schumann’s “Etudes symphoniques” is authentic, and
the first variation is plagal.

Between the sixth and tenth centuries there was much
confusion as to the placing of these modes, but they finally
stood as given above. The Greek names were definitely
accepted in the eleventh century, or thereabouts; previously,
they were known also as the first, second, third,
etc., up to the twelfth, church tones or Gregorian modes.

At this point it is necessary to refer again to Ambrose.
Apart from having brought the first four authentic modes
into church music, he composed many hymns which had
this peculiarity, namely, that they were modelled more on
the actual declamation of the words to be sung than had
hitherto been the case. We are told that his chants—to
use the phrase of his contemporary, Francis of Cologne—were
“all for sweetness and melodious sound”; and St.
Augustine (354–430 A.D.), speaks of them with ecstasy.
The words in these hymns were used in connection with
small groups of notes; consequently they could be understood
as they were sung, thus returning in a measure to
the character of the music of the ancients, in which the
word and declamation were of greater importance than
the actual sounds which accompanied them. But now a
strange thing was to happen that was to give us a new art.
Now, at last, music was to be separated from language and
dance rhythms, and stand alone for the first time in the
history of civilization as pure music.

To appreciate the change made by Gregory (540–604
A.D.), it is necessary to bear in mind the state of the
church just before his time. As the Ambrosian chant
had brought something of the old declamation and sweetness
back into the church ceremonial, so also in the

church itself there was a tendency to sink back into the
golden shimmer that had surrounded the ancient pagan
rites. Already Paul of Samosata, Bishop of Antioch
(260 A.D.), had striven to bring a certain Oriental
magnificence into the church ceremonials. He had a
canopied throne erected for himself, from which he would
address his congregation; he introduced applause into the
church, after the fashion of the Roman theatres; he also
had a chorus of women singers, who, as Eusebius tells us,
sang not the Christian hymns, but pagan tunes. Later,
in Constantinople, even this luxury and pomp increased;
the churches had domes of burnished gold, and had become
gigantic palaces, lit by thousands of lamps. The choir,
dressed in glittering robes, was placed in the middle of
the church, and these singers began to show the same
fatal sign of decadence that we saw before in Rome and
Greece. According to St. Chrysostom (347–407 A.D.),
they used unguents on their throats in order to make the
voice flexible, for by this time the singing had become a
mere vehicle for virtuosity; when they sang their tours de
force, the people applauded and waved their handkerchiefs,
as they did also when the preaching pleased them.
The pagans pointed the finger of scorn at the Christians,
as being mere renegades from the old religion, and said,
plausibly enough, that their worship was merely another
form of the Dionysus tragedy. There was the same altar,
the same chorus, the priest who sang and was answered
by the chorus; and the resemblance had grown to such an
extent that St. Chrysostom (350 A.D.) complained that
the church chorus accompanied its singing with theatrical

gestures, which, as we know, is simply the first step towards
the dance.

This was the state of things when Gregory became
Pope in 590 A.D. His additions to the modes already
in use have been explained. His great reform lay in
severing the connection between the music of the church
and that of the pagan world before it. Casting aside the
declamation and rhythm, which up to now had always
dominated pure sound, he abolished the style of church
singing in vogue, and substituted for it a system of chanting
in which every tie between the words and music was
severed.

The music was certainly primitive enough, for it consisted
merely of a rising and falling of the voice for the
space of many notes on one single syllable, as, for instance,

The difference between this and the Ambrosian chant is
evident if we look at the following; and we must also bear
in mind that the Ambrosian chants were very simple in
comparison with the florid tours de force of the Byzantine
church:

Now this reform could not be carried out at once;
it was only through the medium of Charlemagne (742–814
A.D.), a hundred years later, that the Gregorian
chant was firmly established. Authorized by a synod of
bishops, called together from all parts of Europe by Pope
Adrian I, Charlemagne, in 774, caused all the chant and
hymn books of the Ambrosian system throughout Italy to
be burned. So completely was this accomplished that
only one Ambrosian missal was found (by St. Eugenius at
Milan), and from this work alone can we form any idea
as to the character of the music used by the followers of
Ambrose, who were much retarded by the lack of a musical
notation, which was the next factor needed to bring
music to an equality with the other arts.

 7 
Imitating the sound of the thing signified. Poe’s “Raven”
has much of this character.

 8 
ċ, perfect pause; c·, short; c., shortest;
breathings:
hard;
soft.

VIII

FORMATION OF THE SCALE—NOTATION

In
comparing the Ambrosian chant with that of Gregory,
it may be said that we have touched upon the vital
principle of modern music. The novelty in the Gregorian
chant consisted in its absolute emancipation from the
tyranny of actual words and declamation; while the idea,
the poetic principle, or religious ecstasy still remained the
ideal to be expressed in the music. Before this, as already
explained, music was either a mathematical problem, a
rhythm to mark the time in dancing, or a vehicle serving
for the display of clever tours de force, the music of the
tragedies being merely a kind of melodious declamation.
To quote Goethe, “having recognized the fact, it still
remains for us to see how it developed.” Let us now consider
this point.

Three things were necessary before these Gregorian
chants could develop at all: (1) A simple, clean-cut
musical scale or systematized table of musical sounds.
(2) Some definite manner of symbolizing sounds, so that
they could be accurately expressed in writing. (3) A
cultivation of the sense of hearing, in order that mankind
might learn to distinguish between sounds that are discordant
and those that sound well together; in other
words, harmony.

We will begin with the scale, and review what we know
of the Greek modes in order to show how they were
amalgamated into our present octave system of scales.

Under Ambrose and Pope Gregory, these modes had
taken a different form. The chromatic and enharmonic
styles had been abandoned in theory, the portamento
which the singers introduced into their chants being the
only principle retained. The new system was as follows:

In order to complete the story of the evolution of scales
and clefs, we must add that the Flemish monk, Hucbald
(900 A.D.), divided this scale into regular tetrachords,
beginning at G, with the succession, tone, semitone, tone,
forming four disjunct tetrachords,

This division remained without influence on the development
of the scale.

The first change in the tetrachord system of reckoning
tones and dividing the scale was made by Guido d’Arezzo
(first half of eleventh century), who divided it into hexachords
or groups of six notes each. Up to that time,
each note of the scale had had a letter of the alphabet for
its symbol. It was Guido who conceived the idea of
using syllables for these notes. The story of how it
occurred to him is well known: On one occasion, hearing
his brethren in the monastery choir of Arezzo, in Tuscany,
sing a hymn to St. John the Baptist, he noticed that the
first syllable of each line came on regularly ascending
notes of the scale, the first syllable coming on C, the
first of the next line on D, the first of the third on E, etc.,
up to A on the sixth line. As all these syllables happened
to differ one from the other, and, moreover, were very
easy to sing, he hit upon the idea of using them to distinguish
the notes on which they fell in the hymn.

Furthermore, as there were six of these syllables, he
arranged the musical scale in groups of six notes instead
of four, hexachords instead of tetrachords. Commencing
with G, which was the lowest note of the system in
Hucbald’s time, the first hexachord was formed of
G A B C D E;
the second, following the example of the Greeks,
he made to overlap the first, namely, C D E F G A; the
third, likewise overlapping the second, commenced on
F. In order to make this hexachord identical in structure
with, the first and second, he flatted the B, thus making
the succession of notes, F G A B♭ C D. The next three
hexachords were repetitions of the first three, namely,
G A B C D E, C D E F G A,
F G A B♭ C D; the last
was again a repetition of the first, G A B C D E.

The Gamut.

To the lowest note of this scale, which was foreign to
the Greek system, he gave a special name, gamma, after
the Greek letter G. From this we get our word for the
scale, the gamut. The other notes remained the same as
before, only that for the lowest octave capital letters were
used; in the next octave, the notes were designated by
small letters, and in the last octave by double letters, aa,
bb, etc., as in the following example.

Present Scale.

Following out his system, he applied the newly acquired
syllables to each of the hexachords—for instance, the
lowest hexachord, G A B C D E, which was called hard,
became ut re mi fa sol la; the second, which was called
natural, C D E F G A, also became
ut re mi fa sol la;

and the third, which was called soft, F G A B♭ C D,
became likewise ut re mi fa sol la. The next three
hexachords were treated in the same manner; the last
or seventh hexachord was merely a repetition of the first
and the fourth.

Now in the hymns, and also in the sequences, as they
were called (which were simply a series of notes forming
a little melody sung to two or three words), the voice was
rarely called upon to progress more than the interval of
a sixth, and so this solmization, as the new system was
called, was very valuable; for one had only to give the
pitch, and ut always meant the keynote, re the second,
mi the third, etc., etc. In time ut was found to be a
difficult syllable to sing, and do was substituted. This
change, however, was made after the scale was divided
into a system of octaves instead of hexachords. The
improvement in singing soon made the limits of the hexachords
too small to be practical; therefore another syllable
was added to the hexachordal system, si, and with this
seventh note we have our modern scale. From this we see
that the scale in present use is composed of octaves, just
as the older scales were composed of hexachords, and
before that tetrachords. Just as in mediæval times each
hexachord commenced with ut, so now every octave of
our tonal system commences with do.

Before leaving the hexachordal system, it may be as
well to explain the mode of procedure when the voice had
to go beyond the interval of the sixth. We know that
the first of every set of six notes was called ut, the second,
re, the third, mi, etc. When the voice had to go beyond

la, the sixth note, to B♮, that sixth note was always called
re, and was considered the second note of a new hexachord.
If, on the other hand, the voice had to go beyond
a, to B♭, the fifth note was called re, since the syllables
mi fa must always come on the half-tone.

In a study of our system of writing music, it may be
as well to begin with the derivation of our sharps and
flats. Observing the third hexachord on our list we see
that in order to make it identical in structure with the
first and second, the B had to be lowered a semitone.
Now the third hexachord was called soft. The B♭ in
it was accordingly called a soft B or B molle, which is
still the name in France for a flat, and moll in German
still means minor, or “soft” or “lowered.” For the
fourth hexachord, which was called hard, this B was
again raised a semitone. But the flatted B was already
indicated by the letter b or round b, as it was called;
hence this B natural was given a square shape and called
B carré,
.
The present French word for natural (when
it is specially marked) is bécarré; the German word for
major also comes indirectly from this, for dur means
“hard.”

An explanation of the modern German names for notes
will be easily understood in this connection. In the
German nomenclature the letters of the alphabet stand
for the notes of the scale as in the English, with the exception
of B. This B, or “round” B, in the German system
stands for B♭, which is more logical than our English
usage, since our flat is merely a slightly modified form of
b. The German B natural is our letter h, which is merely

a corruption of the square b,
,
which by the addition of
a line in time became our ♮. The Germans have carried
the flatting and sharping of tones to a logical conclusion
in their present nomenclature, for by “sharping”
the sound of a single letter it is raised a semitone from its
normal diapason, thus F becomes Fis, G Gis. On the
other hand, in order to lower a tone, the letter representing
it is “flatted,” and F is called Fes, G Ges, the only exception
to these rules being the B which we have already
considered.

In France the Guidonian system was adhered to closely,
and to this day the bécarré is used only as an accidental,
to indicate that the note to which it refers has been
flatted before. The naturel (which has the same shape)
is used to designate a note that is natural to the
key; thus the distinction is made between an accidental
and a note that is common to the key. In F major,
for instance, B♮ is si bécarré, A♮ would be la naturel.
Our modern sharp is merely another form of the natural
or square B (♮) which gradually came to be used before
any note, signifying that it was raised or sharped a half-tone;
the flat lowered it a semitone, and after a while the
natural received its present place between the sharp and
flat. The first instance we have of the sharp being used
is in the thirteenth century, when (in the Rondels of
Adam de la Hale) it takes the form of a cross × (the
German word for the sharp still remains kreuz). The
French word diese (sharp) comes from the Greek diesis,
a term used to indicate the raising of the voice in the
chromatic scale.

And now we have to speak of notation and its development.
Thus far we have found only two ways in which
musical sounds were indicated by the ancients. First, we
remember the invention of Aristophanes of Alexandria,
his accents, high, low, and circumflex. Then we know
from Ptolemy, Bœthius, and Alypius that letters were
used to designate the different tones; but as there is no
music extant in this notation to prove the theory, we need
not trouble ourselves with it.

The system of Aristophanes, however, was destined to
become the nucleus from which our modern notation
sprang. We know that an elementary idea, clearly expressed,
has more chances of living than has a more complicated
system, however ingenious the latter may be.
Now this system is so plain that we will find it is common
to many aboriginal peoples, for instance the American
Indians have a system very similar.

In the period now under consideration (from the third
to the tenth century), music was noted in this way: an upstroke
of the pen meant a raising of the voice, a downstroke
lowered it, a flat stroke meant a repetition of the
same note, thus



. Gradually
it became necessary to indicate the contour of the melodies
with more accuracy; therefore the circumflex was
added


and reversed

.
Still
later a sign for two steps was invented


and when the progression was to be diatonically stepwise

the strokes were thicker

.
So this notation
developed, and by combining the many signs together,
simple non-rhythmic melodies could be indicated with comparative
clearness and simplicity. The flat stroke for a
single note
,
indicating
,
eventually became smaller
and thicker, thus
.
By combining these different signs,
a skip of a third and back came to be noted
,
and
if the note came down on a second instead of the original
note it became

.
The quilisma
()
indicated
a repetition of two notes, one above the other, and
we still use much the same sign for our trill. Also the two
forms of the circumflex,

,
were joined
()
and thus
we have the modern turn, so much used by Wagner.

