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 Pres (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 Haendel
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.