The early Church, origin of present development of modern music—Antiphon, precursor of harmony and counterpoint—The invention of the organ and its importance—Tallis, the link between pre and post Reformation music—Purcell and the Augustan age of English music—Acts of Reformation period—Present system of musical education—Principal schools of music—Lack of national character in English music—Suggested explanation—Influence of foreign resident composers—Rival Italian opera companies—Return of Handel and effect of his oratorios—English music festivals and foreign conductors—Sterndale Bennett's "Woman of Samaria"—Sir Edward Elgar's violin concerto—Foreign teachers and their influence—Costa and the high pitch—Recognition of great foreign musicians—The new school of British composers—Mendelssohn on Italian methods of singing for northern races.
PAST
It is to the Catholic Church that modern art must look for the origin of its present development. To the monks of mediæval times must be ascribed the glory of the greatest achievements in Gothic architecture, the art of fresco-painting, and the foundations of modern music.
Not only were the monasteries the repository of every kind of learning, but it is interesting to think that the impress of religion, which music received in those long-ago days, and in those gone and forgotten buildings, is as alive to-day as it ever was.
Notwithstanding the degrading uses to which a beautiful art has been so constantly put, a
degradation greater, perhaps, than that to which any sister art has had to submit, it is still triumphantly evident, in works so otherwise dissimilar as Elgar's "Dream of Gerontius" and Wagner's "Parsifal."
In fact, it is safe to say that the greatest creations in music have either been dedicated to the services of Christianity or have largely received inspiration from its illimitable resources.
Though many an aching heart may have throbbed out its existence in the seclusion of those cloistered cells, still, many must have been the joyful emotions evoked in the minds of other of their occupants, by the achievement of some long worked-for discovery that has had untold influence on ages then unborn.
What, for instance, must have been their feeling of ecstacy when the first harmonious triad fell upon the ears of the amazed monks?
To them, long accustomed as they were to the barbaric sound of sequences of bare fourths and fifths, it must have seemed like a revelation of Heaven itself, and we may fain hope that many a Nunc dimittis, all the happier in consequence, came from their grateful hearts as the passing hour arrived.