Now while this notation was ingenious, it still left much
to be desired as to pitch. To remedy this a red line was
drawn before writing these signs or neumes, as they were
called. This line represented a given pitch, generally E;
above and below it were then written the signs for the
notes, their pitch being determined by the relative position
they held in regard to the line. Thus

was the
equivalent of
,
considering
the line as being middle C pitch, a fourth higher F.
This was the condition of musical notation in 1000 A.D.

To Guido d’Arezzo is ascribed its development up to
some semblance of our present system, although the

claim has often been denied. It is certain, however, that
the innovations were made at this period. In the first
place Guido made the red line always stand for the pitch
of F, and at a little distance above it he added another
line, this time yellow, which was to indicate the pitch of
C. Thus the signs began to take very definite meaning
as regards pitch; for, given a sign extending from one line
to the other, the reader could see at a glance that the
music progressed a fifth, from F to C, or vice-versa. And
now the copyists, seeing the value of these lines in determining
the pitch of the different signs, of their own account
added two more in black ink, one of which they drew
between the F and the C line, and the other above the
C line, thus
.
By doing this they accurately
decided the pitch of every note, for the lowest line, being
F, the line between that and the C line must stand for A,
and the two spaces for G and B; the top line would stand
for E, and the space between it and the yellow line for D.
Little by little these copyists grew careless about
making the lines in yellow, red, and black, and sometimes
drew them all in black or red, thereby losing the distinguishing
mark of the F and C lines. In order to remedy
this, Guido placed the letters F and C before the lines representing
these notes, thus
.
In this way our
modern clefs (clavis or key) originated, for the C clef, as
it is called, gradually changed its shape to

and
,
and the F clef changed to
,
which is our
bass clef in a rudimentary form.

Later, still another line was added to the set, thus giving
us our modern staff, and another clef,
,
was added
on the next to the lowest line. This, in turn, became our
present treble clef,
.
In the course of time the signs
themselves underwent many changes, until at last from
,
etc., they became our modern signs.

Before this, however, a grave defect in the notation had
to be remedied. There was as yet no way of designating
the length of time a note was to be sustained; something
definite in the way of noting rhythm was necessary. This
was accomplished by Franco of Cologne, in the beginning
of the thirteenth century. By disconnecting the parts
of the sign

one from another, the following individual
signs were acquired
.
In order to have two
distinct values of length, these signs were called longs and
shorts, longa
,
and brevis
,
to which was added the
brevis in another position
,
called semibrevis. The
longa was twice the value of the brevis, and the semibrevis
was half the length of the brevis
( =

 
=

).
When notes of equal length were slurred, they were written
.
When two or more notes were to be sung to one
syllable in quicker time, the brevi were joined one to the
other
,
as for instance in the songs of the thirteenth
century,

DIRGE FOR KING RICHARD’S DEATH

or, in modern style,

In this example we find the first indication of the measuring
off of phrases into bars. As we see, it consisted of
a little stroke, which served to show the beginning of a
new line, and was not restricted to regularity of any kind
except that necessitated by the verse.

The use of the semibrevis is shown in the following
chanson of Raoul de Coucy (1192):

The French troubadours and the German minnesingers
of the thirteenth century used these forms of notes only,
and even then restricted themselves to two kinds, either
the longa and brevis, or brevis and semibrevis.

The necessity for rests very soon manifested itself,
and the following signs were invented to correspond to
the longa, brevis, and semibrevis
.
Also
the number of note symbols was increased by the maxima
or double longa
,
and the minima
,
which represented
half the value of the semibrevis.

Now that music began taking a more definite rhythmic
form than before, a more regular dividing off of the
phrases became necessary. This was accomplished by
the use of a dot, and another form, the perpendicular
line, which we have noticed in the song of the King of
Navarre (1250). At first a means to indicate triple
time was invented, and the measure corresponding to our

was indicated by placing the sign

at the beginning
of the line. This was called perfect. Then, for plain
triple time the dot was omitted
;
for

time the sign

was adopted, and for ordinary common time

was taken.
Consequently, when these signs were placed at the beginning
of the line they changed the value of the notes to
correspond to the time marked. Thus in

(tempus perfectum, prolatio major) or
,
the brevis was reckoned
worth three semibrevi
=



=
;
the semibrevis
three minimi
=



=
. In

or

time
=



=
;
but the semibrevis was
only as long as two minimi
=


=
.
In

or

time
=


=
,
but
=



=
.
In

or

time
=


=
,
and
=


=
.

In the beginning of the fifteenth century the notes began
to be written in an open form

	Maxima.
	Longa.
	Brevis.
	Semibrevis.
	Minima.
	Semiminima, which was added later.

As still smaller units of value were added, the semiminima
was replaced by
,
and the half semiminima thus
became
,
and the next smaller values,

and
.
The
rest to correspond to the semiminima was
;
for the semibrevis
,
and minima
.

Thus we have the following values and their corresponding
rests:

Maxima
Longa
Brevis
Semibrevis
Minima
Semiminima or crocheta
Fusa or crocheta
Semifusa

The rests for the fusa and semifusa were turned to the left
in order to avoid the confusion that would ensue if the

rest

stood for
.
Besides, the sign would have easily
become confused with the C clef
.

Signs for the changes of tempo, that is to say changes
from quick to slow, etc., were introduced in the fifteenth
century. The oldest of them consists of drawing a line
through the tempus sign
.
This meant that the notes
were to be played or sung twice as rapidly as would
usually be the case, without, however, affecting the relative
value of the notes to one another. Now we remember
that the sign

stood for our modern

time; when a line was drawn through it,

it indicated that two
brevi were counted as one, and the movement was said
to be alla breve. This is the one instance of time signatures
that has come down to us unaltered.

IX

THE SYSTEMS OF HUCBALD AND GUIDO D’AREZZO—THE BEGINNING
OF COUNTERPOINT

We
have seen that by order of Charlemagne, Ambrosian
chant was superseded by that of Gregory, and from any
history of music we may learn how he caused the Gregorian
chant to be taught to the exclusion of all other
music. Although Notker, in the monastery of St. Gall,
in Switzerland, and others developed the Gregorian chant,
until the time of Hucbald this music remained mere
wandering melody, without harmonic support of any kind.

Hucbald (840–930) was a monk of the monastery of
St. Armand in Flanders. As we know from our studies
in notation, he was the first to improve the notation by
introducing a system of lines and spaces, of which, however,
the spaces only were utilized for indicating the notes, viz.:

His attempt to reconstruct the musical scale was afterwards
overshadowed by the system invented by Guido
d’Arezzo, and it is therefore unnecessary to describe it
in detail. His great contribution to progress was the
discovery that more than one sound could be played or
sung simultaneously, thus creating a composite sound,
the effect which we call a chord. However, in deciding
which sounds should be allowed to be played or sung
together, he was influenced partly by the mysticism of
his age, and partly by a blind adherence to the remnants
of musical theory which had been handed down from the
Greeks. As Franco of Cologne, later (1200), in systematizing
rhythm into measure, was influenced by the idea
of the Trinity in making his

or

time tempus perfectum,
and adopting for its symbol the Pythagorean circle

or
,
so Hucbald, in choosing his series of concords or
sounds that harmonize well together, took the first
three notes of the overtones of every sonorous fundamental,
or, to express it differently, of the series of natural
harmonics, that is to say, he admitted the octave and fifth:
.
But from the fifth to the octave gives
the interval of the fourth, therefore he permitted this
combination also.

From the works of Bœthius (circa 400) and others, he
had derived and accepted the Pythagorean division of
the scale, making thirds and sixths dissonant intervals;
and so his perfect chord (from which our later triad gets
its name of perfect) was composed of a root, fifth or fourth,
and octave.

Hucbald, as I have already explained, changed the
Greek tone system somewhat by arranging it in four
regular disjunct tetrachords, namely:

This system permitted the addition of a fifth to each
note indiscriminately, and the fifths would always be
perfect; but in regard to the octaves it was faulty, for
obvious reasons. As his system of notation consisted of
merely writing T for tone and S for semitone between
the lines of his staff, it was only necessary to change the
order of these letters for the octave at the beginning of
each line. With the fourth, however, this device was
impossible, and therefore he laid down the rule that when
the voices proceeded in fourths, and a discord (or augmented
fourth) was unavoidable, the lower voice was to
remain on the same note until it could jump to another
fourth forming a perfect interval:

This at least brought into the harmony an occasional third,
which gradually became a recognized factor in music.

We probably know that the year 1000 was generally
accepted as the time when the world was to come to an
end. In the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris there is a
manuscript containing the prophecy which had been
handed down for many centuries; also the signs for the
notes to which it was to be sung, viz.:

[MIDI]

The text is:

The Judge will speak and the earth shall tremble with awe.
The stars shall be destroyed and the glory of the moon shall die, the
mountains shall be crushed and the world with all in it shall utterly
perish.

With the opening of the eleventh century, such was
the relief from this fear which had been oppressing Christendom,
that even the church reflected it in such strange
rites as the Feast of Asses (January 14th), which was a
burlesque of the Mass.

In this travesty of the Mass a young girl, dressed to
represent the Virgin, riding on an ass and carrying a
child in her arms, was conducted to the church door.
Upon being admitted and riding up the aisle to the altar,
the girl tethered the ass to the railing and sat on the
steps until the service was finished. The Credo, Gloria,
etc., all ended with a “hee-haw,” and at the conclusion
of the service the officiating priest brayed three times,
and was answered by the congregation. The mixing of
the vernacular with Latin in this service is the first
instance of the use of any language but Latin in church
music.

This quasi-symbolical pantomime gave rise in time to
the mediæval Passion Plays, or Mysteries, as they were
called. That these travesties of the Mass took different

forms in various countries is very evident when we remember
the description of the “Abbot of Unreason,” in Scott’s
“Abbot.” In England, among other absurdities such as
the “Pope of Fools,” the “Ball Dance,” etc., they also
had the festival of the “Boy Bishop,” in which, between
the sixth and twenty-eighth of December, a boy was
made to perform all the functions of a bishop.

It would seem that all this has but little bearing upon
the development of music. As a matter of fact it was a
most potent factor in it, for music was essentially and
exclusively a church property. By permitting the people
to secularize the church rites at certain seasons, it was
inevitable that church music would also become common
property for a time, with this difference, however, that the
common people could carry the tunes away with them,
and the music would be the only thing remaining as a
recollection of the carnival. Indeed, the prevalence of
popular songs soon became such that writers of church
music began to use them instead of their being derived
from church music, as was originally the case. This
continued to such an extent that almost up to 1550 a
mass was known by the name of the popular song it was
based upon, as, for instance, the mass of the “Man in
Armour,” by Josquin dés Pres, and those entitled “Je
prends conge” and “Je veult cent mille ecus.”

Now we know that the tempus perfectum was par excellence

and

time. It was natural therefore that these
first church tunes should have been changed to dances in
the hands of the common people. Even in these dances
it is interesting to note that the same symbolic significance

appears to be present, for the earliest form of these dances
was the “round song,” or roundelay, and it was danced
in a circle.

Duple time did not come into general use until the
beginning of the fourteenth century. About the same
time, the organum (as it was called) or system of harmonization
of Hucbald was discarded, and Johannes de
Muris and Philippe de Vitry championed the consonant
quality of the third and sixth, both major and minor.
The fifth was retained as a consonant, but the fourth was
passed over in silence by the French school of writers, or
classed with the dissonants. Successive fifths were prohibited
as being too harshly dissonant, but successive
fourths were necessarily permitted, as it would be an impossibility
to do without them. Nevertheless, the fourth
was still considered a dissonance, and was permitted only
between the upper parts of the music. Thus the harsh
consecutive passages in fifths and fourths of the organum
of Hucbald disappeared in favour of the softer progressions
of thirds and sixths.

In order to make clear how the new science of counterpoint
came into existence, I must again revert to
Hucbald. 9 

Before his time, all “recognized” music was a more or
less melodious succession of tones, generally of the same

length, one syllable being sometimes used for many
notes. He discovered that a melody might be sung by
several singers, each commencing at a different pitch
instead of all singing the same notes at the same time.
He also laid down rules as to how this was to be done to
produce the best effect. We remember why he chose the
fourth, fifth, and octave in preference to the third and
sixth. He called his system an “organum” or “diaphony,”
and to sing according to his rules was called to “organize”
or “organate.” We must remember that at that time
fourths and fifths were not always indicated in the written
music; only the melody, which was called the principal
or subject. By studying the rules prescribed for the
organum, the singers could add the proper intervals to
the melody. We must keep in mind, however, that
later fourths were preferred to fifths (being considered
less harsh), and that the musical scale of the period compelled
the different voices to vary slightly, that is to say,
two voices could not sing exactly the same melody at the
interval of a fourth without the use of sharps or flats;
therefore one voice continued on the same note until the
awkward place was passed, and then proceeded in fourths
again with the other voice as before:

On account of the augmented fourth that would occur by a
strict adherence to the melodic structure of the subject, the
following would have been impossible:

Thus we find the first instance of the use of thirds, and
also of oblique motion as opposed to the earlier inevitable
parallel motion of the voices. This necessary freedom in
singing the organum or diaphony led to the attempt to
sing two different melodies, one against the other—“note
against note,” or “point counter
point,” 10 
point or punct
being the name for the written note. There being now
two distinct melodies, both had to be noted instead of
leaving it to the singers to add their parts extemporaneously,
according to the rules of the organum, as they
had done previously. Already earlier than this (in 1100),
owing to the tendency to discard consecutive fourths and
fifths, the intermovement of the voices, from being parallel
and oblique, became contrary, thus avoiding the parallel
succession of intervals. The name “organum” was
dropped and the new system became known as tenor
and descant, the tenor being the principal or foundation
melody, and the descant or descants (for there could be as
many as there were parts or voices to the music) taking
the place of the organum. The difference between discantus
and diaphony was that the latter consisted of
several parts or voices, which, however, were more or less
exact reproductions, at different pitch, of the principal or
given melody, while the former was composed of entirely
different melodic and rhythmic material. This gave rise
to the science of counterpoint, which, as I have said,
consists of the trick of making a number of voices sing
different melodies at the same time without violating
certain given rules. The given melody or “principal”

soon acquired the name of cantus firmus, and the other
parts were each called
contrapunctus, 11 
as before they had
been called tenor and descant. These names were first
used by Gerson, Chancellor of Notre Dame, Paris, about
1400.

