THE PERIODS OF MUSICAL HISTORY
The modern view of history is vivified by a principle scarcely dreamed
of before the middle of the last century; the conception which
permeates all our interpretations of the story of the world, which
illuminates our study of all its phases, was by our grandfathers
apprehended either vaguely or not at all. For them, history dealt with
a more or less random series of happenings, succeeding each other
accidentally, unaccountably, and at haphazard; each single event,
determined by causes peculiar to itself, was without relation to all
the others. Political and social history, for example, was an account
of battles, sieges, revolutions, governments; of kings, warriors, and
statesmen. Its salient features were special occasions and individual
men: Marathon and Waterloo, Alexander, Cæsar, Alfred, Napoleon. Of
pervasive social movements, tendencies of human feeling and thought,
developments of industries, institutions, laws, and customs by a
gradual process in which great numbers of personally insignificant men
played their part, little account was taken. Facts were facts, and had
no hidden significance, no mutual interaction, no cumulative force,
momentum, or direction.
Far otherwise do we interpret the story of the world. Inspired by the
great doctrine of the nineteenth century, the doctrine of evolution,
first formulated by biology, but immediately applied to all realms
of knowledge, we read in events a continuous movement, a coherent
growth, a gradual, vast, and single process. For us, individual
events and men sink into insignificance in comparison with the great
drama of which they are only acts and actors. For us, great popular
movements, instinctive strivings, of which the men and women under
their sway were unconscious, vast blossomings of vital energy the
roots of which were far below the surface of the human mind, rise
into relief as the true interests of the historian, and we interpret
all particular happenings and special persons in the light of these
universal tendencies. In geology we trace the continuous formation of
the earth through innumerable years; in zoology we study those slow
but constant transformations of animals which are effected by natural
selection and the survival of the fittest; in sociology we examine the
painful yet inevitable crystallization out of the human spirit of such
ideas as responsibility, liberty, justice; in philosophy we learn of
the subtle implications of our nature, and so learning, substitute a
human God for the idols of savages and the remote tyrannical deities
of half-developed religions. There is not a branch of our thought in
which this way of interpreting life as a process, this conceiving of
it as dynamic and vital rather than static and inert, has not enlarged
our outlook, deepened our sense of the sacredness and wonder of the
universe, and filled our spirits with a new freedom, enthusiasm, and
hope.
Peculiarly interesting is the application of this mode of study to
the art of music. The expression of feeling through sounds combined
in beautiful forms, gives us an opportunity, as cannot be too often
pointed out,[1] for a much freer and more self-determined activity
than we can enjoy in our other artistic pursuits. Because the art of
music, both in its material and in its content, is less shackled, less
thwarted in its characteristic processes, than the representative arts,
its evolution is remarkably obvious and easy to trace. Its material,
in the first place, is a product of man’s free selection; that complex
system of musical tones which he has constructed by many centuries of
work, is his own, to use as he will, in a sense in which language,
natural objects, and physical substances can never be. Whereas the
growth of poetry, of painting, of sculpture, of architecture, is
complicated and distorted by a thousand external conditions, that of
music is determined by its own inner laws alone,--by the laws, that is
to say, of sound-production, of sound-perception, and of psychology.
In the second place, the content of music, that which it expresses by
means of these freely selected and composed tones, is purely internal.
It is easy to see that the objects of musical expression, namely, human
emotions in their essence, reduced, so to speak, to their lowest terms,
are more fluid to manipulation than the comparatively fixed, indocile,
and external objects of the representative arts. By virtue, then, both
of its material medium and of its ideal content, music enjoys, among
human modes of expression, a unique freedom and autonomy. It grows, not
under pressure from outside, but by its own inner vitality; its forms
are determined, not by correspondence with anything in the heavens or
on the earth, but, like those of the snow-crystals, by the inexorable
laws that govern it; and the particular changes it undergoes in its
evolution, marking merely successive incarnations of tendencies and
potencies always implicit in it, can be traced with comparative ease,
clearness, and certainty.
But however unmistakably musical history may reveal an evolutionary
process, it does not reveal that process as perfectly regular and
uniform. That general tendency from a low toward a high state
of organization, with increase in definiteness, coherence, and
heterogeneity, which readers of Herbert Spencer expect in any
evolutionary series, does characterize the growth of music as a whole;
but within the large general process we also observe, as we do in many
other cases of evolution of any degree of complexity, many momentary
phases sharply marked off from one another, many separate and distinct
periods, like the chapters in a book or the acts in a play. Each
period, beginning tentatively, maturing slowly, and culminating in
music which carries its characteristic effects to the highest possible
pitch, is succeeded by another, presenting the same phases of growth,
but seeking effects quite different. All the periods hang together
in a large view; yet they are, after all, diverse in character, and
therefore capable of being distinguished, and even dated.
