I
At the beginning of the century music was, so to speak, taken out of the church and set, free and weak, into the open world. At once social fashion seized upon it. Opera, for instance, became almost at once the fashion of the day. From the opening of the first public opera house in Venice in 1637 opera composers had to write their music with regard to popular success, in other words, with regard to what the public wanted; and since the public came soon to worship the human voice even more than the music, the composer and his works were often at the mercy of the reigning favorite singer. Moreover, in the course of the century, a race of virtuosi sprang into prominence, men who thrilled and electrified by display of technical skill, and won the public by amazement. Music which is written only with the aim of giving the performer a chance to exhibit technical skill cannot be adjudged great music, nor even good music; yet the influences of attempts at virtuosity were of inestimable value to the growth of music in the seventeenth century, and indeed have been so at all times, though they often appear a fruitless, hollow sham. For the virtuoso discovers the utmost capabilities of his instrument and thereby widens the field of composition. In the seventeenth century, and in the eighteenth as well, the composer and the virtuoso were one.
As we have already seen, in the church music of Palestrina and Lassus there was no active rhythm. The recurrence of regular beats was as far as possible disguised to avoid the excitement which a persistent, marked rhythm must convey upon an audience, and which is out of place in the mystical rites of the church. But in the seventeenth century composers of vocal music made more and more use of marked rhythm as a means of conveying emotional excitement; and instrumental composers, finding out little by little how lifeless music for instruments was when not animated by rhythm, made rhythm more and more persistent and obvious in their work. Along with the recognition of the life-giving power of rhythm came the appreciation of clearly balanced structural form, which is only a broader kind of rhythm.
Melody, rhythm, and symmetrical form seem to us the very essentials of music. It must be ever a source of wonder that for centuries musicians gave themselves to the development of a style of music which deliberately suppressed them. Yet those very musicians whose long labors are summed up and glorified in the works of Palestrina and Lassus laid the foundation upon which the art of modern music has been built. The polyphonic style, animated by rhythm and molded to melody, became counterpoint, which, though in a sense the ‘mathematics’ of music and in the hands of an uninspired composer as dry as dust, is none the less the very essence of the art; and in the hands of a master the power and glory of man’s mind in music. We shall see it prepared in the course of the century for the hands of perhaps the greatest of all composers, John Sebastian Bach.
Spreading gradually through all the music of the century came the new warm force of harmony. In the works of Palestrina and Lassus the appreciation of chords is often evident; but the attention of both was mainly centred upon the interweaving of many melodies, and for the most part the chords which resulted from the simultaneous sounding of many voice parts were not regarded in relation to each other, nor planned beforehand in a definite progression. The flow of the various parts was theoretically never directed nor influenced by an harmonic plan. Moreover, the vocal polyphony was written in the various types of scales known as the ecclesiastical modes, types which owed their peculiar characteristics to the position of the semi-tone steps within the octave. A change in the course of a piece from one mode to another—a modulation as we should say to-day—was most rarely ventured. In other words, there was no change of key. The practice of raising or lowering notes in the scales by sharps and flats in order to avoid harsh dissonances, or to let parts glide by the interval of a semi-tone into the chords of cadences, which practice was called musica ficta, had by the middle of the sixteenth century softened the rigor of the modes; yet during the first half of the seventeenth century the modes were still held to differ from each other in æsthetic qualities, and composers were still under the sway of the laws which governed them. The modes broke down gradually, it is true, and traces of their influence are found late in the seventeenth century; but by the end of the century they had practically given way to the major and minor keys upon which our greatest music has been based. The subtleties of the modes were artificial. The popular music of the Middle Ages shows an instinctive choice of modes nearest our present-day major and minor scales.
The enthusiasm for melody in the seventeenth century at first allowed to an accompaniment only simple chords, to be played by lute or spinet, which very soon came to be regarded as harmonic progressions. These chords were not the result of the interweaving of various melodies, but were entities in themselves, and came to be appreciated as such. Freed from the laws of counterpoint and calculated to aid in the expression of keen emotion, sudden unprepared dissonances found their place in music. Chords were contrasted, their beauty and power were perceived, and they were studied and used for themselves. Moreover, it became the custom to play a few chords as prelude to an instrumental piece, and out of this custom there grew up in the course of the century a type of instrumental music called a Prelude, which was hardly more than an elaborate series of chords broken up in arpeggios, of which no finer example can be mentioned than the first prelude in Bach’s ‘Well-tempered Clavichord.’ Thus the rich beauty of harmony came into music, the most subtle, the most colored, and the most profound of her expressions.
Perhaps the most characteristic mark of the new school of composition, and one which points suggestively to the way in which harmony developed, is the employment of what is known as a Figured Bass. The voice parts of the great polyphonic masterpieces were often printed separately, rarely together in one score; but the first operas were printed in score on two staffs, on the upper of which the melody was recorded, and on the lower a single bass part, with figures and sharps and flats written under the notes to indicate the chords of which these notes were the foundation and which constituted the accompaniment. The origin of this Figured Bass is doubtful. It is possibly the result of the endeavors of Italian organists in the sixteenth century to free themselves from the task of playing those pieces written in the old style from a number of separately printed parts. Whatever its origin, it was perfectly suited to the monodists and to those who during the century wrote in the new style. It is indicative of the way composers centred all their interest in the melody, leaving the details of the accompaniment to the discretion and the taste of the accompanist, thought of in this case as a single player, using lute, harpsichord, organ, or any instrument upon which chords could be played. Evidently only a most simple accompaniment was expected, one which merely supported the melody with chords and attempted little or no contrapuntal intricacies. In cases where the accompaniment was given to a number of instruments the Figured Bass still served only for the instrument which could play chords, though the single notes of it might be reinforced by an instrument of low range such as the viol. For the other instruments which were to enrich the harmonies and add touches of orchestral color special parts were written. So the harpsichord became the centre of the group of accompanying instruments, and later the centre of the orchestra, apart from opera, supplying the harmonic basis of the music in solid chords. It continued to hold its central place until at the end of the next century Gluck took a definite stand against it.
The bass part itself was at first considered only as the foundation of the harmonies of the accompaniment. It was not, therefore, an independent melody, and was not planned in any contrapuntal relation with the melody above it. But before the end of the first decade of the century composers began to give it movement and a character of its own, sometimes treating it in definite contrapuntal relation with the melody. Thus early did the composers of the new school turn to the science of counterpoint for aid in the construction of their music; thus early began the new and the old to work together.
The Figured Bass is significant, not only of the way composers came to an appreciation of the value of an harmonic foundation in music, and of how counterpoint came to the aid of the new music when it was leaden and uninteresting; it points also to the slow development of the orchestra, of the skill to write for groups of instruments in such a way that they could stand independently without the bolstering of the harpsichord or the organ. The orchestral style proper is the most complex style in music and was the slowest to develop. The employment of the Figured Bass is evidence of the inability of composers to master it during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.