In the meantime (about 1300–1375), the occasional use
of thirds and sixths in the diaphonies previously explained
led to an entirely different kind of singing, called falso
bordone or faux bourdon (bordonizare, “to drone,” comes
from a kind of pedal in organum that first brought the
third into use). This system, contrary to the old organum,
consisted of using only thirds and sixths together, excluding
the fourth and fifth entirely, except in the first
and last bars. This innovation has been ascribed to the
Flemish singers attached to the Papal Choir (about 1377),
when Pope Gregory XI returned from Avignon to Rome.
In the British Museum, however, there are manuscripts
dating from the previous century, showing that the faux
bourdon had already commenced to make its way against
the old systems of Hucbald and Guido. The combination
of the faux bourdon and the remnant of the organum
gives us the foundation for our modern tone system.
The old rules, making plagal motion of the different
voices preferable to parallel motion, and contrary motion
preferable to either, still hold good in our works on theory;
so also in regard to the rules forbidding consecutive fifths
and octaves, leaving the question of the fourth in doubt.

To sum up, we may say, therefore, that up to the
sixteenth century, all music was composed of the slender

material of thirds, sixths, fifths, and octaves, fourths being
permitted only between the voices; consecutive successions
of fourths, however, were permitted, a license not allowed
in the use of fifths or octaves. This leads us directly
to a consideration of the laws of counterpoint and fugue,
laws that have remained practically unchanged up to the
present, with the one difference that, instead of being
restricted to the meagre material of the so-called consonants,
the growing use of what were once called dissonant
chords, such as the dominant seventh, ninth,
diminished seventh, and latterly the so-called altered
chords, has brought new riches to the art.

Instead of going at once into a consideration of the
laws of counterpoint, it will be well to take up the development
of the instrumental resources of the time. There
were three distinct types of music: the ecclesiastical
type (which of course predominated) found its expression
in melodies sung by church choirs, four or more melodies
being sometimes sung simultaneously, in accordance with
certain fixed rules, as I have already explained. These
melodies or chants were often accompanied by the organ,
of which we will speak later. The second type was purely
instrumental, and served as an accompaniment for the
dance, or consisted of fanfares (ceremonial horn signals), or
hunting signals. The third type was that of the so-called
trouvères or troubadours, with their jongleurs, and the
minnesingers, and, later, the mastersingers. All these
“minstrels,” as we may call them, accompanied their
singing by some instrument, generally one of the lute type
or the psaltery.

 9 
There is much question as to Hucbald’s organum. That
actually these dissonances were used even up to 1500 is proved by
Franco Gafurius of Milan, who mentions a Litany for the Dead
(De Profundis) much used at that time:

 10 
Counterpoint is first mentioned by Muris (1300).

 11 
Only principal (tenor or cantus firmus) was sung to words.

X

MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS—THEIR HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT

In
church music, the organ is perhaps the first instrument
to be considered. In 951, Elfeg, the Bishop of Winchester
had built in his cathedral a great organ which
had four hundred pipes and twenty-six pairs of bellows,
to manage which seventy strong men were necessary.
Wolstan, in his life of St. Swithin, the Benedictine
monk, gives an account of the exhausting work required
to keep the bellows in action.

Two performers were necessary to play this organ,
just as nowadays we play four-hand music on the piano.
The keys went down with such difficulty that the players
had to use their elbows or fists on each key; therefore it
is easy to see that, at the most, only four keys could be
pressed down at the same time. On the other hand,
each key when pressed down or pushed back (for in the
early organs the keyboard was perpendicular) gave the
wind from the bellows access to ten pipes each, which
were probably tuned in octaves or, possibly, according
to the organum of Hucbald, in fifths or fourths. This
particular organ had two sets of keys (called manuals),
one for each player; there were twenty keys to each
manual, and every key caused ten pipes to sound. The
compass of this organ was restricted to ten notes, repeated

at the distance of an octave, and, there being four hundred
pipes, forty pipes were available for each note. On
each key was inscribed the name of the note. As may
be imagined, the tone of this instrument was such that it
could be heard at a great distance.

There were many smaller organs, as, for instance, the
one in the monastery of Ramsey, which had copper
pipes. Pictures of others from the twelfth century show
that even where there were only ten pipes, the organ
had two manuals, needed two players, and at least four
men for the bellows. The great exertion required to play
these instruments led to the invention of what is called
“mixtures.” From the moment fifths and fourths were
considered to sound better together than the simple
notes, the pipes were so arranged that the player did not
need to press two of the ponderous organ keys for this
combination of sounds. One key was made to open the
valves of the two sets of pipes, so that each key, instead of
sounding one note, would, at will, sound the open fifth,
fourth, or octave. With the addition of the third, thus
constituting a perfect major triad, this barbarous habit
has come down to our present day almost unchanged, for
by using what is called the “mixture stop” of our modern
organs, each key of the manual gives not only the original
note, but also its perfect major triad, several octaves
higher.

Originally the organ was used only to give the right
intonation for the chanting of the priests. From the
twelfth century, small portable organs of limited compass
were much used; although the tone of these instruments

was necessarily slight, and, owing to the shortness of
the pipes, high in pitch, the principle of the mechanism
was similar to that of the larger instruments. They were
hung by means of a strap passed over the shoulders; one
hand pressed the keys in front of the pipes (which were
arranged perpendicularly), and the other hand operated
the small bellows behind the pipes. These small instruments
rarely had more than eight pipes, consequently
they possessed only the compass of an octave. With
slight variations, they were quite universally used up to
the seventeenth century. Organ pedals were invented in
Germany about 1325. Bernhard, organist of St. Mark’s,
Venice (1445–1459), has been credited with the invention
of organ pedals, but it is probable that he merely introduced
them into Italy.

As the Greek modes formed the basis for the musical
system of the church, so the Greek monochord is the
type from which the monks evolved what they called
the clavichord. The monochord has a movable bridge,
therefore some time is lost in adjusting it in order to
get the different tones. To obviate this inconvenience, a
number of strings were placed side by side, and a mechanism
inserted which, by pressing a key (clavis), would move
the bridge to the point at which the string must divide to
give the note indicated by the key. This made it possible
to use one string for several different notes, and explains
why the clavichord or clavicembalo needed comparatively
few strings. This instrument became obsolete toward the
end of the eighteenth century.

The other species of instrument, the harpsichord,

which was invented about 1400, and which may be considered
as having sprung from the clavichord, consisted
of a separate string for each sound; the key, instead of
setting in action a device for striking and at the same
time dividing the strings, caused the strings to be plucked
by quills. Thus, in these instruments, not only was an
entirely different quality of tone produced, but the pitch
of a string remained unaltered. These instruments were
called bundfrei, “unbound,” in opposition to the clavicembalo,
which was called gebunden, or “bound.” The harpsichord
was much more complicated than the clavichord,
in that the latter ceased to sound when the key which
moved the bridge was released, whereas the harpsichord
required what is called a “damper” to stop the sound when
the key came up; once the string was touched by the quill,
all command of the tone by the key was lost. To regulate
this, a device was added to the instrument by means
of which a damper fell on the string when the key was
released, thereby stopping the sound.

We have now to consider the instrumental development
of the Middle Ages.

An instrument of the harpsichord family which has
significance in the development of the instruments of the
Middle Ages is the spinet (from spina, “thorn”; it had
leather points up to 1500), first made by Johannes Spinctus,
Venice, 1500. It was a harpsichord with a square case,
the strings running diagonally instead of lengthwise.
When the spinet was of very small dimensions it was
called a virginal; when it was in the shape of our modern
grand piano, it was, of course, a harpsichord; and when the

strings and sounding board were arranged perpendicularly,
the instrument was called a clavicitherium. As early as
1500, then, four different instruments were in general
use, the larger ones having a compass of about four
octaves. The connecting link between the harpsichord,
the clavichord, and the piano, was the dulcimer or hackbrett,
which was a tavern instrument. Pantaleon Hebenstreit,
a dancing master and inventor of Leipzig, in 1705
added an improved hammer action, which was first
applied to keyboard instruments by Cristofori, an instrument
maker at Florence (1711). His instrument was
called forte-piano or pianoforte, because it would strike
loud or soft.

These instruments all descended from the ancient lyre,
the only difference being that instead of causing the
strings to vibrate by means of a plectrum held in the hand,
the plectrum was set in motion by the mechanism of the
claves or keys. The system of fingering employed in
playing the harpsichord, up to 1700, did not make use of
the thumb. J.S. Bach, F. Couperin, and J.P. Rameau
were the pioneers in this matter. The first published
work on piano technique and fingering was that by
C.P.E. Bach (1753).

With the advent of bowed instruments the foundation
was laid for the modern orchestra, of which they are
the natural basis. The question of the antiquity of
the bowed instrument has often been discussed, with the
result that the latter has been definitely classed as essentially
modern, for the reason that it did not become
known in Europe until about the tenth to the twelfth

centuries. As a matter of fact, the instrument is doubtless
of Person or Hindu origin, and was brought to the West
by the Arabs, who were in Spain from the eighth to the
fifteenth centuries; in fact, most of our stringed instruments,
both the bowed and those of the lyre type, we owe
to the Arabs—the very name of the lute, el oud (“shell”
in Arabic) became liuto in Italian, in German laute, and
in English lute. There were many varieties of these bowed
instruments, and it is thought that the principle arose
from rubbing one instrument with another. The only
other known examples of bowed instruments of primitive
type are (1) the ravanastron, an instrument of the monochord
type, native to India, made to vibrate by a kind
of bow with a string stretched from end to end; (2) the
Welsh chrotta (609 A.D.), a primitive lyre-shaped instrument,
with which, however, the use of the bow seems to
have been a much later invention. Mention should also
be made of the marine trumpet, much in vogue from the
fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries; it consisted of a long,
narrow, resonant box, composed of three boards, over
which was stretched a single string; other unchangeable
strings, struck with the bow, served as drones. Only
the harmonics were played on the marine trumpet.

The principle of procuring the vibrations in stringed
instruments by means of a bow was, of course, applied to
the monochord class of keyed instruments, and was thus
the origin of the hurdy-gurdy, which consisted of a wheel
covered with resined leather and turned by a crank.

The bowed instruments were originally of two types,
the first in the form of the lute or mandolin; the second

probably derived from the Welsh crwth, consisting of a
flat, long box strung with strings (called fidel from fides,
“string”). The combination of these types, which were
subjected to the most fantastic changes of shape, led
eventually to the modern violin family.

We know that the highest plane of perfection in the
violin was reached in Italy about 1600. The Cremona
makers, Amati, Guarnerius, and Stradivarius, made their
most celebrated instruments between 1600 and 1750.

The violin bow, in its earliest form, was nothing more
than an ordinary bow with a stretched string; Corelli
and Tartini used a bow of the kind. The present shape
of the bow is due to Tourte, a Paris maker, who experimented
in conjunction with Viotti, the celebrated violinist.

By looking at the original lute and the Arabian rebeck
or Welsh crwth (originally Latin chorus), we can see how
the modern violin received its generally rounded shape
from the lute, its flatness from the rebeck, the sides of
the instrument being cut out in order to give the bow
free access to the side strings. The name too, fidula or
vidula, from mediæval Latin fides, “string,” became fiddle
and viola, the smaller viola being called violino, the
larger, violoncello and viola da gamba.

In the Middle Ages, the different species of bowed instrument
numbered from fifteen to twenty, and it was
not until between 1600 and 1700 that the modern forms of
these instruments obtained the ascendancy.

Of the wind instruments it was naturally the flute that
retained its antique form; the only difference between
the modern instrument and the ancient one being that

the former is blown crosswise, instead of perpendicularly.
Quantz, the celebrated court flute player to Frederick the
Great of Prussia, was the first to publish, in 1750, a so-called
“method” of playing the traversal (crosswise) flute.

With the reed instruments the change in modern times
is more striking. The original form of the reed instruments
was of the double-reed variety. The oldest known mention
of them dates from 650 A.D., when the name
applied is calamus (reed); later the names shalmei (chalumeau,
“straw,” from German halm) and shawm were
used. These instruments were played by means of
a bell-shaped mouthpiece, the double reed being fixed
inside the tube. It was not until toward the end of the
sixteenth century that the bell-shaped mouthpiece was
dispensed with and the reed brought directly to the lips,
thus giving the player greater power of expression. The
oboe is a representative type of the higher pitched double-reed
instruments. In its present shape it is about two
hundred years old. As the deeper toned instruments
were necessarily very long, six to eight and even ten feet,
an assistant had to walk before the performer, holding the
tube on his shoulder. This inconvenience led to bending
the tube back on itself, making it look somewhat like a
bundle of sticks, hence the word faggot; although it is
commonly known in this country by the French name,
bassoon. This manner of arranging the instrument dates
from about the year 1550. The clarinet is an essentially
modern instrument, the single beating reed and cylindrical
tube coming into use about 1700, the invention
of a German named Denner, who lived at Nuremberg.