An analogy offered by certain well-known chemical processes may help
to make comprehensible this periodic nature of musical evolution.
Chemists have a term, “critical point,” by which they name a stage
in the behavior of a substance, under some systematic treatment, at
which it suddenly undergoes some striking change, some catastrophic
transformation. Put, for example, a lump of ice in a crucible and
apply an even heat by which its temperature is raised, say, one degree
each minute. Here is a systematic treatment of the ice, a steady
influence exerted upon it. Yet, curiously enough, this ice which is
being so equably acted upon will not change its form in the equable,
regular fashion we might expect. It will seem to undergo little or
no change until, at a given moment, suddenly, it passes into water, a
liquid wholly different in appearance from the original solid. It has
reached a “critical point.” Continue the heating, and presently another
critical point will be reached, at which, with equal suddenness, the
liquid will be transformed into a vapor--steam. These catastrophes, in
which the physical properties of the substance suddenly change, are
conditioned, of course, by its chemical nature. They take place in
the midst of a systematic treatment which we might expect to produce
only gradual, inconspicuous effects, but which, as a matter of fact,
produces a series of events as strikingly differentiated one from
another as the acts of a drama.
It is in a similar way that, in the history of music, the tonal
material used, under the systematic treatment of man’s æsthetic
faculty, has been constrained by its nature to undergo sudden
changes, to recrystallize in novel ways, to take on unwonted aspects
which initiate new periods. When the possibilities of one sort of
tone-combination are nearly or quite exhausted, the keener minds of
a generation, led by groping but unerring instinct, grasp an unused
principle of organization, latent in the material, and inaugurate
a new style. This in turn runs its course, develops its resources,
reaches its perfection, and is succeeded by another, which, after due
time, is also superseded. All these periods are but moments in one
vast evolution, successive blossomings from the one root of human
feeling expressible in music; yet each has its individual qualities,
its peculiar style, its special masters. It is possible both to trace
certain general tendencies through them all, and to define other
special qualities in which each is peculiar; and it will be worth
while, before passing on to our proposed study of the particular period
of Beethoven, to describe thus in general terms the salient features
of the evolution as a whole, and to characterize, however briefly, the
individual periods we can discriminate in it.
In the most general point of view, an evolution, of whatever sort, is a
progress from what Spencer calls “indefinite, incoherent, homogeneity,”
to what, consistently if rather overwhelmingly, he calls “definite,
coherent, heterogeneity.” All low forms of life, that is to say, are
so homogeneous in constitution as to be comparatively indefinite and
incoherent; their parts, being all very much alike, cannot be built up
into definite, strongly cohesive structures. A jelly fish, made up of
thousands of but slightly differentiated cells, and without legs, arms,
head, or any viscera worth mentioning except stomach, is doubtless a
useful animal, but not one of pronounced individuality or solidarity. A
savage tribe, consisting of many human beings almost indistinguishable
from one another as regards character, strength, accomplishments, or
powers of leadership, is a similar phenomenon in a different field, a
sort of social jelly fish.
In higher forms of life, on the contrary, such as vertebrate animals
and civilized communities, the elementary parts are sufficiently
diverse to be interwoven into highly individual and compact
organisms. The variety of the atoms or molecules makes possible a
great solidarity in the molar unit they compose, since the uniqueness
and indissolubility of a structure is directly proportionate to the
diversity of the elements that compose it. A man, if he is to attain
the dignity of manhood, must be more than a stomach; he must knit
into his single unity a bony skeleton, a circulatory system, a brain
and nervous apparatus, complicated viscera, and heart, mind, and
spirit. A state depends for its vitality on the varied characters and
abilities of its citizens; it must have laborers, artisans, merchants,
sailors, soldiers, students, and statesmen. In the second book of his
“Republic,” Plato describes the differentiation of talents and pursuits
in the citizens on which depends the advance in civilization of the
society. Such an increase in differentiation of the parts, accompanied
by increasing definiteness and coherence in the wholes, characterizes
every process of evolution.
The history of music is the history of such an evolution. Music
began with vague, unlocated sounds, not combined with one another,
but following at haphazard, and but slightly contrasted in pitch or
duration. Gradually, under the inconceivably slow yet irresistible
influence of men’s selective and constructive faculty, these sounds
took on definiteness, were fixed in pitch, were measured in time,
were knit into phrases and themes as words are knit into sentences,
were combined simultaneously in chords as individuals are combined in
communities;--became, in a word, the various, clearly defined, and
highly organized family of tones we use in modern music. Two passages
from Spencer’s “First Principles” will bring before us very clearly
the advance music has made towards heterogeneity in its elements, on
the one hand, and towards definiteness and coherence in its wholes, on
the other. “It needs,” he says, “but to contrast music as it is with
music as it was, to see how immense is the increase of heterogeneity.
