[18.] Art of Music, pp. 99 seq. For an account of the musical culture in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries see the Introduction to Dr. Naylor's Shakespeare and Music, a most interesting and useful little work.
The divorce between music and words became complete when songs were arranged in transcriptions for various instruments. For now the orchestra and the Kapellmeister have come into being and the further development of music is instrumental. With the invention of printing and the influence of the Italian Renaissance with its humanistic and pseudo-classical ideals the dissolution is completed. Poems are no longer sung but only read, while instrumental music follows its own paths alone.
In the Middle Ages instrumental music can scarcely be said to have existed as an art. Musical instruments--"giterne and ribible"--were known and played upon. "Fiddlers, players, cobblers, and other debauched persons" tramped the country and appeared at festivals in company with jugglers and mountebanks. Towards the beginning of the sixteenth century, private orchestras were maintained by the noble and the wealthy. Still the instrumental band held at best but a secondary place beside the vocal choir. "Harping," says the ancient bard, "ken I none, for song is chefe of myn-strelsé." The music which it played differed in no essential respect from that intended for singing; indeed the part-song was often arranged without alteration for instruments, and so instrumental technique grew out of vocal technique, but--and this is important--retaining important rhythmic characteristics from the dance. Exactly as all stone architecture--Gothic, Classic, Saracenic--bears the features of its wooden parent, so does our modern instrumental music reproduce the physiognomy of its origin, uniting the flowing cantilene of the voice with the marked rhythm of the dance, and we may notice in any modern instrumental composition how the two are contrasted together, now the one feature predominating, now the other.
There remains yet another current in the stream of musical development of at least equal importance with the growth of dance and song. I cannot here enter fully into the history of ecclesiastical music. We are only concerned with the influence exerted by Dutch and Italian composers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries upon the development of later German music.
While pope and prelate cared only for the outer logical shell of Christian doctrine, which they could use as a weapon in their struggle for power, art laid hold upon its vital essence. Those politicians who are in the habit of sneering at Wagner's steadfast belief in the saving power of art for human society would do well to cast a glance at the course of each development of the Christian ideal, the political and the artistic respectively. In the Middle Ages the one showed itself in councils like those of Nicea and Ephesus, in political popes like Gregory VII. and Innocent III., in Isidorian decretals, excommunications, interdicts, tortures, indulgences; the other in our mediaeval cathedrals, in the poetry of a Dante, the paintings of a Giotto and a Raphael, the sculpture of a Michael Angelo, the music of a Palestrina, and our politician might then ask himself which he thought had been the more beneficial as a social force. There still remain as our meagre heritage from these times of "faith," on the one hand the orthodoxy of the Nicene Creed, on the other certain festivals and celebrations in the cathedral of a small Bavarian town, little known, scarcely noticed, but still in the full glory of their pristine mediaeval beauty.
No one who has not attended the celebrations in the cathedral of Regensburg can fully measure what has been lost for mankind through the domination of human rationalism in the place of religious devotion. Here alone in Europe all who will may yet hear the great masters of the sixteenth century rightly performed with the ancient ritual, and Gregorian chant that belongs to it, without pretence, without pomp or pageant, with the single purpose of serving God worthily in that true spirit of mediaeval sincerity and purity which our historians are apt to pass over unnoticed in their rancorous eagerness to proclaim the sins of the Church. The compositions of Palestrina and his compeers represent music in its highest form as pure song in its most perfect consummation, attaining as song an elevation which has never even been distantly approached since. "The centuries have no power over the Palestrina style," says its historian; "it can neither fade nor die." Truly does Wagner say we shall never believe the vocal school which followed it to have been the legitimate daughter of that wondrous mother.
The predominant feature of this music is harmony, brought forth by the union, not of sounds, but of melodies--different and contrasting melodies united in harmony, that is the characteristic of the polyphonic school, and the rhythm is marked, not by accents, but by changes of the chords. It is a rhythm of quantity alone, not of accent and quantity combined, as in the song and the dance and in modern music. Thus, although dancing was by no means excluded from the church in early times--its trace still remains in the name choir [Greek: choros] for that part of the church where the dancing was performed[[19]]--its most characteristic element, accent, came to be banished from the music of the church as something foreign to the character of religious worship. But the loss was amply repaid by the wealth and richness which the harmonic structure was able to acquire, and which was rendered intelligible by that fine and expressive method of handling the separate voices which we know as counterpoint. This is not without some interest for us, because, widely as Wagner's harmonies differ from those of Palestrina, we shall find that they too can often only be understood through the progression of the voices. The same is true of Bach's harmonies. Harmony was generated by polyphony, and not vice versa; that is, men first tried fitting melodies together, not chords, and when they had learned to do this skilfully, so that they sounded well together, harmony came into being. It does not follow that the music was unrhythmic because it was unaccented, and because in writing it was not divided into bars. No music can be intelligible without rhythm. The rhythmic pulsations are there; they are distinctly felt by the hearer in the performance, and in modern editions the barring is always introduced; but it is less crude, less obvious, through not being enforced by strong accents.
[19.] Ménil, Histoire de la Danse, where an interesting account of church dancing in the Middle Ages will be found.
We have already seen how the Volkslied became fertilized by the polyphony of church-music. At the same time the music of the mass itself received an important impulse from the Volkslied. The employment of well-known popular song-melodies as canti fermi in sacred contrapuntal compositions had a very beneficial effect upon those works, inasmuch as it introduced a bit of fresh popular life into music just at the moment when it was in danger of degenerating into pedantry and triviality.[[20]] Possibly the secularization of church music went too far, and at the Council of Trent the proposal was very seriously considered whether the music of the church should not be restricted to the traditional Gregorian chant, which had never been popular and never will be, because priests cannot ordinarily be found to sing it properly. The point at issue in this celebrated discussion really was whether in polyphonic song the words could be made intelligible,[[21]] for if not the music would become a mere decorative feature, and the mass itself unmeaning. Precisely as in the Wagner controversy of three centuries later, the question was whether art was a diversion only to be enjoyed for the sake of the pleasure which it afforded, or whether it had a serious didactic purpose founded on a reality. It is impossible not to be struck with the similarity of the issues involved with those of the Wagner struggle. In both the question was raised whether music could be justified in detaching itself from its basis--in the one case religious, in the other dramatic--and assert an absolute existence for itself. Still closer is the resemblance when we consider the dramatic character of the Roman ritual, with its sublime conceptions of Real Presence and Transubstantiation. The ritual during Holy Week, for example, is the story of the Passion, partly narrated, partly in a sort of idealized representation. When the solemn moment of the Crucifixion is reached on Good Friday, when the officiating priests advance in turn to adoration while the Cross itself lifts its voice in "Reproaches" to the multitude with Palestrina's music, who does not feel the dramatic directness of the representation?
Popule meus, quid feci tibi? aut in quo contristavi
te? responde mihi.