All the brass instruments of the Middle Ages seem
to have been very short, therefore high in pitch. We
remember that the Romans had trumpets (chiefly used
in signalling) called buccina, and we may assume that
the whole modern family of brass instruments has
descended from this primitive type. As late as 1500, the
hunting horn consisted of but one loop which passed
over the shoulder and around the body of the player.
A horn of from six to seven feet in length was first
used about 1650; and we know that, owing to the smallness
of the instruments and their consequent high pitch
in those days, many of Bach’s scores contain parts absolutely
impracticable for our modern brass instruments.
The division of these instruments into classes, such as
trumpets, horns, trombones, etc., is due to the differences
in shape, which in turn produce tones of different quality.
The large bore of the trombone gives great volume to the
tone, the small bore of the trumpet great brilliancy, the
medium bore of the horn veils the brilliancy on one hand
and lightens the thickness of tone on the other.

The horn, called cor de chasse, was first used in the orchestra
in 1664, in one of Lully’s operas, but its technique
(stopped tones and crooks) was only properly understood
about 1750; the present-day valve horn did not come into
general use until within the last half century. Fifty years
before the principle had been applied to the horn the
trumpet had crooks and slides, a mechanism which, in
the trumpet, is still retained in England, pointing to the
fact that the trombone is, after all, nothing but a very
large kind of trumpet.

XI

FOLK SONG AND ITS RELATION TO NATIONALISM IN MUSIC

In
order to understand as well as to feel music, we must
reduce it to its primary elements, and these are to be
found in folk song, or, to go further back, in its predecessor,
the chant of the savages.

Folk music may be likened to a twig which has fallen
into a salt mine, to borrow an expression from Taine;
every year adds fresh jewels to the crystals that form
on it until at last the only resemblance to the original
is in the general contour. We know that the nucleus of
melody lies in one note, just as the origin of language
is to be sought for in the word. Therefore folk music
proper must be separated from what may be called barbaric
music, the most primitive type of the latter being
the “one-note” strain from which spring the melodies
of the people. This one-note form passes through many
rhythmical changes before song becomes developed to the
extent of adding several notes to its means of expression.
The next development of savage chanting (which
is the precursor of folk song) may be traced back to its
two elements, one of which was a mere savage howl, and
the other, that raising of the voice under stress of strong
emotion which still constitutes one of our principal means
of expression.

Thus, in this barbaric music we invariably find three
principles: 1, rhythm; 2, the howl or descending scale of
undefined intervals; and 3, the emotional raising of the
voice. The rhythm, which characterizes the most primitive
form of song or chant, consists of the incessant repetition
of a very small group of rhythmic sounds. This
incessant recurrence of one idea is characteristic of primitive,
weak, or insane natures. The second principle,
which invariably includes the first (pointing to a slightly
more advanced state of development), is met with in many
folk songs of even modern times. The third principle is
one which indicates the transition stage from primitive
or barbaric music to folk music.

To the primitive savage mind, the smallest rhythmic
phrase is a wonderful invention, therefore it is repeated
incessantly. Add to that a certain joy in mere sound, and
we have the howl, which certainly follows the sequence
of nature, for a thunder clap, or the phenomenon of
echo, is its prototype, being a loud explosion followed by
a more or less regular sequence of minor reverberations.
When the accent of passion is added to these two principles—will
and nature—we have laid the æsthetic
foundation for all that we call
music. 12  The example of
a loud tone with gradually ascending inflections has only
been found in the most perverted types of humanity;
for instance, an English writer quaintly alludes to the
songs of the Polynesian cannibals as consisting of “gruesomely
suggestive passages of rising quarter-tones sung

gloatingly before their living captives who are soon to be
devoured.”

Now traces of these three elements are to be found in
every folk song known, and we may even trace their
influence in modern music, the lowest or most primitive
being, as I have said, the “one-note” type, the next what
I have called the “howl” type, the third the highest or
“emotional” type.

Specimens of the first type, chants such as these

[MIDI],
are to be heard in every part of the
globe, the rhythmic figure being necessarily short and
repeated incessantly.

The next step was a tremendous advance, and we find
its influence permeating all music. The most primitive
specimens of this type we find among the Jute Indians

[MIDI],
a mixture of one and two.
The same is to be found in Australia, slightly modified:

[MIDI]

The Caribs have the same song
.
We find
it again in Hungary, although in a still more modified
form, thus:

[MIDI]

And last of all we meet with it in its primitive state in the
folk song used by Bizet in “Carmen.” We can even see
traces of it in the quasi-folk song of the present century:

[MIDI]

The third element of folk song shows again a great
advance, for instead of the mere howl of pleasure or pain,
we have a more or less exactly graded expression of
feeling. In speaking of impassioned speech I explained
the relative values of the inflections of the voice, how the
upward skip of the fourth, fifth, and octave indicates the
intensity of the emotion causing the cry. When this element
is brought into music, it gives a vitality not before
possessed, for by this it becomes speech. When in such
music this inflection rhymes with the words, that is to
say, when the speech finds its emotional reflection in the
music, we have reached the highest development of folk
song. In its best state, this is immeasurably superior
to much of our “made” music, only too often false in
rhythm, feeling, and declamation.

Among the different nations, these three characteristics
often become obscured by national idiosyncracies. Much
of the Chinese music, the “Hymn to the Ancestors,” for
instance, seemingly covers a number of notes, whereas,
in fact, it belongs to the one-note type. We find that
their melodies almost invariably return to the same note,
the intervening sounds being more or less merely variations
above and below the pitch of the principal sound. For
example:

[MIDI]

Hungarian folk music has been much distorted by the
oriental element, as represented by the zingari or gypsies.
The Hungarian type of folk music is one of the highest,
and is extremely severe in its contours, as shown in the
following:

[MIDI]

The gypsy element as copied by Liszt has obscured the
folk melodies by innumerable arabesques and ornaments
of all sorts, often covering even a “one-note” type of
melody until it seems like a complicated design.

This elaboration of detail and the addition of passing
and ornamental notes to every melody is distinctly an
oriental trait, which finds vent not only in music but also
in architecture, designing, carving, etc. It is considered
by many an element of weakness, seeking to cover a
poverty of thought by rich vestments. And yet, to my
mind, nothing can be more misleading. In spite of Sir
Hubert Parry and other writers, I cannot think that the
Moors in Spain, for instance, covered poverty of thought
beneath superficial ingenuity of design. The Alhambra
outdoes in “passage work,” in virtuoso arabesques,

all that an army of Liszts could do in piano literature;
and yet the Arabs were the saviours of science, and promoted
the greatest learning and depth of thought known
in Europe in their time. As for Liszt, there is such an
astounding wealth of poetry and deep feeling beneath
the somewhat “flashy,” bombastic trick of speech he
inherited, that the true lover of music can no more allow
his feelings to be led astray by such externals than one
would judge a man’s mind by the cut of his coat or the
hat he wears.

Thus we see the essence of folk song is comprised in
the three elements mentioned, and its æsthetic value may
be determined by the manner in which these elements
are combined and their relative preponderance.

One point must be very distinctly understood, namely,
that what we call harmonization of a melody cannot be
admitted as forming any part of folk song. Folk melodies
are, without exception, homophonous. This being the
case, perhaps my statement that the vital principle of
folk music in its best state has nothing in common with
nationalism (considered in the usual sense of the word),
will be better understood. And this will be the proof
that nationalism, so-called, is merely an extraneous thing
that has no part in pure art. For if we take any melody,
even of the most pronounced national type, and merely
eliminate the characteristic turns, affectations, or mannerisms,
the theme becomes simply music, and retains no
touch of nationality. We may even go further; for if we
retain the characteristic mannerisms of dress, we may
harmonize a folk song in such a manner that it will belie

its origin; and by means of this powerful factor (an essentially
modern invention) we may even transform a Scotch
song, with all its “snap” and character, into a Chinese
song, or give it an Arabian flavour. This, to be sure, is
possible only to a limited degree; enough, however, to
prove to us the power of harmony; and harmony, as I
have said, has no part in folk song.

To define the rôle of harmony in music is no easy matter.
Just as speech has its shadow languages, gesture and expression;
just as man is a duality of idealism and materialism;
just as music itself is a union of the emotional and
the intellectual, so harmony is the shadow language of melody;
and just as in speech this shadow language overwhelms
the spoken word, so in music harmony controls the
melody. For example: Imagine the words “I will kill you”
being said in a jesting tone of voice and with a pleasant
expression of the face; the import of the words would
be lost in their expression; the mere words would mean
nothing to us in comparison with the expression that
accompanied them.

Take away the harmonic structure upon which Wagner
built his operas and it would be difficult to form a conception
of the marvellous potency of his music. Melody,
therefore, may be classed as the gift of folk song to
music; and harmony is its shadow language. When these
two powers, melody and harmony, supplement each other,
when one completes the thought of the other, then, provided
the thought be a noble one, the effect will be overwhelmingly
convincing, and we have great music. The
contrary results when one contradicts the other, and that

is only too often the case; for we hear the mildest waltzes
dressed up in tragic and dramatic chords, which, like
Bottom, “roar as gently as any sucking dove.”

In discussing the origin of speech, mention was made
of those shadow languages which accompany all our
spoken words, namely, the languages of expression and
gesture. These were surely the very first auxiliaries of
uttered speech, and in the same way we find that they
constitute the first sign of advance in primitive melody.
Savages utter the same thought over and over again,
evidently groping after that semblance of Nirvana (or
perhaps it may be better described as “hypnotic exaltation”)
which the incessant repetition of that one thought,
accompanied by its vibrating shadow, sound, would naturally
occasion.

It was also stated that the relative antiquity or primitivity
of a melody is invariably to be discovered by its
degree of relationship to the original type, one note, one
rhythm, the emotional, the savage howl, or, in other
words, the high note followed by a gradual descent. To
confirm this theory of the origin of folk song, we need
only look at the aboriginal chants of widely separated
peoples to find that the oldest songs all resemble one
another, despite the fact that they originated in widely
separated localities.

Now the difference between this primitive music and
that which we call folk song is that the latter is characterized
by a feeling for design, in the broadest sense of
the word, entirely lacking in the former. For we find
that although folk song is composed of the same material

as savage music, the material is arranged coherently into
sentences instead of remaining the mere exclamation of
passion or a nerve exciting reiteration of unchanging
rhythms and vibrations, as is the case in the music of the
savage.

Before proceeding further, I wish to draw the line
which separates savage from folk music very plainly.

We know that the first stage in savage music is that of
one note. Gradually a tone above the original is added
on account of the savage being unable to intone correctly;
through stress of emotion the fifth and octave
come into the chant; the sixth, being the note above
the fifth, is added later, as is the third, the note above
the second. Thus is formed the pentatonic scale as it is
found all over the world, and it is clear, therefore, that
the development of the scale is due to emotional influences.

The development of rhythm may be traced to the
words sung or declaimed, and the development of design
or form to the dance. In the following, from Brazil,
we find a savage chant in almost its primitive state:

[MIDI]

The next example, also from Brazil, is somewhat better,
but still formless and unemotional.

[MIDI]

Let this be danced to, however, and the change is very
marked, for immediately form, regularity, and design are
noticeable:

[MIDI]

On the other hand, the emotional element marks another
very decided change, namely, by placing more sounds
at the command of the singer, and also by introducing
words, which necessarily invest the song with the rhythm
of language.

Thus the emotional and declamatory elements heighten
the powers of expression by the greater range given to
the voice, and add the poignancy and rhythm of speech
to song. On the other hand, the dance gives regularity
to the rhythmic and emotional sequences.

In the following examples we can see more clearly the
elements of folk song as they exist in savage music:

Three or four note (simple)

South America
[MIDI]

Nubia
[MIDI]

Emotional (simple)

Samoa
[MIDI]

Emotional and Composite

Hudson’s Bay
[MIDI]

Soudan
[MIDI]

Howl and Emotion

[MIDI]

Dance. Brazil
[MIDI,
MIDI,
MIDI]

The fact that so many nations have the pentatonic or
five-note scale (the Chinese, Basque, Scotch, Hindu, etc.),
would seem to point to a necessary similarity of their
music. This, however, is not the case. In tracing the
differences we shall find that true folk song has but few
marked national traits, it is something which comes from
the heart; whereas nationalism in music is an outward
garment which is a result of certain habits of thought,
a mannerism of language so to speak. If we look at the
music of different nations we find certain characteristics;
divest the music of these same characteristics
and we find that the figure upon which this garment of
nationalism has been placed is much the same the world
over, and that its relationship to the universal language
of savage music is very marked. Carmen’s song, divested
of the mixture of triplets and dual rhythms (Spanish or
Moorish) is akin to the “howl.”

Nationalism may be divided into six different classes:

First we have what may be broadly termed “orientalism,”
which includes the Hindu, Moorish, Siamese, and
Gypsy, the latter embracing most of southeastern European
(Roumania, etc.) types. Liszt’s “Second Rhapsody,”

opening section, divested of orientalism or gypsy characteristics,
is merely of the savage three-note type.

Our second division may be termed the style of reiteration,
and is to be found in Russia and northern Europe.

The third consists of the mannerism known as the
“Scotch snap,” and is a rhythmic device which probably
originated in that trick of jumping from one register of
the voice to another, which has always had a fascination
for people of simple natures. The Swiss jodel is the best
illustration of this in a very exaggerated form.

The fourth consists of a seemingly capricious intermixture
of dual and triple rhythm, and is especially
noticeable in Spanish and Portuguese music as well as
in that of their South American descendants. This distinction,
however, may be traced directly back to the
Moors. For in their wonderful designs we continually
see the curved line woven in with the straight, the circle
with the square, the tempus perfectum with the spondee.
This would bring this characteristic directly under the
head of orientalism or ornamental development. Yet
the peculiarity is so marked that it seems to call for
separate consideration.