We see this ... on comparing any one sample of aboriginal music with
a sample of modern music--even an ordinary song for the piano; which
we find to be relatively highly heterogeneous, not only in respect of
the varieties in the pitch and in the length of the notes, the number
of different notes sounding at the same instant in company with the
voice, and the variations of strength with which they are sounded and
sung, but in respect of the changes of key, the changes of time, the
changes of timbre of the voice, and the many other modifications of
expression: while between the old monotonous dance-chant and a grand
opera of our own day, with its endless orchestral complexities and
vocal combinations, the contrast in heterogeneity is so extreme that
it seems scarcely credible that the one should have been the ancestor
of the other.”[2] Of the corresponding increase in coherence and
definiteness he writes as follows: “In music, progressive integration
is displayed in numerous ways. The simple cadence embracing but a
few notes, which in the chants of savages is monotonously repeated,
becomes, among civilized races, a long series of different musical
phrases combined into one whole; and so complete is the integration,
that the melody cannot be broken off in the middle, nor shorn of its
final note, without giving us a painful sense of incompleteness. When
to the air, a bass, a tenor, and an alto are added; and when to the
harmony of different voice-parts there is added an accompaniment; we
see exemplified integrations of another order, which grow gradually
more elaborate. And the process is carried a stage higher when these
complex solos, concerted pieces, choruses, and orchestral effects,
are combined into the vast ensemble of a musical drama; of which,
be it remembered, the artistic perfection largely consists in the
subordination of the particular effects to the total effect.”[3]
In innumerable ways, which these passages will perhaps suffice to
suggest, the material of music has undergone a continuous, orderly,
and progressive process of development, from its earliest days down to
our own. It has exemplified, in short, an evolution from “indefinite,
incoherent, homogeneity” to “definite, coherent, heterogeneity.”
Concomitantly with this special evolution of the sound-material
of music, moreover, has gone on a more general evolution of human
faculties, which has involved a gradual turning away of men’s attention
from comparatively low forms of musical effect to those higher forms
which require for their appreciation a good deal of concentration,
perception, and power of intellectual synthesis. What was the exclusive
concern of the earliest musicians became, as time went on, but a
factor in a more complex artistic enjoyment. In order to understand
this aspect of the matter clearly, we shall have to distinguish as
accurately as possible three kinds of musical effect, all indispensable
to music worthy of the name, yet not of equal dignity and value.
There is, in the first place, the direct sensuous effect of the sounds,
their deliciousness as sensations. Musical tones gratify the ear just
as light and color gratify the eye, agreeable tastes the palate,
aromatic odors the nose, and soft, warm surfaces the touch. A single
tone from a flute, a violin, or a horn, is as delightful as a patch of
pure color, white, red, or purple. To listen to music is, at least in
part, to bathe in a flood of exquisite aural sensation. This immediate
value for our sense of the “concord of sweet sounds” is a fundamental,
legitimate, and important one, to deny or disparage which is to confess
oneself insensitive or a prude. All music depends for a part of its
appeal on its primary sensuous quality.
In the second place, music has what we call expressive value.
Feelings, of surprising depth and variety, it can arouse in us, by
inducing, through the contagiousness of rhythm and melody, tendencies
to make those bodily motions and vocal sounds which are the natural
accompaniment of our emotions.[4] These tendencies, of course, remain
incipient; they do not discharge in actual movements greater than the
tapping of the foot in “keeping time” and a slight contraction of the
vocal cords; but even this faint organic commotion suffices to arouse
those vivid feelings with which we listen to expressive music. It is
worth while to note further that these feelings are in themselves
necessarily most general and undefined, hardly more than moods of
animation, excitement, apprehensiveness, solemnity, or depression.
Their particular coloring is always imparted either by words or titles,
or by the associations of the individual listener. On that very fact
depend both the poignancy and the variety of musical expression.
The third and highest value of music is its æsthetic value, or beauty.
