II
The clavichord and the harpsichord were the instruments upon which music was first shaped for the pianoforte during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Looming behind them and quite dominating them until the last quarter of the seventeenth, until even much later in Germany, was the organ. Instrumental music had a long road to travel before either of the two smaller instruments received the special attention of composers. The organ led this uncertain way, setting out milestones which mark the successive stages in the development of the great forms of instrumental music. Later bands of strings took this leadership away from her. Always the clavichord and the harpsichord followed submissively in the trail of the organ, or carried the impedimenta for the strings, until late in the seventeenth century. Considering the wilderness through which composers had to make their way, their progress was rapid. In the course of the seventeenth century they found forms and styles of music quite unknown when the march began.
Top: the virginal and the gravicembalo.
Bottom: the clavicord and the harpsichord.
In the year 1600 there was no pure-blooded instrumental music. The sets of pieces for organ, lute, or groups of instruments which had appeared up to that time, and such sets had appeared as early as 1502, were almost strict copies of vocal forms, in which the vocal style was scarcely altered. Frequently they were simply arrangements of famous madrigals and chansons of the day. The reason is obvious. For well over a century and a half, the best energy of musicians had gone into the perfecting of unaccompanied choral music, into masses and motets for the church, and into madrigals, the secular counterparts of the motets. Long years of labor had amassed a truly astonishing technique in writing this sort of music. The only art of music was the special art of vocal polyphony. Instruments were denied a style and almost a music of their own.[1] But improvements in sonority and mechanism brought instruments into prominence, and the spirit of the Renaissance stimulated composers to experiment with music for them. This was the beginning of a new art, fraught with difficulties and problems, to meet which composers had only the skill acquired in the old.
By far the most serious of these was the problem of form. The new music was independent of words, and, in order to enjoy freedom from words of any sort and at the same time to exist and to walk abroad, it had to become articulate of itself; had, so to speak, to build a frame or a skeleton out of its proper stuff. It had to be firmly knit and well balanced.
The music of the masses of Palestrina, woven about a well-known text, like that of the madrigals and chansons of Arcadelt and Jannequin, which depended upon popular love-poems, was vague and formless. Such inner coherence as it had of itself was the result of continuous and skillful repetition of short phrases or motives in the course of the various voice-parts. In religious music these motives were for the most part fragments of the plain-song chant, nearly as old as the church itself; and masses frequently went by the name of the plain-song formula out of which they were thus built. Over and over again these bits of melody appeared, now in one part, now in another, the voices imitating each other so constantly that the style has been aptly called the imitative style. It was this style in which the great organists of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century first shaped music for the organ. It was the one principle of musical form upon which they knew how to build.
Thus were constructed the ricercars of the famous Andrea Gabrieli (d. 1586), Claudio Merulo (d. 1604), and Giovanni Gabrieli (d. 1612), the great pioneers. The name ricercar is itself significant. It came from ricercare (rechercher), to seek out over and over again. Such were the pieces, a constant seeking after the fleeing fragment of a theme. Older names, originally applied to vocal music, were fuga and caccia—flight and chase. Always there was the idea of pursuit. A little motive of a few notes was announced by one part. The other parts entered one by one upon the hunt of this leader, following, as best the composer could make them, in its very footsteps.
There was a unity in this singleness of purpose, a very logical coherence, so long as the leader was not lost sight of. Little counter-themes might join in the chase and give a spice of variety within the unity. But unhappily for the musical form of these early works, the theme which began was run to earth long before the end of the piece; another took its place and was off on a new trail, again to be run down and to give way to yet a third leader. Unity and coherence were lost, the piece ambled on without definite aim or limit. There is, however, a piece by Giovanni Gabrieli in which the opening theme and a definite counter-theme are adhered to throughout. This is a rather brilliant exception, becoming as the century grows older more and more the rule until, other principles mastered and applied, composers have built up one of the great forms, the true fugue. Toward the end of the sixteenth century the name fantasia is applied to this same incoherent form and in the seventeenth that of capriccio appears. Later, at the time of Bach, the word ricercar signified a fugue worked with unusual technical skill.[2]
The ricercar was the most important of the early instrumental forms, if form it may be called which was at first but a style. The canzona, another form at first equally favored by composers, was destined to have but little effect upon the development of keyboard music. There was no real principle of construction underlying it. It was merely the instrumental counterpart of the famous French chansons of the day. These were part-songs divided into several contrasting sections according to the stanzas of the poems to which they were set. Some of the sections were in simple chord style, like hymns of the present day; others in more or less elaborate polyphonic style. The instrumental canzona followed the same plan. The sections were irregular in length, in number and in metre; and the piece as a whole lacked unity and balance. After the middle of the seventeenth century it was generally abandoned by organists. Other composers, however, took it up, and by regulating the length and number of the various sections, by expanding them, and, finally, by bringing each to a definite close, laid the foundations for the famous Italian sonata da chiesa, cousin germain to the better known Suite.