The fifth type, like the fourth, is open to the objection
that it is merely a phase of the oriental type. It consists
of the incessant use of the augmented second and diminished
third, a distinctively Arabian characteristic, and is
to be found in Egypt, also, strange to say, occasionally
among our own North American Indians. This, however,
is not to be wondered at, considering that we know nothing
of their ancestry. Only now and then on that broad sea

of mystery do we see a half submerged rock, which gives
rise to all sorts of conjectures; for example, the custom
of the Jutes to wear green robes and use fans in certain
dances, the finding in the heart of America of such an
Arab tune as this:

[MIDI]

or such a Russian tune as this:

[MIDI]
.

The last type of nationalism in folk song is almost
a negative quality, its distinguishing mark being mere
simplicity, a simplicity which is affected, or possibly
assimilated, by the writer of such a song; for German
folk song proper is a made thing, springing not from the
people, but from the many composers, both ancient and
modern, who have tried their hands in that direction.

While this of course takes nationalism out of the composition
of German folk song so-called, the latter has
undoubtedly gained immensely by it; for by thus divesting
music of all its national mannerisms, it has left the
thought itself untroubled by quirks and turns and a restricted
musical scale; it has allowed this thought to shine
out in all its own essential beauty, and thus, in this so-called
German folk song, the greatest effects of poignancy
are often reached through absolute simplicity and directness.

Now let us take six folk songs and trace first their
national characteristics, and after that their scheme of

design, for it is by the latter that the vital principle, so
to speak, of a melody is to be recognized, all else being
merely external, costumes of the different countries in
which they were born. And we shall see that a melody
or thought born among one people will change its costume
when it migrates to another country.

Arab Song
[MIDI]

Scheme
[MIDI]

Russia—Reiteration
[MIDI]

[MIDI]

Red Sarafan
[MIDI]

Scotch
[MIDI]

[MIDI]

Irish—Emotional in character,
with greater perfection in design
[MIDI]

Spanish
[MIDI]

Egyptian
[MIDI]

The characteristics of German and English folk songs
may be observed in the familiar airs of these nations.

The epitome of folk song, divested of nationalism, is
shown in the following:

[MIDI]

 12 
The antiquity of any melody (or its primitiveness) may be established
according to its rhythmic and melodic or human attributes.

XII

THE TROUBADOURS, MINNESINGERS AND MASTERSINGERS

Although
wandering minstrels or bards have existed
since the world began, and although the poetry they have
left is often suggestive, the music to which the words
were sung is but little known.

About 700–800 A.D., when all Europe was in a state
of dense ignorance and mental degradation, the Arabs
were the embodiment of culture and science, and the
Arab empire extended at that time over India, Persia,
Arabia, Egypt (including Algeria and Barbary), Portugal,
and the Spanish caliphates, Andalusia, Granada, etc.
The descriptions of the splendour at the courts of the
Eastern caliphs at Bagdad seem almost incredible.

For instance, the Caliph Mahdi is said to have expended
six millions of dinars of gold in a single pilgrimage to
Mecca. His grandson, Almamon, gave in alms, on one
single occasion, two and a half millions of gold pieces,
and the rooms in his palace at Bagdad were hung with
thirty-eight thousand pieces of tapestry, over twelve
thousand of which were of silk embroidered with gold.
The floor carpets were more than twenty thousand in
number, and the Greek ambassador was shown a hundred
lions, each with his keeper, as a sign of the king’s royalty,
as well as a wonderful tree of gold and silver, spreading
into eighteen large, leafy branches, on which were many

birds made of the same precious metals. By some
mechanical means, the birds sang and the leaves trembled.
Naturally such a court, particularly under the reign of
Haroun-al Raschid (the Just), who succeeded Almamon,
would attract the most celebrated of those Arabian minstrels,
such as Zobeir, Ibrahim of Mossoul, and many
others who figure in the “Arabian Nights,” real persons
and celebrated singers of their times. We read
of one of them, Serjab, who, by court jealousy and intrigues,
was forced to leave Bagdad, and found his way
to the Western caliphates, finally reaching Cordova in
Spain, where the Caliph Abdalrahman’s court vied with
that of Bagdad in luxury. Concerning this we read in
Gibbon that in his palace of Zehra the audience hall was
incrusted with gold and pearls, and that the caliph was
attended by twelve thousand horsemen whose belts and
scimiters were studded with gold.

We know that the Arabian influence on the European
arts came to us by the way of Spain, and although we can
see traces of it very plainly in the Spanish music of to-day,
the interim of a thousand years has softened its characteristics
very much. On the other hand, the much more
pronounced Arabian characteristics of Hungarian music
are better understood when we recall that the Saracens
were at the gates of Budapesth as late as 1400. That the
European troubadours should have adopted the Moorish
el oud and called it “lute” is therefore but natural. And
in all the earlier songs of the troubadours we shall find
many traces of the same influence; for their albas or aubades
(morning songs) came from the Arabic, as did their

serenas or serenades (evening songs), planhs (complaints),
and coblas (couplets). The troubadours themselves were
so called from trobar, meaning to invent.

In the works of Fauriel and St. Polaye, and many others,
may be found accounts of the origin of the Provençal
literature, including, of course, a description of the troubadours.
It is generally admitted that Provençal poetry
has no connection with Latin, the origin of this new poetry
being very plausibly ascribed to a gypsy-like class of
people mentioned by the Latin chroniclers of the Middle
Ages as joculares or joculatores. They were called joglars
in Provençal, jouglers or jougleors in French, and our
word “juggler” comes from the same source. What that
source originally was may be inferred from the fact that
they brought many of the Arab forms of dance and
poetry into Christian Europe. For instance, two forms
of Provençal poetry are the counterpart of the Arabian
cosidas or long poem, all on one rhyme; and the maouchahs
or short poem, also rhymed. The saraband, or Saracen
dance, and later the morris dance (Moresco or Fandango)
or Moorish dance, seem to point to the same origin. In
order to make it clearer I will quote an Arabian song from
a manuscript in the British Museum, and place beside it
one by the troubadour Capdeuil.

Arabian Melody
[MIDI]

[MIDI]

The troubadours must not be confounded with the
jougleurs (more commonly written jongleurs). The latter,
wandering, mendicant musicians, ready to play the lute,
sing, dance, or “juggle,” were welcomed as merry-makers
at all rich houses, and it soon became a custom for rich
nobles to have a number of them at their courts. The
troubadour was a very different person, generally a noble
who wrote poems, set them to music, and employed jongleurs
to sing and play them. In the South these songs
were generally of an amorous nature, while in the North
they took the form of chansons de geste, long poems recounting
the feats in the life and battles of some hero,
such as Roland (whose song was chanted by the troops
of William the Conqueror), or Charles Martel.

And so the foundations for many forms of modern
music were laid by the troubadours, for the chanson or
song was always a narrative. If it were an evening song
it was a sera or serenade, or if it were a night song,

nocturne; a dance, a ballada; a round dance, a rounde or
rondo; a country love song, a pastorella. Even the words
descant and treble go back to their time; for the jongleurs,
singing their masters’ songs, would not all follow the
same melody; one of them would seek to embellish it
and sing something quite different that still would fit well
with the original melody, just as nowadays, in small
amateur bands we often hear a flute player adding embellishing
notes to his part. Soon, more than one singer
added to his part, and the new voice was called the triple,
third, or treble voice. This extemporizing on the part
of the jongleurs soon had to be regulated, and the actual
notes written down to avoid confusion. Thus this habit
of singing merged into faux bourdon, which has been
discussed in a former chapter. Apart from these forms
of song, there were some called sirventes—that is “songs
of service,” which were very partisan, and were accompanied
by drums, bells, and pipes, and sometimes by
trumpets. The more warlike of these songs were sung at
tournaments by the jongleurs outside the lists, while their
masters, the troubadours, were doing battle, of which custom
a good description is to be found in Hagen’s book on
the minnesingers.

In France the Provençal poetry lasted only until the
middle of the fourteenth century, after the troubadours
had received a crushing blow at the time the Albigenses
were extirpated in the thirteenth century.

In one city alone (that of Beziers), between 30,000 and
40,000 people were killed for heresy against the Pope.
The motto of the Pope’s representatives was “God will

know His Own,” and Catholics as well as Albigenses (as
the sect was called) were massacred indiscriminately.
That this heresy against the Pope was vastly aided by the
troubadours, is hardly open to doubt. Such was their
power that the rebellious, antipapal sirventes of the
troubadours (which were sung by their troops of jongleurs
in every market place) could be suppressed only after the
cities of Provence were almost entirely annihilated and
the population destroyed by the massacre, burning alive,
and the Inquisition.

A review of the poems of Bertran de Born, Bernart de
Ventadour, Thibaut, or others is hardly in place here.
Therefore we will pass to Germany, where the spirit of the
troubadours was assimilated in a peculiarly Germanic
fashion by the minnesingers and the mastersingers.

In Germany, the troubadours became minnesingers, or
singers of love songs, and as early as the middle of the
twelfth century the minnesingers were already a powerful
factor in the life of the epoch, counting among their
number many great nobles and kings. The German
minnesingers differed from the French troubadours in
that they themselves accompanied their songs on the viol,
instead of employing jongleurs. Their poems, written in
the Swabian dialect, then the court language of Germany,
were characterized by greater pathos and purity than
those of the troubadours, and their longer poems, corresponding
to the chansons de geste of the north of France,
were also superior to the latter in point of dignity
and strength. From the French we have the “Song of
Roland” (which William the Conqueror’s troops sang in

their invasion of England); from the Germans the “Nibelungen
Song,” besides Wolfram von Eschenbach’s “Parzival”
and Gottfried von Strasburg’s “Tristan.” In
contradistinction to the poetry of the troubadours, that of
the minnesingers was characterized by an undercurrent
of sadness which seems to be peculiar to the Germanic
race. The songs are full of nature and the eternal strife
between Winter and Summer and their prototypes Death
and Life (recalling the ancient myths of Maneros, Bacchus,
Astoreth, Bel, etc.).

After the death of Konrad IV, the last Swabian emperor
of the House of Hohenstaufen, minnesinging in Germany
declined, and was succeeded by the movement represented
by the meister or mastersingers. During the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries, when Germany was broken up
into countless small duchies and kingdoms, many of the
German nobles became mere robbers and took part in the
innumerable little wars which kept the nation in a state
of ferment. Thus they had neither time nor inclination
to occupy themselves with such pursuits as poetry or
music. In the meanwhile, however, the incessant warfare
and brigandage that prevailed in the country tended to
drive the population to the cities for protection. The
latter grew in size, and little by little the tradespeople
began to take up the arts of poetry and music which had
been discarded by the nobles.

Following their custom in respect to their trades, they
formed the art companies into guilds, the rules for admittance
to which were very strict. The rank of each
member was determined by his skill in applying the rules

of the “Tabulatur,” as it was called. There were five
grades of membership: the lowest was that of mere admittance
to the guild; the next carried with it the title
of scholar; the third the friend of the school; after that
came the singer, the poet; and last of all the mastersinger,
to attain which distinction the aspirant must have invented
a new style of melody or rhyme. The details of
the contest we all know from Wagner’s comedy; in a
number of cases Wagner even made use of the sentences
and words found in the rules of the mastersingers. Although
the mastersingers retained their guild privileges
in different parts of Germany almost up to the middle
of the present century, the movement was strongest in
Bavaria, with Nuremberg as its centre.

Thus we see that the mastersingers and the minnesingers
were two very different classes of men. The
mastersingers are mainly valuable for having given
Wagner a pretext for his wonderful music. Hans Sachs
was perhaps the only one of the mastersingers whose
melodies show anything but the flattest mediocrity.
The minnesingers and their immediate predecessors and
successors, on the other hand, furnished thought for a
great part of our modern art. To put it in a broad
manner, it may be said that much of our modern poetry
owes more than is generally conceded to the German
mediæval romance as represented in the works of Wolfram
von Eschenbach, Gottfried of Strasburg, and the unknown
compilers of the “Nibelungenlied” and “Gutrune.”
Music owes more to the troubadours, for, from what
we know of the melodies of the minnesingers, they cannot

compare in expressiveness with those of their French
confrères.

In closing this consideration of the minnesingers, I will
quote some of their verses and melodies, giving short
accounts of the authors.

The best known of the minnesingers were Walther von
der Vogelweide, Heinrich Frauenlob, Tannhäuser, Nithart,
Toggenburg, etc. We first hear of Walther von der
Vogelweide in 1200, as a poet attached to the court of
Philip of Hohenstaufen, the German Kaiser, and shortly
after to that of his successors Otto and Friedrich. He
accompanied Kaiser Friedrich to the Crusade of 1228,
and saw him crowned in Jerusalem. He died in Würzburg,
Bavaria. In accordance with his dying request,
food and drink for the birds were placed on his tomb
every day; the four holes carved for that purpose being
still visible. The pictures in Hagen’s work on the mastersingers
were collected in the fifteenth century by
Manasses of Zorich, and have served as the basis for all
subsequent works on the subject. The picture of Von der
Vogelweide (page 21) shows him sitting in an attitude
of meditation, on a green hillock, beside him his sword
and his coat of arms (a caged bird on one side and his
helmet on the other), and in his hand a roll of manuscript.
One of his shorter poems begins:

Neath the lindens
In the meadow
Seek I flowers sweet;
Clover fragrant,
Tender grasses,
Bend beneath my feet.

See, the gloaming,
Softly sinking,
Covers hill and dale.
Hush! my lover—
Tandaradei!
Sweet sings the nightingale.