This value, which springs from the delight we take in perceiving, or
mentally organizing our sensations and ideas, is precisely analogous
to the æsthetic value of the other arts, as, for example, the beauty
of sonnets and other highly articulated poetic forms, of well-composed
pictures, of finely-proportioned sculpture, of symmetrical and
harmonious architecture. It depends, in general, on the perception of
unity in a mass of various impressions, and is but one example of a
type of satisfaction we are capable of finding in all the departments
of our experience. Wherever, confronted by many objects, sensations,
thoughts, or feelings, we are able to gain a sense of their coherence,
inter-relation, and essential oneness, we get the characteristic
æsthetic value. To win it is the highest success we know. To perceive
unity in the bewildering complexity of our experience, is to possess,
in the realm of knowledge, truth; in the realm of practice, character;
in the realm of art, beauty. Moreover, since perception is a far more
active, self-directed process than either sensation or emotion, which
are in large degree passively suffered, its contribution to our mental
life has for us a deeper charm, a more far-reaching significance, than
that of any other faculty. Beauty transfigures all elements that may
coexist with it in the mind. In the intellectual sphere, for example,
we understand far more deeply the phenomenon when we know its species
and genus, and “science is but classified knowledge.” In practical
life, all the little every-day events, the petty pleasures and pains,
take on, when we view them in relation to a conceived unity in our
characters and destinies, a new significance. Similarly in music,
values of the first two species, sweetness of sound and emotional
expressiveness, can be transfigured by formal beauty; there is no
tone that is not sweeter when it embodies a lovely melody; there is
no emotion that is not apotheosized by association with others in a
harmonious whole, or that does not defeat itself when it stands out
single, and will not merge itself in the organism. No music is wholly
devoid of any one of the three values; but the greatest music uses the
first two only as the materials of the third.
It is easy to see, however, that supreme as the æsthetic value of
music may be, men could arrive at an appreciation of it only after a
long novitiate and training. To enjoy the sensuous beauty of sweet
sounds one needs only ears; to be moved by melodies and rhythms that
strongly suggest those vocal utterances and bodily motions which are
the natural avenues of emotion, requires but a slightly more complex
appreciative mechanism, the mechanism of organic sensations and their
associations in the regions of naïve feeling; but to perceive the
manifold inter-relationship, and the final unity, of groups of tones
combined together by relations in pitch and in time, one needs a
keen ear, an awakened memory, a capacity for tracing unity under the
mask of variety,--in a word, a thoroughly trained and concentrated
mind. Musical art could reach a stage in which all three of its values
were associated in due proportion and proper adjustment, only through
a gradual progress beginning with stages in which it was but the
embodiment of sensuous, or at most of sensuous and emotional, values.
That it did, as a matter of fact, go through these evolutionary phases,
can be demonstrated by a brief and summary account of the actual
periods in its history.
In the first periods that we can make out by theory and
deduction--prehistoric periods that left no records--the values
sought appear to have been preponderantly sensuous and expressive.
The earliest savages, like all children even to this day, who make a
noise for the mere joy of it, probably used their voices and their
instruments chiefly as nerve-stimulants. As in the realm of color their
tastes ran to vivid reds and greens and blues, barbaric hues that
assaulted the eye with a potent stimulation, so in music they were
addicted to the drums and trumpets, to shoutings, and wild contortions,
to whatever gave them a generous measure of sensation, whether in
ears or muscles. Their motto in art was doubtless the one which some
unknown humorist, perhaps a Frenchman, has attributed to the Germans,
in all departments from art to gastronomy--“Plenty of it.” They did,
to be sure, take a certain satisfaction in the expressiveness of their
wailings and shoutings, and even in the crude formal designs into
which they shaped them, generally by mere repetition of some easily
recognizable formula; but their chief pleasure was to make a good,
rousing noise. Of these preliminary stages in the arts of dance and
song it is impossible, however, to form any certain ideas. We can only
rely upon conjecture and inference, supposing that something like them
preceded the stages about which we have more reliable information.
The earliest music of which historic records remain is that of the
Greeks. By painstaking study of the musical inscriptions on stone that
have survived the centuries, of the instruments actually in existence,
or described by ancient Greek writers, and of the technical treatises
on music which are preserved, scholars have been able to substantiate a
very few meager facts about the musical practices of the most artistic
of nations. On the whole, these facts are singularly disappointing.
Forgetting that music is the youngest of the arts, one is apt to expect
of the Greeks that wondrous subtlety and maturity in it which they
showed in sculpture, architecture, and poetry. A people possessed of
so surpassing an artistic instinct, one is apt to think, must have
carried its music to a high pitch of perfection. Investigation shows,
nevertheless, that the reverse was the case. Indeed, no testimony
could speak more eloquently for the deliberation and continuity of the
growth of music than the childishness with which it was practiced by a
people so gifted as the Greeks with every fineness of nature, but at
the disadvantage of living too near the time at which it emerged from
savagery.
