I
A consideration of music among the Indians is not germane to our present purpose. As far as we are concerned Indian music is an exotic, and it is only of recent years that American composers have turned to it in a conscious search for national color which is, perhaps, the first real symptom of aspiration toward characteristically national expression. From the point of view of musical history the development of American music must be considered as beginning among the first white settlers on these shores, and it may be said at once that those beginnings, like Guy of Warwick's death, are still 'wrop in mystery.' Regarding musical life in the colonies before the year 1700 our information is so slight as to be negligible. For almost a century preceding that year white men—many of them men of culture—had been settled in America.[2] That these men completely forgot the art in which so many of them found pleasure, and in which at least a few of them must have possessed some skill, is a supposition too absurd to be seriously entertained. As to the nature and proportions of their musical activities we have no exact evidence and, in default of such, it is necessary for us to dip a little into comparative history.
In England the curtain of the seventeenth century rose on a country that as yet knew not cropped heads nor Geneva cloaks nor steeple-crowned hats nor the snuffling drone of Hop-on-High-Bomby mournfully mouthing the sinfulness of the flesh and the menace of the wrath to come. England still deserved its old-time appellation of 'merrie.' It still ate and drank, sang and swore, bussed and wantoned blithely, lustily, as befitted a country with a full purse, a sound constitution, and a healthy indifference to the disturbing subtleties of theology and metaphysics. It was a robust, Falstaffian England, still unregenerate, still addicted to sack and loose company, but with a mind as clearly keen as a Sheffield blade and a heart as soft and impressionable as its own Devonshire butter—'pitiful-hearted butter that melted at the sweet tale of the sun.' In short, a normal, vigorous, able-bodied, human country, not yet soured by the virus of an acidulated Puritanism, nor devitalized by the distemper of a cultivated licentiousness; a country in whose fertile soil the seeds of art might well germinate and flourish apace. And, as a matter of fact, English music, like English drama and poetry, was then approaching the culmination of its golden age. In Italy, Palestrina had just died; Peri and Monteverdi were shaping the beginnings of opera; the madrigal, the mystery, the morality and the masque were the prevailing media of secular musico-literary expression, while popular instrumental music was represented by Pavans, Galliards, Allmains, Courantes, and other courtly-sounding forms. The stern, strict god of polyphony was already stooping to flirt with the light and wayward muse of the people, making the first tentative advances toward a union from which was destined to spring a seductively human art. Never since has England stood so high musically among the nations of Europe. Never since has she produced composers who so closely rivalled the greatest of their contemporaries. There was William Byrd 'a Father of Musicke,' as the Cheque-book of the Chapel Royal has it—one of the most learned contrapuntists of his time and unequalled by any of his contemporaries in compositions for the virginals. There was John Dowland, 'whose heavenly touch upon the lute doth ravish human sense.' There was Orlando Gibbons, one of the greatest composers of his period, who was then in the beginning of his distinguished career. These, and many other English composers of scarcely lesser note, were as highly honored abroad as they were at home. Their influence on the development of German music has been admitted even by German critics.[3] In England the madrigal flourished then as it did nowhere else in Europe and reached a degree of perfection hitherto unattained even by the best madrigalists of Italy and the Netherlands. What Peri and Monteverdi were doing successfully in Italy in the pseudo-Grecian music-drama, the English were attempting to do, more characteristically though less successfully, in the masque. Some of the most famous of English popular songs—like 'The Bailiff's Daughter of Islington,' 'The Three Ravens,' and 'Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes'—have come down to us from that period. Indeed, the musical vitality of the England of that time was truly remarkable, and thousands of madrigals, motets, anthems, ayres, and ballets remain as eloquent witnesses to its teeming fecundity. English instrumentalists were then rated the best in Europe and were as commonly employed in the courts of Germany as German instrumentalists are now employed in the restaurants of London.
Nor was this noteworthy musical activity confined to the small class of professional musicians. If we may believe Morley,[4] and read aright the references of Shakespeare and other contemporary writers, music was sedulously practised by all classes in England, from the sovereign to the beggar. Queen Elizabeth, we find, played excellently on the virginals and the poliphant, though it does not appear that her dour successor took very kindly to such exercises. It seems to have been a matter of course that every well-reared girl should sing at sight and play acceptably on the virginals, the flute, and the cittern. Sight-reading—alas for our degenerate days—was apparently a universal accomplishment, at least among people of the better classes. After viols were introduced, every gentleman's house contained a chest of them and the chance visitor was expected to take his part at sight in the impromptu concerts which were a favorite form of social diversion. 'Tinkers sang catches,' says Chappell, 'milkmaids sang ballads; carters whistled; each trade, and even the beggars had their special songs; the bass-viol hung in the drawing-room for the amusement of waiting visitors; and the lute, cittern, and virginals, for the amusement of waiting customers, were the necessary furniture of the barber-shop. They had music at dinner; music at supper; music at weddings; music at funerals; music at night, music at dawn; music at work; music at play.'