We all are familiar with Tannhäuser (plate 35), through
Wagner’s opera; therefore it is unnecessary to say more
than that he was a real person, a minnesinger, and that the
singing tournament at the Wartburg (the castle of the
Thüringen family) really took place in 1206–07. This
tournament, which Wagner introduces into his “Tannhäuser,”
was a trial of knightly strength, poetry, and music,
between the courts of Babenhausen and Thüringen, and
was held in Erfurt. Among the knights who competed
were Klingsor of Hungary, a descendant of the Klingsor
who figures in the “Parzival” legend, Tannhäuser,
Walther von Eschenbach, Walther von der Vogelweide,
and many others. Tannhäuser was a follower, or perhaps
better, the successor of Walther von der Vogelweide,
like him, a crusader, and lived in the first half of the
thirteenth century. Toggenburg and Frauenlob were
both celebrated minnesingers, the former (plate 7) being
the subject of many strange legends. The simplicity and
melodious charm of his verses seem to contradict the
savage brutality ascribed to him in the stories of his life.

Frauenlob (plate 44), as Heinrich von Meissen was
called, represents the minnesingers at the height of their
development. He died about 1320, and his works, as his
nickname suggests, were imbued with das ewig weibliche

in its best sense. He was called the Magister of the
seven free arts, and was given the position of Canon of
the Cathedral of Mayence, with the title of Doctor of
Divinity. He also wrote a paraphrase on the “Song
of Solomon,” turning it into a rhapsodical eulogy of the
Virgin Mary, carrying versification to what seemed then
its utmost limits. The picture shows him playing and
singing to some prince, the carpet on which he stands
being lifted by the attendants. It makes plain the difference
between the minnesingers and the troubadours.
In this picture the singer is seen to be accompanying
himself before the king, whereas in plate 28 we see two
troubadours in the lists, their jongleurs playing or singing
the songs of their masters, while the latter engage each
other in battle. In order to give one more example we
will take the pictures of Conrad, the son of Conrad IV,
and the last of the Hohenstaufens (plate 11). He was born
about 1250, and was beheaded in the market place at
Naples in 1268. The story of Konradin, as he was called,
is familiar; how he lived with his mother at the castle of
her brother, Ludwig of Bavaria, how he was induced to
join in a rebellion of the two Sicilies (to the crown of
which he was heir) against France, his defeat and execution
by the Duke of Anjou, himself a well-known troubadour.
The text accompanying his picture in Hagen’s
work describes him as having black eyes and blonde
hair, and wearing a long green dress with a golden collar.
His gray hunting horse is covered with a crimson mantle,
has a golden saddle and bit, and scarlet reins. Konradin
wears white hunting gloves and a three-cornered king’s

crown. Above the picture are the arms of the kingdom
of Jerusalem (a golden crown in silver ground), to which
he was heir through his grandmother, Iolanthe. One of
his songs runs as follows, and it may be accepted as
a fair specimen of the style of lyric written by the
minnesingers:

The lovely flowers and verdure sweet
That gentle May doth slip
Have been imprisoned cruelly
In Winter’s iron grip;
But May smiles o’er the green clad fields
That seemed anon so sad,
And all the world is glad.

No joy to me the Summer brings
With all its bright long days.
My thoughts are of a maiden fair
Who mocks my pleading gaze;
She passes me in haughty mood,
Denies me aught but scorn,
And makes my life forlorn.

Yet should I turn my love from her,
For aye my love were gone.
I’d gladly die could I forget
The love that haunts my song.
So, lonely, joyless, live I on,
For love my prayer denies,
And, childlike, mocks my sighs.

The music of these minnesingers existing in manuscript
has been but little heeded, and only lately has an attempt
been made to classify and translate it into modern notation.
The result so far attained has been unsatisfactory,

for the rhythms are all given as spondaic. This seems
a very improbable solution of the mystery that must
inevitably enshroud the musical notation of the eleventh,
twelfth, and thirteenth centuries.

Nithart (plate 36), by whom a number of melodies or
“tones” are given in Hagen’s book (page 845), has been
dubbed the second “Till Eulenspiegel.” He was a Bavarian,
and lived about 1230, at the court of Frederick of
Austria. He was eminently the poet and singer of the
peasants, with whom, after the manner of Eulenspiegel, he
had many quarrels, one of which is evidently the subject
of the picture. His music, or melodies, and the verses
which went with them, form the most complete authentic
collection of mediæval music known. In considering the
minnelieder of the Germans it is very interesting to compare
them with the songs of the troubadours, and to
note how in the latter the Arab influence has increased
the number of curved lines, or arabesques, whereas the
German songs may be likened to straight lines, a characteristic
which we know is a peculiarity of their folk
song.

PASTORELLA BY THIBAUT II, KING OF NAVARRE, 1254.

[MIDI]

[MIDI]

In speaking of the straight lines of the melodies of the
minnesingers and in comparing them with the tinge of
orientalism to be found in those of the troubadours, it was
said that music owes more to the latter than to the former,
and this is true. If we admit that the straight line
of Grecian architecture is perfect, so must we also admit
that mankind is imperfect. We are living beings, and as
such are swayed to a great extent by our emotions. To
the straight line of purity in art the tinge of orientalism,
the curved line of emotion, brings the flush of life, and the
result is something which we can feel as well as worship
from afar. Music is a language, and to mankind it serves
as a medium for saying something which cannot be put
into mere words. Therefore, it must contain the human
element of mere sensuousness in order to be intelligible.

This is why the music of the troubadours, although not
so pure in style as that of the minnesingers, has been of
the greatest value in the development of our art. This
orientalism, however, must not mask the straight line;
it must be the means of lending more force, tenderness,
or what not, to the figure. It must be what the poem is
to the picture, the perfume to the flower; it must help
to illustrate the thing itself. The moment we find this
orientalism (and I am using the word in its broadest
sense) covering, and thus distorting the straight line of
pure music, then we have national music so-called, a
music which derives its name and fame from the clothes
it wears and not from that strange language of the soul,
the “why” of which no man has ever discovered.

XIII

EARLY INSTRUMENTAL FORMS

Referring
to some newspaper reports which he knew to
be without foundation, Bismarck once said, “Newspapers
are simply a union of printer’s ink and paper.” Omitting
the implied slur we might say the same of printed music
and printed criticism; therefore, in considering printed
music we must, first of all, remember that it is the letter
of the law which kills. We must look deeper, and be able
to translate sounds back into the emotions which caused
them. There is no right or wrong way to give utterance
to music. There is but one way, namely, through the
living, vital expression of the content of the music; all
else is not music but mere pleasure for the ear, a thing of
the senses. For the time being we must see through
the composer’s eyes and hear through his ears. In other
words, we must think in his language. The process of
creating music is often, to a great extent, beyond the control
of the composer, just as is the case with the novelist
and his characters. The language through which musical
thought is expressed, however, is a different thing, and it
is this process of developing musical speech until it has
become capable of saying for us that which, in our spoken
language, must ever remain unsaid, that I shall try to make
clear in our consideration of form in music.

Until the very end of the fifteenth century, music, so
far as we know, had no language of its own, that is to say,
it was not recognized as a medium for expressing thought
or emotion. Josquin des Prés (born at Conde in the north
of France in 1450, died 1521) was the first to attempt
the expression of thought in sound. Luther, in rebelling
against Rome, also overturned the music of the church in
Germany. He incorporated many folk songs into the
music of the Protestant church and discarded the old
Gregorian chant (which was vague in rhythm, or, rather,
wholly without rhythm), calling it asinine braying.

While Luther was paving the way for Bach by encouraging
church music to be something more than merely the
singing of certain melodies according to prescribed rules,
in Italy (at the time of his death in 1546) the Council of
Trent was already trying to decide upon a style of music
proper for the church. The matter was definitely settled
in 1562 or 1563 by the adoption of Palestrina’s
style. 13 
Thus, while in Germany ecclesiastical music was being
broadened and an opening offered for the development
of the dramatic and emotional side of music, in Italy, on
the contrary, the emotional style of music was being
neglected and an absolutely serene style of what may be
called “impersonal” music encouraged. Italy, however,
soon had opera on which to fall back, and thus music
in both countries developed rapidly, although on different
lines.

In England, the budding school of English art, as
exemplified by Purcell, was soon overwhelmed by the

influence of Händel and the all-pervading school of Italian
opera, which he brought with him.

In France, up to 1655, when Cardinal Mazarin sent to
Italy for an opera troupe with the purpose of entertaining
Anne of Austria (the widow of Louis XIII), there was
practically no recognized music except that imported from
other countries. Under Louis XI (d. 1483) Ockeghem, the
Netherland contrapuntist, was the chief musician of the
land.

The French pantomimes or masques, as they were
sometimes called, can hardly be said to have represented
a valuable gain to art, although their prevalence in France
points directly to their having been the direct descendants
of the old pantomime on one hand, and on the other, the
direct ancestor of the French opera. For we read that
already in 1581 (twenty years before Caccini’s “Euridice”
at Florence), a ballet entitled “Circe” was given
on the occasion of the marriage of Margaret of Lorraine,
the stepsister of Henry III. The music to it was written
by Beaulieu and Salmon, two court musicians. There
were ten bands of music in the cupola of the ballroom
where the ballet was given. These bands included hautbois,
cornets, trombones, violas de gamba, flutes, harps,
lutes, flageolets. Besides all this, ten violin players in
costume entered the scene in the first act, five from each
side. Then a troupe of Tritons came swimming in, playing
lutes, harps, flutes, one even having a kind of ‘cello. When
Jupiter makes his appearance, he is accompanied by forty
musicians. The festivities on this occasion are said to
have cost over five million francs. Musically, the ballet

was no advance towards expressiveness in art. An air
which accompanied “Circe’s” entrance, may be cited as
being the original of the well-known “Amaryllis,” which is
generally called Air Louis XV. Baltazarini calls it un son
fort gai, nomme la clochette.

Music remained inert in France until 1650, when the
Italians gained an ascendancy, which they retained until
1732, when Rameau’s first opera “Hyppolyte et Aricie”
was given in Paris. Rameau had already commenced
his career by gaining great success as a harpsichord player
and instrumental composer, mostly for the harpsichord.
By his time, however, music, that is to say, secular music,
was already becoming a new art, and the French merely
improved upon what already existed.

Now this new art was first particularly evident in the
dances of these different peoples. These dances gave the
music form, and held it down to certain prescribed rhythms
and duration. Little by little the emotions, the natural
expression of which is music, could no longer be restricted
to these dance forms and rhythms; and gradually the latter
were modified by each daring innovator in turn. This
“daring” of human beings, in breaking through the
trammels of the dance in order to express what lay within
their souls in the language that properly belonged to it,
would seem almost ludicrous to us, were we not even
to-day trying to get up courage to do the same thing.
The modifications of dance forms led up to our sonata,
symphony, and symphonic poem, as I hope to show.
Opera was a thing apart, and, being untrammelled either
by dance rhythms or church laws, developed gradually and

normally. It cannot, however, be said to have developed
side by side with purely instrumental music, for the latter
is only just beginning to emancipate itself from its dance
clothes and to come forth as a language for the expression
of all that is divine in man. First we will consider the
forms and rhythms of these dances, then the awakening
of the idea of design in music, and its effect in modifying
these forms and laying the foundation for the sonata of
the nineteenth century.

The following shows the structure of the different dance
forms up to about 1750.

OLD DANCE FORMS (1650–1750).

In all these forms each period may be repeated.

Often the first, third, and fourth periods are repeated,
leaving the second period as it is. This happens especially
when the second period is longer than the first. In Nos.
2, 4, 6, 7, a few bars are often added at Fine as a coda.

ANALYSIS OF OLD DANCES

1. Sarabande.—

lento. Rhythm
.
Form 1, sometimes Form 2. This is of Spanish
origin (Saracen dance), and is generally accompanied by
variations called partita or doubles.

2. Musette
(cornemusa or bagpipe).—

allegretto.
Form 1. Always written over or under a pedal note,
which is generally sustained to the end. It generally
forms the second part (not period) to the gavotte.

3. Gavotte.—
allegro moderato.
Rhythm

or
.
Always commences on the third beat. Form 3 or 5.
When accompanied by a musette, the gavotte is always
repeated.

4. Bourree.—
allegro. Rhythm
.
Form 3 or 5. Generally faster than the gavotte, and
commences on the fourth beat.

5. Rigaudon.—Similar to the bourrée, but slower.

6. Loure.—Similar to the bourrée, but slower. (In
French the verb lourer means “to hold,” which may have
been a characteristic of the loure bass).

7. Tambourin.—
allegro. In form and rhythm like
the gavotte, but faster. Usually founded on a rhythmic
pedal note imitating a tambourine.

8. Corrente,
Courante.—
allegretto.
Rhythm

or

(does not usually commence on the beat). Form 1,
sometimes Form 2. The rhythm is usually uniform, a
kind of perpetual motion, though not in one voice.

9. Minuet.—
generally a little slower than moderato,
although in later minuets the tempo became allegretto.
Rhythm, generally,
Chaconne.—
moderato. Form undecided; has
sometimes even only one period, sometimes three or two.
It is generally accompanied by doubles or variations, and
is invariably written on a ground bass or basso ostinato.
The rhythm is often syncopated.

Passacaille,
,
resembles a chaconne but is more
stately.

11. Waltz
(old German).—
andante moderato.
Generally Form 6. Rhythm

approximately.

12. March.—
allegro moderato.
Rhythm
etc.,
or
etc.
Form 6. Generally all the periods are
repeated and consist of eight measures each; third and
fourth periods change the key and rhythm.

13. Allemande.—
moderato. Rhythm generally
uniform sixteenth notes. Form 1.

14. Passepied.—Quick minuet.

15. Pavane, Padvana,
or Pavo (peacock).—
andante
moderato. Rhythm
.
Form 2 or 6. Sometimes ;
third and fourth periods in
different keys.

16. Gigue.—





presto. Rhythm generally
uniform eighth notes. Forms 1 and 2.

17. Polonaise.—.
Rhythm or
allegro. Form 1, generally with short coda.

MODERN FORMS (1800).