The Greeks used music chiefly as an adjunct to their poetry, and were
accustomed to chant long epics in what would seem to us a monotonous
sing-song, generally if not always without accompaniment. Their love
for moderation and their avoidance of the passionate, harsh, or
over-expressive, moreover, impelled them to exclude from their gamut
both the lowest and the highest tones of the voice, so that even their
tonal material was confined to a range of about two octaves. The tones
included in this limited range, however, they classified and disposed
with the greatest ingenuity. The intervals at which tone should follow
tone were dictated by seven arbitrary schemes called modes, and each
mode was supposed to have its peculiar quality of expression. Thus the
Lydian mode, corresponding to our modern major scale, was considered
voluptuous and enfeebling, while the Doric mode, an idea of which may
be gained by playing a scale, all on white keys, beginning with E,
was thought to breathe manliness, vigor, and dignity. They used no
harmony, and introduced rhythm only by the metre of the verses sung.
Consequently it is easy to see that they can have had from their
music but little æsthetic delight, which depends on the grouping into
harmonic or rhythmic forms of the tonal material; but must have valued
it chiefly for its sensuous beauty, and for its power to enhance the
expressiveness of their poetry.
It is nevertheless noteworthy that all three kinds of value did exist
in the music of the Greeks, though the third was still in a rudimentary
stage. As a result of the generally equal length of their verses or
lines of poetry, the melody that accompanied them tended to be divided
into equal sections remotely resembling our modern “phrases”; and these
sections tended to balance each other, and so to give the sense of
symmetrical form. Furthermore, it was customary to end each line with
a fall of the voice analogous to the downward inflection of a speaking
voice at the end of a sentence. These downward inflections, called
cadences, from a Latin verb meaning “to fall,” afforded a convenient
means of dividing off the musical as well as the poetic flow into
definite parts like segments in a piece of bamboo or the inches on a
tape-line; and in the subsequent development of musical structure these
divisions, marked by cadences, became the indispensable elements in a
highly complex organism. Thus the Greeks, in spite of the immaturity of
their music, considered in and for itself, did actually make valuable
contributions to the progress of the art. Their period was one of
promise rather than of fruition; but it contained the seeds of further
growth. It is often called the Monophonic or “one-voiced” period, from
the fact that their chants were purely melodic, employing but one
voice at a time, without harmonic support.
With the simultaneous employment of more than one voice, music passed
out of its infancy. The Polyphonic period, so called from Greek words
signifying “many-voiced,” extended, through all the Middle Ages, up
to so recent a date as the end of the sixteenth century, there to
culminate in the remarkable compositions of Palestrina. In duration it
was the longest of all the periods; but this is not surprising when we
consider, in the first place, the almost insuperable difficulties to
be overcome before even two voices could be pleasantly and fluently
conducted together; in the second place, the absence of all prototypes
or models for the first experimenters to work from; and, above all, the
surprising distance that separates Palestrina’s ingenious, intricate,
and beautiful tone-fabrics, written sometimes in as many as sixteen
parts, from the rude and protoplasmic chants of two voices, singing an
interval of a “fifth” apart, from which they were developed.
That type of chant in which two voices, one a fifth higher than the
other, sang the same melody, primitive as it was, and intolerable to
modern ears, was to its originators a convenient and pleasant device.
It was convenient because, the natural range of soprano and tenor
voices being about a fifth above that of contraltos and basses, choirs
could chant at this interval more naturally than at the octave. It was
pleasant because, while it left each of the two melodies distinctly
audible, it produced by their combination a harmonic richness that must
have fallen on mediæval ears with an unwonted splendor. Organum, as
this device of singing in fifths was called, must be ever memorable in
the history of music as the beginning of harmony.
After musicians had once taken the plunge, and dared to make different
melodies sound simultaneously, it took them but a comparatively short
time (though eras in music, as in geology, are long) to combine the
parts in other intervals than the fifth, to use varying intervals in
successive chords, to add more voices, and in general to elaborate in
every way their tissue of tones. Adopting, with some modifications,
the Greek modes as the prescribed orbits of the individual melodies,
they produced effects of harmony necessarily very unlike our
modern ones, which are built upon the major and minor scales, but
nevertheless novel and in their way extremely beautiful. The fabric of
the mediæval ecclesiastical music was made up of a succession of
shifting chords, each very pure and sweet in itself, yet without those
definite connections with its fellows that modern habits of thought
demand. The whole effect was curiously kaleidoscopic, mysterious, and
vague. Unity depended, not on the piece being in any one key, which it
never was, but on the melodies being coherent and expressive. These
were the salient features, the harmony was ancillary and incidental.
One voice after another came out from the filmy background, sounded
for a moment above the rest, and subsided again, to be replaced by
another. Not only was there no attempt at a definite series of even
sections, built up into recognizable rhythms, such as are indispensable
to modern music, but any such effect was studiously avoided. The effort
was rather to make the voices interweave inextricably and untraceably.