Other names appear in the old collections, such as Toccata and Prelude, which even today have more or less vague meaning and then were vaguer still. Toccata was at first a general name for any keyboard music. All instrumental music was originally sonata (from sonare, to sound), in distinction from cantata (from cantare, to sing); and from sonata keyboard music was specially distinguished by the appellation toccata (from toccare, to touch). When a characteristic keyboard style had at last worked itself free of the old vocal style, the word toccata signified a piece of music which need have no particular form but must display the particular brilliance of the new style.
The Prelude, too, was at first equally free of the limits of form. As the name plainly tells, it was a short bit of music preparatory to the greater piece to come. Not long ago it was still the fashion for concert pianists to preludize before beginning their programs, running scales and arpeggios over an improvised series of harmonies. The old preludes were essentially the same, very seriously limited, of course, by the childish condition of instrumental technique, and more or less aimless because harmonies were then undefined and unstable. Toward the middle of the seventeenth century organists built up definite schemes, if not forms, of preludizing before the singing of chorales in the Lutheran Church; but this art was naturally restricted to the organ. Preludes for the harpsichord and clavichord took on definite form only when the relatively modern system of major and minor keys had grown up out of the ruin of the ancient system of ecclesiastical modes.
Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that all forms of instrumental music had to attend the definite shaping and establishment of the harmonic idea of music. This was a slow process, and nearly all instrumental music written before 1650, no matter how skillfully the thematic material is woven, lacks to our ears logical form, because of the vagueness or the monotony of its harmony. The system of harmony upon which our great instrumental music rests is so clear and familiar that it is hard for us to imagine another art of music in which it did not constitute a groundwork, in the structure of which, indeed, it held no firm place. Yet in the magnificent vocal music in the style of which Palestrina has left imperishable models, harmony, as we understand it today, did not enter. He and his great predecessors were guided seldom, it is easy to say they were guided not at all, by the beauties of chord progressions. They did not aim at modulations. Rather, by the rules of the art of their day, modulation was forbidden them. No composer might lead his music out of the mode in which it began, to bewilder his hearer in a vague ecstasy of unrest, later to soothe him, gently shifting the harmonies back again home. Before his mind was the ideal of weaving many voice-parts, and to his pen the skill of countless imitations and independent melodies. The beauty of consonance after dissonance could not be appreciated by him, since to him each dissonance was a blemish. His was a music of flowing concord. Such harmonic discord as was inevitable was so smoothly prepared, so gently touched, that it now passes all but unobserved. This was essentially religious music.
Many causes brought about the awakening of musicians to the beauty of harmony and its expressive power. The most effectual was the growing opera. The aim of the first writers of opera was the combination of dramatic recitation and music, from the union of which they shaped a style of music we now call recitative. The singing or reciting voice was accompanied by a few scattered chords upon the harpsichord, these chords serving at first mainly to mark cadences, later little by little to intensify the emotion of the play. It was then but a step to dramatic effects of harmony, to harsh, unprepared discords. The player at the harpsichord, always the nucleus about which the operatic orchestra grouped itself, began to appreciate chords as a power in music. The organist, under the influence of the dramatic style, thought of chords now and then in his slow-moving ricercars. The modes were broken down. A new system of scales, our own, grew up, which was adaptable to the new need of composers, to the sequence and contrast of chords. Harmony grew into music, became more than themes, than imitation and pursuit, the balance of its form.
Until music had thus knit itself anew upon harmony, it was fundamentally unstable. Toccatas, ricercars, canzonas, preludes, even fugues, all wandered unevenly, without proper aim, until harmony came to lay the contrast and balance of chords and keys as the great principle of form. Especially was instrumental music dependent upon this logical principle, for, as we have noted, music without words stands in vital need of self-sufficing form, and without it totters and falls in scattered pieces.
The best skill at knitting themes together was of no avail without harmony. It left but a texture of music flapping to the caprice of the wind of invention. Or, to change the figure, composers laid block by block along the ground; but, without harmony, had not the art to build them up one upon the other into lasting temples. And so the music of the Gabrielis, of Merulo, and of many another man from many a wide corner of Europe lies hidden in the past. It is tentative, not perfect. And the music of later and perhaps greater men lies similarly hidden.