1. Mazurka.—
allegretto. Form 6.
Rhythm .

2. Polonaise
(also Polacca).—
allegro maestoso.
Rhythm or
. The
bass is generally . Form 7.

3. Bolero (Cachucha)
(Spanish).—Like the polonaise
but livelier, and generally containing counter-rhythms in
triplets.

4. Habanera.—.
Rhythm
.
The characteristic element is the
mixture of triplets and eighth notes. Time, andante.
Form undecided, generally No. 1. Very often repeated
with slight changes.

5. Czardas
(Hungarian).—First part
(lassan, lento);
second part
(friska, presto and prestissimo). For
form and rhythm see Liszt’s rhapsodies, Nos. 2, 4, and 6.

6. Tarantella.—Rhythm

or . Time, molto allegro to prestissimo.
Forms 4 and 6, sometimes 7. In the Trio the
movement is often quieter although not necessarily
slower. It almost invariably has a Coda. The Finale
is usually prestissimo.

7. Saltarello.—Similar to the tarantella, with the
exception of having more jumps (salti).

8. Polka
(about 1840).—
allegretto.
Rhythm . Form 6. Accent is on the
second beat. Cuban dances (sometimes called habaneros)
are often in polka form and rhythm, with the one exception
of the triplets peculiar to almost all Spanish music
Waltz.—.
Rhythm (bass) Galop.—.
Rhythm or
. Form 6. Time, presto.

11. March.—Same as the old march, but modified
in character and movement according to its title—funeral

march, military march, cortege, festival march, etc. In
funeral marches, the third and fourth periods are generally
in major.

The modernizing of dance forms has been undertaken
by almost every writer from Scarlatti (d. 1757) down to our
day. Scarlatti joined sections together with isolated
measures, repeated sections and phrases before completing
the period, and added short codas to periods indiscriminately.
Since his time, everyone has added to or curtailed
the accepted forms by putting two forms together; hence
the fantaisie-mazurka, etc. Wagner represents the culminating
point of the modern tendency to disregard
forms which were interpreted differently by every composer,
and which had their origin in dances.

The attempt to emancipate music from the dance commenced
very early; in fact, most of the earliest secular
music we know already shows the tendency towards
programme music, for, from an emotional standpoint,
secular music began at the very bottom of the ladder.
It was made to express things at first, just as in learning
any new language we naturally first acquire a vocabulary
of nouns to express things we see, such as table,
chair, etc., in the same way that in written language the
symbols first take the shape of animals or other things
they are meant to represent. This same characteristic
naturally showed itself in music before the words for
emotion came, the common, everyday nouns were sought
for in this new language. The madrigals of Weelkes
and their word painting show this, and the same occur
in instrumental music, as in Byrd’s “Carman’s Whistle,”

one of the earliest English instrumental works contemporaneous
to the madrigals of Morley and others.
In France, many of the earliest clavichord pieces were of
the programme type, and even in Germany, where instrumental
music ran practically in the same groove with
church music, the same tendency showed itself.

I have given the forms of most of the old dances, and
also the elements of melodic structure (motive, phrase,
etc.). I must, however, add the caution that this material
is to be accepted in a general way, and as representing
the rhythms and forms most frequently used. A French
courante differed from the Italian, and certain dances were
taken at different tempi in different countries. Poor, or
at least careless construction, is often the cause of much
confusion. Scarlatti, for instance, is especially loose in
melodic structure.

It was only with Beethoven that the art of musical
design showed anything like complete comprehension by
the composer. Until then, with occasional almost haphazard
successes, the art of pushing a thought to its logical
conclusion was seemingly unknown. An emotional passage
now and then would often betray deep feeling, but
the thought would almost invariably be lost in the telling,
for the simple reason that the musical sentences were put
together almost at random, mere stress of momentary
emotion being seemingly the only guiding influence. Bach
stands alone; his sense of design was inherent, but, owing
to the contrapuntal tendency of his time, his feeling for
melodic design is often overshadowed, and even rendered
impossible by the complex web of his music. With a

number of melodies sounding together, their individual
emotional development becomes necessarily difficult to
emphasize.

Bach’s art has something akin to that of Palestrina.
They both stand alone in the history of the world, but
the latter belongs to the Middle Ages. He is the direct
descendant of Ambrose, Gregory, Notker, Tutilo, etc.,
the crowning monument of the Roman Church in music,
and represents what may be termed unemotional music.
His art was untouched by the strange, suggestive colours
of modern harmony; it was pure, unemotional, and serene.
One instinctively thinks of Bach, on the other hand, as a
kind of musical reflection of Protestantism. His was not
a secluded art which lifted its head high above the multitude;
it was rather the palpable outpouring of a great heart.
Bach also represents all the pent-up feeling which until
then had longed in vain for utterance, and had there been
any canvas for him to paint on (to use a poor simile), the
result would have been still more marvellous. As it
was, the material at his disposal was a poor set of dance
forms, with the one exception of the fugue, the involved
utterance of which precluded spontaneity and confined
emotional design to very restricted limits. It is exactly
as if Wagner had been obliged to put his thoughts in
quadrille form with the possible alternative of some
mathematical device of musical double bookkeeping. As
it is, Bach’s innovations were very considerable. In the
first place, owing to the lack of the system of equal temperament,
composers had been limited to the use of only
two or three sharps and flats; in all the harpsichord music

of the pre-Bach period we rarely find compositions in
sharp keys beyond G, or flat keys beyond A♭. To be
sure, Rameau, in France, began at the same time to see
the necessity for equal temperament, but it was Bach who,
by his forty-eight “Preludes and Fugues,” written in all
the keys, first settled the matter definitely.

In the fugue form itself, he made many innovations consisting
mainly of the casting aside of formalism. With
Bach a fugue consists of what is called the “exposition,”
that is to say, the enunciation of the theme (subject),
its answer by another voice or part, recurrence of the
subject in another part which, in turn, is again answered,
and so on according to the number of voices or parts.
After the exposition the fugue consists of a kind of free
contrapuntal fantasy on the subject and its answer. By
throwing aside the restraint of form Bach often gave his
fugues an emotional significance in spite of the complexity
of the material he worked with.

 13 
Pier Luigi, born in Palestrina, near Rome.

XIV

THE MERGING OF THE SUITE INTO THE SONATA

In
the previous chapter it was stated that the various
dances, such as the minuet, sarabande, allemande, etc.,
led up to our modern sonata form, or, perhaps, to put it
more clearly, they led up to what we call sonata form.
As a matter of fact, already in the seventeenth century,
we find the word sonata applied to musical compositions;
generally to pieces for the violin, but rarely for the harpsichord.
The word sonata was derived originally from the
Italian word suonare, “to sound,” and the term was used
to distinguish instrumental from vocal music. The latter
was sung (cantata), the former was sounded (suonata) by
instruments. Thus many pieces were called suonatas;
the distinguishing point being that they were played and
not sung. Organ sonatas existed as far back as 1600 and
even earlier, but the earliest application of the word seems
to have been made in connection with pieces for the violin.

Dances were often grouped together, especially when
they had some slight intrinsic musical value. Probably
the term sonata first designated a composition in one of
these dance forms not intended for dancing. Gradually
groups of dances were called suites; then, little by little,
the dance titles of the separate numbers were dropped,
and the suite was called sonata. These different numbers,

however, retained their dance characteristics, as we shall
see later. The arrangement of the pieces composing the
suites differed in various countries. There were French,
Italian, German, and English suites, generally, however,
retaining the same grouping of the different movements.
The first movement consisted of an allemande; then came
a courante; then a minuet; then a sarabande; and last of
all a gigue; all in the same key. Sometimes the minuet
and sarabande changed places, just as in modern times do
the andante and scherzo.

Already in 1685, when Corelli’s sonatas for strings
appeared, the custom of decreasing the number of movements
to three began to obtain, and a century later this
custom was universal. The allemande, overture, or preludio
formed the first movement; the second consisted of
the sarabande, the ancestor of our adagio; and the last part
was generally a gigue. Even when the dance titles were
no more used (the music having long outgrown its original
purpose), the distinctive characteristics of these different
movements were retained; the sarabande rhythm was still
adhered to for the adagio (even by Haydn) and the triple
time and rhythm of the gigue were given to the last part.
In addition to this, these three movements were often kept
in one key. In his first sonatas Beethoven added a movement,
generally a minuet, to this scheme; but returned to
the three-movement structure later. His Op. 111 has only
two movements, in a way returning to a still earlier general
form of the sonata. Now, as has already been said, some
of the earliest examples of instrumental music were mainly
descriptive in character, that is to say, consisting of

imitations of things, thus marking the most elementary
stage of programme music. Little by little composers
became more ambitious and began to attempt to give
expression to the emotions by means of music; and at last,
with Beethoven, “programme music” may be said, in one
sense, to have reached its climax. For although it is not
generally realized, he wrote every one of his sonatas with
definite subjects, and, at one time, was on the point of
publishing mottoes to them, in order to give the public
a hint of what was in his mind when he wrote them.

Analysis may be considered as the reducing of a musical
composition to its various elements—harmony, rhythm,
melody—and power of expression. Just as melody may
be analyzed down to the motives and phrases of which
it consists, so may the expressiveness of music be analyzed;
and this latter study is most valuable, for it brings us
to a closer understanding of the power of music as a
language.

For the sake of clearness we will group music as follows:

1. Dance forms.
2. Programme music. (Things. Feelings.)
3. The gathering together of dances in suites.
4. The beginnings of design.
5. The merging of the suite into the sonata.

The dance tunes I need hardly quote; they consist of
a mere play of sound to keep the dancers in step, for which
purpose any more or less agreeable rhythmical succession
of sounds will serve.

If we take the next step in advance of instrumental
music we come to the giving of meanings to these dances,
and, as I have explained, these meanings will at first have
reference to things; for instance, Couperin imitates an
alarm clock; Rameau tries to make the music sound as if
three hands were playing instead of two (Les trois mains);
he imitates sighing (Les soupirs); the scolding voice; he
even tries to express a mood musically (L’indifferente). In
Germany, these attempts to make instrumental music
expressive of something beyond rhythmic time-keeping
continued, and we find Carl Philip Emanuel Bach attempting
to express light-hearted amiability (La complaisance)
and even languor (Les tendres langueurs). The suite,
while it combined several dances in one general form,
shows only a trace of design. There was more design in
one of the small programme pieces already quoted than in
most of the suites of this period (see, for example, Loeilly’s
“Suite”).

Bach possessed instinctively the feeling for musical
speech which seemed denied to his contemporaries whenever
they had no actual story to guide their expression;
and even in his dance music we find coherent musical sentences
as, for instance, in the Courante in A.

In art our opinions must, in all cases, rest directly on
the thing under consideration and not on what is written
about it. In my beliefs I am no respecter of the written
word, that is to say, the mere fact that a statement is made
by a well-known man, is printed in a well-known work, or
is endorsed by many prominent names, means nothing to
me if the thing itself is available for examination. Without

a thorough knowledge of music, including its history
and development, and, above all, musical “sympathy,”
individual criticism is, of course, valueless; at the same time
the acquirement of this knowledge and sympathy is not
difficult, and I hope that we may yet have a public in
America that shall be capable of forming its own ideas,
and not be influenced by tradition, criticism, or fashion.

We need to open our eyes and see for ourselves instead
of trusting the direction of our steps to the guidance of
others. Even an opinion based on ignorance, frankly
given, is of more value to art than a platitude gathered
from some outside source. If it is not a platitude but the
echo of some fine thought, it only makes it worse, for it is
not sincere, unless of course it is quoted understandingly.
We need freshness and sincerity in forming our judgments
in art, for it is upon these that art lives. All over the
world we find audiences listening suavely to long concerts,
and yet we do not see one person with the frankness of
the little boy in Andersen’s story of the “New Clothes of
the Emperor.” It is the same with the other arts. I
have never heard anyone say that part of the foreground of
Millet’s “Angelus” is “muddy” or that the Fornarina’s
mysterious smile is anything but “hauntingly beautiful.”
People do not dare admire the London Law Courts;
all things must be measured by the straight lines of Grecian
architecture. Frankness! Let us have frankness,
and if we have no feelings on a subject, let us remain silent
rather than echo that drone in the hive of modern thought,
the “authority in art.”

Every person with even the very smallest love and

sympathy for art possesses ideas which are valuable to
that art. From the tiniest seeds sometimes the greatest
trees are grown. Why, therefore, allow these tender
germs of individualism to be smothered by that flourishing,
arrogant bay tree of tradition—fashion, authority,
convention, etc.

My reason for insisting on the importance of all lovers
of art being able to form their own opinions is obvious,
when we consider that our musical public is obliged to
take everything on trust. For instance, if we read on
one page of some history (every history of music has such
a page) that Mozart’s sonatas are sublime, that they do
not contain one note of mere filigree work, and that they
far transcend anything written for the harpsichord or
clavichord by Haydn or his contemporaries, we echo the
saying, and, if necessary, quote the “authorities.” Now
if one had occasion to read over some of the clavichord
music of the period, possibly it might seem strange that
Mozart’s sonatas did not impress with their magnificence.
One might even harbour a lurking doubt as to the value of
the many seemingly bare runs and unmeaning passages.
Then one would probably turn back to the authorities
for an explanation and find perhaps the following: “The
inexpressible charm of Mozart’s music leads us to forget
the marvellous learning bestowed upon its construction.
Later composers have sought to conceal the constructional
points of the sonata which Mozart never cared to disguise,
so that incautious students have sometimes failed to
discern in them the veritable ‘pillars of the house,’ and
have accused Mozart of poverty of style because he left

them boldly exposed to view, as a great architect delights
to expose the piers upon which the tower of his cathedral
depends for its support.” (Rockstro, “History of Music,”
p. 269.) Now this is all very fine, but it is nonsense, for
Mozart’s sonatas are anything but cathedrals. It is time
to cast aside this shibboleth of printer’s ink and paper and
look the thing itself straight in the face. It is a fact that
Mozart’s sonatas are compositions entirely unworthy of
the author of the “Magic Flute,” or of any composer with
pretensions to anything beyond mediocrity. They are
written in a style of flashy harpsichord virtuosity such as
Liszt never descended to, even in those of his works at
which so many persons are accustomed to sneer.