The entire mass was in constant flux and change, a body of lovely
and expressive sound, without a single distinct lineament, or any
conceivable whence or whither. In Palestrina we have the style at its
acme, vague, iridescent, beautiful with a mystical and unearthly
beauty. Beyond the point it reached with him, pure polyphonic music,
without rhythmic or harmonic definition, could not go. Another critical
point was reached, another transformation was imminent.
By the beginning of the seventeenth century, moreover, there began to
dawn upon men’s minds various new principles of musical construction
which were pregnant with possibilities for a far wider and more vital
development than any that had gone before. The rapidity with which
the art now began to grow, ramify, and mature, the variety of the new
tendencies, and the multiplicity of different styles or orders of
art, such as opera and oratorio, fugue and sonata, toward which they
led, are surprising. In the countless centuries before Palestrina
music grew slowly and uniformly, like a plant; in the short three
hundred years between the birth of Palestrina in 1528 and the death
of Beethoven in 1827, it had its inconceivably rich and various
blossoming, and Monteverde and Gluck, Corelli and Scarlatti, Couperin
and Rameau, Bach and Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, were the
bright flowers it now put forth. Such a rapid and many-sided advance
is fairly bewildering; but it is nevertheless possible to distinguish
in the movement a few salient and dominant features, more significant
and remarkable than all the others. From our present point of view,
the labors of J. S. Bach in the fugue and suite forms, and of Haydn,
Mozart, and Beethoven in the sonata form, are of supreme interest.
These labors were guided and fructified by several new principles of
musical effect.[5]
The first step toward new fields was taken early in the seventeenth
century by a set of daring reformers in Florence, who, boldly
discarding the perfect polyphonic style of Palestrina, contrived a
style of dramatic music, embodied in small operas, in which single
voices sing more or less expressive melodies over an instrumental
accompaniment in chords. Crude in the extreme as were necessarily the
compositions of Cavaliere, Caccini, Peri, and their fellows, they
opened up novel paths, because they had to rely for their effectiveness
largely on the conduct of the harmonies employed. So long as the old
church modes were adhered to, to be sure, the harmonic style remained
necessarily vague, wandering, and monotonous; but gradually the
composers began to see that, by altering their intervals, they could
introduce variety and contrast into their cadences, making one line
end on one chord, and the next on a different though related one, and
that thus they could make coherent the successive phrases, punctuated
by the cadences, and at the same time set them in an opposition
that made for variety. In the interests of definiteness of cadence
and an obvious distribution of contrasted yet complementary chords,
therefore, the modes were slowly transformed into the modern scale,
and music became at last harmonically definite and firm. All the tones
came to be conceived as grouped around certain tonal centres, which
could be manipulated and organized like the masses in a picture. Thus
emerged the principle of tonality or key, and in the course of time
the device of modulation by which one passes from one key to another.
Still it remained difficult to get far away from the key in which
one started out, because of the manner of tuning, which made only a
few keys available at once; but J. S. Bach, modifying the system of
tuning to what is called equal temperament,[6] which opens the doors
simultaneously to the entire twelve keys, emancipated music entirely
from the restrictions of the ecclesiastical modes, and in his great
work, “The Well-[or Equally-] Tempered Clavichord,” demonstrated
practically the use of all the twelve keys as an intimate and compact
family. By his time the principle of tonality was firmly established.
A second principle vital to modern music is that of “thematic
development.” By this is meant, first, the existence in the music of
certain salient, easily recognizable groups of tones, called motifs,
subjects, or themes, which are presented to the hearer at the outset,
and impressed upon him by their unique individuality of cut; and
second, that subsequent elaboration of these themes, in varied but
still recognizable forms, which corresponds closely with the process
by which an essayist develops an idea, a mathematician proves a
theorem, or a preacher elucidates a text. It is interesting to note
that the German word “Satz,” often used by musicians to mean “a
theme,” signifies primarily a thesis or proposition in logic, while
“Durchführung,” used to describe the development of the theme, means
primarily a leading-through or bringing to an issue. Thus the process
of thematic development in music is much like any other process of
intellectual statement and proof. Now it is evident that this process,
which is indispensable to all the higher intellectual forms of music,
requires in the first place definite, concise, and memorable themes,
since it is impossible to discuss what one fails to grasp, or after
grasping, forgets. As the proverb says, the preparer of a ragout of
hare must “first catch his hare.” Similarly musicians, before they
could make their music logical, had to catch their themes. But as
musical material up to the time of Palestrina never was definite or
memorable, the first requisite of thematic music was some principle
by which themes could be defined. This principle was found in the
time-measurement of tones. So soon as a group of tones were placed in
measured relations of duration to one another, an individual theme
emerged, and could be elaborated. The second great conquest of modern
music, then, was the conquest of the definite theme or motif, strictly
measured in time, and of those devices by which it could be developed
in an extended and logical discourse.
