The appetite for music increases in the seventeenth century and
the development of musical drama brings the commercial aspect into
prominence. It is the age of the theatrical and rhetorical style. It is
an age of speed. There was little music printed, but much circulated in
manuscript. This does not mean that the general output was less than
before. The manuscripts are much more easily legible than the printing
from type; only engraving, rarely practised outside England, can rival
them. It is the century of “figured bass,” a system of notation which
enabled a composer to write down a mere outline of his accompaniments,
leaving them to be filled up _extempore_ by the player. It saved time
in composition, time in writing out; copying by hand took less time
than type-setting, and there was no need to multiply copies to any
great extent. By the time that the copyist has made one the composer
has produced another work, and his public want the very latest. One of
the things that strikes us in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
is the incredible fertility of composers. Operas, cantatas, quartets
or symphonies――it is nothing unusual to find composers reckoning them
in hundreds. And we cannot dismiss this copious output with contempt.
It is easy enough to say that one work sounds very much like another,
and that even the greatest men have their moments of dullness; but even
for people who have not specialized in antiquarian studies there is a
vast quantity of this music which still seems to have power to stir the
emotions. It must have been composed in a hurry, performed in a hurry
and thrown away in a hurry; it is a marvel that at this distance of
time we can still feel that even if we do not want to hear it often we
are still glad to hear it once.
The agitated rhetoric of the seventeenth century becomes in the
eighteenth a convention of grandiloquence. The intellectual basis
of the classical key-system proves to be a foundation upon which
structures of extraordinary massiveness and dignity can be reared. The
immense productivity of the age was only made possible by the frank
acceptance of convention, even in the case of those rare composers
like Domenico Scarlatti and Haydn who systematically made fun of it.
This acceptance of convention was stabilized by the fact that there
had been time for the long accumulation of tradition. The constant
demand for new music was in no way inconsistent with the preservation
of tradition; it was preserved not so much by the practical revival of
old music as by the absorption of its style into what was contemporary.
It is significant that the eighteenth century marked the beginning of
the study of musical history.