Such a statement as I have just made may be cried
down as rank heresy, first by the book readers and then
by the general public; but I doubt if anyone among that
public would or could actually turn to the music itself and
analyze it intelligently, from both an æsthetic and technical
standpoint, in order to verify or disprove the assertion.

Once a statement is made it seems to be exceedingly
difficult to keep it from obtaining the universal acceptance
which it gains by unthinking reiteration in other works.
One of the strangest cases of this repetition of a careless
statement may be found in the majority of histories of
music, where we are told that musical expression (that is
to say, the increasing and diminishing of a tone, crescendo
and diminuendo) was first discovered at Mannheim, in
Germany, about 1760. This statement may be found in
the works of Burney, Schubart, Reichardt, Sittard, Wasielewski,
and even in Jahn’s celebrated “Life of Mozart.”

The story is that Jommelli, an Italian, first “invented” the
crescendo and diminuendo, and that when they were first
used, the people in the audience gradually rose from their
seats at the crescendo, and as the music “diminuendoed”
they sat down again. The story is absurd, for the simple
reason that even in 1705, Sperling, in his “Principæ
Musicæ,” describes crescendos from ppp to fff, and we
read in Plutarch of the same thing.

Shedlock, in his work “The Pianoforte Sonata,” quotes
as the first sonatas for the clavier those of Kuhnau, and
cites especially the six Bible sonatas. Now Kuhnau,
although he was Bach’s predecessor at St. Thomas’ Church
in Leipzig, was certainly a composer of the very lowest
rank. The Bible sonatas, which Shedlock paints to us
in such glowing colours, are the merest trash, and not to be
compared with the works of his contemporaries. I do not
think that they have any place whatsoever in the history
or development either of music or of that form called the
sonata.

The development of the suite from dance forms has
already been shown, and we will now trace the development
of the sonata from the suite in Italy, Germany, and
France. As an example of this development in Italy, a
so-called sonata by G.B. Pescetti will serve (the sonatas
by Domenico Scarlatti were not originally so named, and
the sonatas before that were simply short pieces, so designated
to distinguish them from dance music). This sonata
was published about 1730, and was one of nine. The first
movement is practically of the allemande type, and its
first period ends in the dominant key. There is but the

slightest trace of a second theme in the first part; yet
the improvement in contrapuntal design over the suites
is evident. The second movement is in the same key, and
retains the characteristic rhythm of the sarabande; at the
end, the improvement, so far as design is concerned, is
very noticeable. The last movement, still in the same
key, is a gigue, thus keeping well in the shadow of the
suite.

A sonata by the German Rolle (1718–1785) is valuable
in that it shows a very decided second theme in the first
period, thus tending toward the development of the
original simple dance form into the more complex sonata
form. The adagio, however, still has the sarabande characteristics,
and foreshadows many things. It contains
many words that later were shaped into great poems by
others. “The Erlking” of Schubert is especially hinted
at, just as the first movement was prophetic of Beethoven.
In the last movement we have the gigue rhythm again.

In France, music had become merely a court appendage,
as was the case with the other arts, and had long served
as a means for showing the divine grace with which
Louis XIV or XV could turn out his toes in the minuet.
In addition to this, the arranging of a scientific system of
harmonization by Rameau (1683–1764) (which, by the
way, is the basis of most of the treatises of harmony of the
present century), caused the few French composers who
could make headway against the prevailing Italian opera
after Lully to turn their attention away from polyphonic
writing; and having, after all, but little to express in other
than the long-accustomed dance rhythms and tunes, their

music cannot be said to have made any mark in the world.
In order to show the poverty of this style, let us take a
sonata by Méhul (1763–1817). The first movement has
already a well-defined second theme, but otherwise is a
mere collection of more or less commonplace progressions.
The second part is a dance tune, pure and simple; indeed
the first part had all the characteristics of the farandole
(see Bizet’s “l’Arlesienne”). The last part is entitled
rondo, “a round dance,” and is evidently one in the literal
sense of the word. In all these sonatas the increasing use
of what is called the Alberti bass is noticeable.

To show the last link between the suite and the sonata,
reference may be made to the well-known sonata in D
major by Haydn. In this, as in those analyzed above,
all the movements are in the same key. The adagio is a
sarabande, and the last movement has the characteristics
of the gigue. This, however, is only the starting point
with Haydn; later we will consider the development of
this form into what is practically our modern sonata,
which, of course, includes the symphony, quartet, quintet,
concerto, etc.

Our path of study in tracing the development of the
sonata from the suite leads us through a sterile tract of
seemingly bare desert. The compositions referred to are
full of fragments, sometimes fine in themselves, but lying
wherever they happened to fall, their sculptors having
no perception of their value one with another. Disconnected
phrases, ideas never completed; to quote Hamlet,
“Words, words!” Later we find Beethoven and Schubert
constructing wonderful temples out of these same

fragments, and shaping these same words into marvellous
tone poems.

The music of the period we have been considering is
well described by Browning in “A Toccata of Galuppi’s”:

Yes you, like a ghostly cricket,
  Creaking where a house was burned:
Dust and ashes, dead and done with,
  Venice spent what Venice earned.

XV

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PIANOFORTE MUSIC

Up
to the time of Beethoven, music for the pianoforte
consisted mainly of programme music of the purely descriptive
order, that is to say, it was generally imitative
of natural or artificial externals. To be sure, if we go
back to the old clavecinists, and examine the sonatas of
Kuhnau, sundry pieces by Couperin, Rameau, and the
Germans, Froberger, C.P.E. Bach and others, we find
the beginnings of that higher order of programme music
which deals directly with the emotions; and not only that,
but which aims at causing the hearer to go beyond the
actual sounds heard, in pursuance of a train of thought
primarily suggested by this music.

To find this art of programme music, as we may call it,
brought to a full flower, we must seek in the mystic utterances
of Robert Schumann. It is wise to keep in mind,
however, that although Schumann’s piano music certainly
answers to our definition of the higher programme music,
it also marks the dividing line between emotional programme
music without a well-defined object and that
dramatically emotional art which we have every reason to
believe was aimed at by Beethoven in many of his sonatas,
and which, in its logical development and broadened out

by orchestral colours and other resources, is championed
by Richard Strauss at the present day.

We have already learned that C.P.E. Bach had entirely
broken with the contrapuntal style of his father and his
age in order to gain freer utterance, and that the word
“colour” began to be used in his time in connection with
music for even one instrument. It is, perhaps, needless
to say that the vastly enlarged possibilities, both technical
and tonal, of the newly invented forte-piano were largely
the outcome of this seeking for colour in music. In
addition to this, the new art of harmonic dissonances was
already beginning to stretch out in the direction of new
and strange tonal combinations, thus giving to the music
written for the instrument many new possibilities in the
way of causing and depicting emotions. That the first
experiments were puerile, we know, as, for example,
Haydn’s attempts, in one of his pianoforte sonatas, to
suggest the conversion of an obdurate sinner.

When we consider Mozart, it is impossible to forget the
fact that in his piano works he was first and foremost a
piano virtuoso, a child prodigy, of whom filigree work was
expected by the public for which he wrote his sonatas.
(We cannot call this orientalism, for it was more or less
of German pattern, traced from the fioriture of the Italian
opera singer.) Therefore, emotional utterance or even
new or poetic colouring was not to be expected of him.

As has been said before, it remained for Beethoven to
weld these new words and strange colours into poems,
which, notwithstanding the many barnacles hanging to
them (remnants of a past of timid adhesion to forms and

fashions), are, in truth, the first lofty and dignified musical
utterances with an object which we possess. I mean by this
statement that his art was the first to cast aside the iron
fetters of what then formed the canons of art. The latter
may be described (even in reference to modern days) as
constituting the shadow of a great man. And, although
this is a digression, I may add that all students of piano
music no doubt realize the weighty shadow that Beethoven
cast over the first half of the nineteenth century,
just as Wagner is doing at the present time.

Our purists are unable to realize that the shadows are
the least vital part of the great men who cast them. We
remember that the only wish expressed by Diogenes when
Alexander came to see him was that the king should stand
aside so that he could enjoy the light of the sun.

To return: We find that Beethoven was the first exponent
of our modern art. Every revolution is bound to
bring with it a reaction which seeks to consolidate and
put in safe keeping, as it were, results attained by it.
Certainly Beethoven alone can hardly be said to have
furthered this end; for his revolt led him into still more
remote and involved trains of thought, as in his later
sonatas and quartets. Even the Ninth Symphony, hampered
as it is by actual words for which declamation
and a more or less well-defined form of musical speech are
necessary, suffers from the same involved utterance that
characterizes his last period.

Schubert, in his instrumental work, was too ardent a
seeker and lover of the purely beautiful to build upon the
forms of past generations, and thus his piano music,

neither restrained nor supported by poetic declamation,
was never held within the bounds of formalism.

It was Mendelssohn who first invested old and seemingly
worn-out forms of instrumental music (especially for the
pianoforte) with the new poetic license of speech, which
was essentially the spirit of the age of revolution in which
he lived.

In holding up Mendelssohn as a formalist against Beethoven,
and at the same time presenting him as the composer
directly responsible for our modern symphonic
poem, there is a seeming contradiction, which, however,
is more apparent than real. While Beethoven never
hesitated to overturn form (harmonic or otherwise) to
suit the exigencies of his inspiration, Mendelssohn cast
all his pictures into well-defined and orthodox forms.
Thus his symphonic poems, for example, the overtures to
“The Lovely Melusina,” “Fingal’s Cave,” “Ruy Blas,”
etc., are really overtures in form; whereas, the so-called
“Moonlight” sonata of Beethoven, as well as many others,
are sonatas only in name. The emotional and problematic
significance given by Mendelssohn to many of his
shorter piano pieces, including even such works as preludes
and fugues, is familiar to us all. These works, however,
but rarely departed from the orthodox forms represented
by their names. His “Songs without Words” have been
so often quoted as constituting a new art form that it is
well to remember that they are practically all cast in the
same mould, that of the most simple song form, with one,
and sometimes two more or less similar verses, preceded
by a short introduction and ending with a coda.

We may say then, broadly, that Beethoven invested
instrumental music with a wonderful poignancy and power
of expression, elevating it to the point of being the medium
of expressing some of the greatest thoughts we possess.
In so doing, however, he shattered many of the great
idols of formalism by the sheer violence of his expression.

Schubert, let me say again, seemed indifferent to
symmetry, or never thought of it in his piano music.
Mendelssohn, possibly influenced by his early severe
training with Zelter, accepted symmetry of form as the
cornerstone of his musical edifice; although he was one
of the first in the realms of avowed programme music,
he never carried it beyond the boundary of good form.
And, as in speaking a moment ago of the so-called canons
of musical art, we compared them with the shadows that
great men have cast upon their times, it may be as well
to remember that just this formalism of Mendelssohn
overshadowed and still overshadows England to the
present day. On the other hand, Beethoven’s last style
still shows itself in Brahms, and even in Richard Strauss.
Schumann was different from these three. His music is
not avowed programme music; neither is it, as is much
of Schubert’s, pure delight in beautiful melodies and
sounds. It did not break through formalism by sheer
violence of emotion, as did Beethoven’s; least of all has it
Mendelssohn’s orthodox dress. It represents, as well as I
can put it, the rhapsodical reverie of a great poet to whom
nothing seems strange, and who has the faculty of relating
his visions, never attempting to give them coherence,
until, perhaps, when awakened from his dream, he naïvely

wonders what they may have meant. It will be remembered
that Schumann added titles to his music after it
was composed.

To all of this new, strange music, Liszt and Chopin
added the wonderful tracery of orientalism. As I have
said before, the difference between these two is that with
Chopin this tracery enveloped poetic thought as with a
thin gauze; whereas with Liszt, the embellishment itself
made the starting point for almost a new art in tonal
combination, the effects of which are seen on every hand
to-day. To realize its influence, one need only compare
the graceful arabesques of the most simple piano piece
of to-day with the awkward and gargoyle-like figuration
of Beethoven and his predecessors. We may justly
attribute this to Liszt rather than to Chopin, whose
nocturne embellishments are but first cousins to those
of the Englishman, John Field, though naturally Chopin’s
Polish temperament gave his work that grace and profusion
of design which we have called orientalism.

XVI

THE MYSTERY AND MIRACLE PLAY

It
is interesting to recall the origin of our words “treble”
and “discant.” The latter was derived from the first
attempts to break away from the monotony of several
persons singing the same melody in unison, octaves,
fifths, or fourths. In such cases the original melody was
called cantus firmus (a term still generally used in counterpoint
to designate the given melody of an exercise to
which the student is to write other parts), the new melody
that was sung with it was called the discant, and when
a third part was added, it received the name triplum
or treble. As Ambros remarks, this forcible welding together
of different melodies, often well-known old tunes,
secular or derived from the church chants, was on a direct
line with the contemporary condition of the other arts.
For instance, on the portal to the left of the Cathedral of
Saint Mark, at Venice, is a relief, representing some Biblical
scene, which is entirely made up of fragments of some
older sculptured figures, placed together without regard
to anatomy in much the same brutal fashion that the
melodies of the time were sung together. The traces of
this clumsy music-making extended down to Palestrina’s
time, and became the germ of counterpoint, canon, and

fugue, constituting (apart from the folk song) the only
music known at that time.