The third notable achievement of seventeenth century composers was the
emancipation of music from servitude to poetry, and the establishment
of it as an independent art. In one sense this was but a natural
outcome of its new qualities of harmonic and thematic definition,
lacking which it could never reach independence. So long as it remained
in itself vague, amorphous, inchoate, it was constrained to be but a
hand-maid, to content itself with lending eloquence or atmosphere to
the utterances of its sister art; but this condition of dependence,
however inevitable for a time, was nevertheless unfortunate, and
bound to be eventually outlived. Music is always fatally handicapped
by association with words. In the first place, words impose upon it
a concrete meaning immeasurably more trite, prosaic, and limited
than that abstract and indefinable meaning to the heart and mind
which is its proper prerogative; the expressive power of music really
begins where that of poetry fails and ceases. In the second place,
the limitations of all vocal music are in many ways serious. Not
only are voices incapable of sounding readily and with certainty
many intervals, but they are confined to a range of a little over
three octaves, and to phrases short enough not to overtax the breath.
Instruments are free from all these disqualifications. They produce
pure tones, without words, the most celestial of artistic materials;
they can sound any interval; they extend over a range of more than
seven octaves, from the deep bass of the organ or contrabass to the
shrill and immaterial treble of the piccolo; and the breadth of the
phrases they can produce is limited not by their own mechanism, but
only by the power of intellectual synthesis possessed by listeners. For
all these reasons, instruments are the ideal media for producing music;
and never until they supplanted voices could music reach its complete
stature as a mature and self-sufficient art, leaning on no crutch,
borrowing no _raison d’être_, but making by its own legitimate means
its own unique effects.
The task of seventeenth century musicians was, then, in large part,
the establishment of tonality and the hierarchy of keys, contrasted
with one another, but accessible by modulation; the crystallization,
by means of both harmonic and metrical definition, of individual
themes out of the amorphous tonal matrix of previous eras, and the
exploration of means for building up these themes into coherent
organisms; and lastly the emancipation of the art thus brought into
full life from the tyranny of association with words and voices. This
was an immense task; and it is not to be wondered at that most of the
men engaged in it never attained mastery enough to give them great
personal prominence. Theirs was a time of beginnings, of preparation
for novel and unprecedented achievements. The early opera-writers,
the Italian violinists, the German organists, and the clavichord and
harpsichord writers of that period, men like Cavaliere and Caccini,
Corelli and Scarlatti, Sweelinck and Frescobaldi, Purcell, Kuhnau, and
Couperin, are chiefly known to us as preparers of the soil, and sowers
of the seed, for a harvest which was gathered by later, and probably
greater, though not more honorable men. The first composer after
Palestrina who like him overtopped all his fellows, and brought to its
culmination another great period, was Johann Sebastian Bach.
In Bach’s style we find, in addition to the polyphonic or many-voiced
texture of Palestrina, a thematic pointedness and logic and a harmonic
structure which are entirely unforeshadowed in the older man. The
fugue, a form which he carried to its highest pitch, and which was
admirably suited to his genius, is in certain respects allied to the
earlier style, though in others wholly modern. Like the ecclesiastical
forms of Palestrina, it is of the basket-work type of texture. One
voice begins alone, others enter in succession, and all wind in and out
amongst one another almost as intricately as in a sixteenth century
madrigal. On the other hand, the fugue as a whole begins and ends in
some one key, and throughout its progress modulates from key to key
with well-planned contrasts and firmly-controlled movement. Moreover,
a single definite theme or subject appears at the outset of the piece,
and stands prominently forth through its whole extent; it is announced
by the first voice, repeated at a different pitch in the answer of the
second, reiterated again by the third and fourth, and subsequently made
the basis of an ingenious, varied, and extended development. Finally,
although some of Bach’s fugues are vocal, most of them are written
either for organ or for clavichord. In all these respects his work
is modern, and perhaps most of all is it modern in its inexorable
logic, its subtlety and variety, and in its poignant, deeply emotional
expressiveness, which is always held within the bounds necessary to
supreme architectural beauty. The period of Bach and his precursors,
sometimes called the “polyphonic-harmonic” period, because in it the
modern harmonic system was grafted upon the polyphony of Palestrina,
remains to-day, from some points of view, the purest and noblest period
of musical history.
