Those who have been brought up on the music of Bach, Beethoven, and
Brahms can readily accept this theory of musical æsthetics. It is
eminently satisfactory as an interpretation of all that we commonly
call classical music. There are many people who do not want to listen
to any other kind of music. They have heard of great names in the
days before Bach, but they are easily inclined to take the view that
such composers as Purcell and the elder Scarlatti were merely the
necessary forerunners who prepared the way; that Palestrina was an
exceptional and unaccountable expression of a peculiarly exalted age
of religious belief, and that any one belonging to an earlier date can
be dismissed as a primitive interesting only to the antiquary. But
at the present day the antiquaries are coming into their own. Both
in England and abroad there is a vigorous revival of interest in the
music of the centuries before Bach. After long years of dusty research
the antiquaries have at last begun to convince a younger generation
that a great deal of this so-called primitive music can be given life
in performance, and performance has shown that it has a surprisingly
vivid power of appealing to the emotions of modern hearers. Leaders of
contemporary music indeed are clearly feeling that pre-classical and
even mediaeval music has in many cases a more intimate affinity with
that of our own day than the music of the last two hundred years. It
has even come to exercise a definite and admitted influence on the
technique of modern composition.
To dissect out the causes and effects of this tendency would be a
complicated and difficult task for which there is no space here. But
there is one point which is a matter of common knowledge to the trained
musician, and the general musical public is probably more or less
aware of it though unable to explain it in technical language. From
the year 1600 to the year 1900, roughly speaking, all Western music is
based on the same fundamental principle of _tonality_. All music is
composed in a key. One note is adopted as a centre. The remaining notes
of the octave are brought into various clearly defined relationships
to it. They may further be arranged in groups, sounded simultaneously,
known as chords. Each of these chords has its own fixed arrangement
and its fixed relationship to the centre. What has been done for one
note of the octave may be done in exactly the same way for any other,
forming what we call the key of that note. The musician may shift from
one key to another in the course of his work, but it is understood
that he must make his main key clear and definite at the outset and
must re-establish it again with equal decision at the end. In the early
years of the seventeenth century the efforts of musicians were directed
chiefly to establishing one key clearly and towards the training of
audiences to grasp the first principles of the system. As they became
more and more accustomed to the system the composers were able to
extend and elaborate it. The interrelations of notes and chords became
increasingly subtle and delicate from the days of Monteverdi to those
of Wagner; but the fundamental key-system and the rhythmical system
which is inseparable from it remained always precisely the same. The
language of music developed steadily and rationally just as the English
language has developed from Shakespeare to Swinburne. It is no wonder
then that most musicians regarded its foundations as indestructible.
Its grammar was codified by Rameau early in the eighteenth century,
and later theorists saw no reason to repudiate the main principles
of Rameau’s doctrine. In the passionate stateliness of Rameau’s own
music, in the gigantic dignity of Handel, in the genial _Gemütlichkeit_
of Bach, we see the same lucid and logical precision of language. It
was only natural that eighteenth century criticism should regard the
music of earlier centuries as crude and barbarous. The nineteenth
century approached the older music with a more penetrating sense of
scholarship, but could not help reading it in the same spirit. An age
of antiquarian research inevitably tended to consider its discoveries
as historical documents to be examined in the dry light of theory
rather than as the expressions of intensely passionate humanity. The
music of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was interpreted according
to the system of Rameau, for no other system could be conceived. If
under these conditions it failed to make any emotional appeal, that
did not matter: reverence for antiquity discouraged the unveiling of
passion.