All the time that Bach, in the privacy of an obscure German town, was
writing his wonderfully intricate and beautiful polyphonic music, the
world about him, oblivious, was seeking out a quite different type of
art. It is a surprising fact that Bach’s compositions were virtually
unknown for fifty years after his death, and might have remained so
permanently had they not been “discovered” by appreciative students,
much as the receptacles of classical lore were discovered in the
Renaissance after the long darkness of the Middle Ages, and made the
basis of an intellectual revival. Bach’s great works, too, were full
of an undying vitality; but for a long time their potency had to
remain latent, because men were occupied with another order of art, a
different set of problems, an alien style. Ever since the Florentine
revolution, when the polyphonic texture of mediæval music was abandoned
for a simple monodic or one-voiced style, in which a melody is
accompanied by a series of chords, much of the musical genius of the
world had been devoted to the development of eloquent single melodies,
and of suitable harmonic backgrounds for them. With the systematization
of harmony and the establishment of definite themes this type of art
became mature. Composers discerned the possibility of building up
whole movements to which interest could be given by the statement and
development of one or more themes, contrasted both in character and
in key. They saw that the whole could be unified by general qualities
of style, by recurrence of the themes, and, above all, by being made
to embody, in the long run, a single tonality, though with momentary
departures from it for the sake of variety. Working out their idea,
they devised a type of structure which has remained up to this day the
highest and most widely useful of all musical forms. The essential
features of “sonata-form,” as it is called, are, in the first place,
the Exposition of two themes or subjects of discourse, contrasting
both in character and in key; in the second place, the Development
of these themes, the exploitation of their latent possibilities;
in the third place, Restatement of them, in the central key of the
movement, bringing all to a point, and completing the cycle of
Statement, Argument, and Summary. Sonata-form, of which it is easy
to see the naturalness and beauty, depends for its unity, not on the
equal interplay of many voices, like the older polyphonic forms, but
on the saliency, cumulative development, and harmonic inter-relations,
of single themes. We may, therefore, call the great period of Haydn,
Mozart, and Beethoven, the period in which the sonata-form attained its
full maturity, the “harmonic period,” or, in view of the complete round
or circuit of themes its forms exemplified, the “cyclical-form period.”
It culminated in the early years of the nineteenth century, in the
grand works of Beethoven’s maturity.
After Beethoven, music began to ramify in so many directions that it is
impossible to classify its phases in a hard-and-fast series. It had its
romanticists, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin, who uttered with
freer passion and poetry the emotional and spiritual meanings already
heard in Beethoven. It had its realists, notably Berlioz and Liszt,
who, attempting to divert it into the realm of pictorial delineation
and description, have been followed by all the horde of contemporary
writers of programme-music. It had its nationalists, men like Glinka,
Smetana, and in our own day, Grieg and Dvořák, who sought to impress
upon its speech a local accent. Above all, it had one great master,
Brahms, who, assimilating the polyphony of Bach, the architectonic
structure of Beethoven, and the romantic ardor of Schumann, added
to them all his own austere beauty and profound feeling. But we are
too near these later masters to get any general, justly-proportioned
view of them. It is on the horizon only that mountains cease to be
solitary peaks, and become ranges, the trend and disposition of which
can be accurately plotted on the maps. The general tendency of musical
evolution, down to Beethoven so clearly traceable, so obviously
continuous, becomes after him bafflingly complex.
Fortunately, this complexity need not embarrass our present
undertaking. We have seen how, in the gradual and laborious, but
incessant and inevitable growth of musical art, period succeeded
period as the artistic faculty of man constantly discerned new
possibilities of beauty, sensuous, expressive, and æsthetic, in the
tonal material with which it dealt. We have seen how this evolution
tended always from the indefinite, incoherent, and homogeneous
toward the definite, coherent, and heterogeneous; and how it tended
to embody ever higher and higher values, beginning with the mere
sense-stimulations of savages and leading up to the highly complex
and intellectual sound-fabric of Beethoven, in which the sensuous and
emotional values are held ever subordinate to the æsthetic. We have
examined, briefly and summarily, the special characteristics of the
successive periods into which the great evolution has been divided by
those critical points which the nature of its material determined.
With the general view of musical history thus gained held clearly in
mind, we may now profitably pass to that more detailed study of the
great period of Beethoven, the golden age of pure music, which is the
especial task before us.
It will be necessary, however, to linger still a little longer on the
threshold, in order to examine in more detail yet the two scarcely
less interesting periods which preceded it,--the periods of Palestrina
and Bach,--and to define yet more precisely those fundamental
principles of pure music on the efficacy of which its glory depended.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See the author’s “From Grieg to Brahms,” pp. 219-223.
[2] “First Principles,” American edition, p. 358.
[3] Op. cit., p. 326.
[4] For a fuller statement of this theory of musical expression, see
“From Grieg to Brahms,” pp. 6-11.
[5] These principles will be studied more in detail in the chapter on
The Principles of Pure Music.
[6] For a technical explanation of equal temperament, see Dr. Parry’s
“Evolution of the Art of Music,” pp. 187-188.