D’Anglebert, Chamber Musician to Louis XIV., after Mignard.
Old French Dance-Pieces
The independent musical fame of England—omitting Purcell, the evening star—rests solely on this early period. Hence we have been led to trace the musical history of England further back than that of countries where the stream spread over a wider area. Old English music, indeed, had no influence worthy of the name. It stands, like a half-mediæval prelude, before the actual history of the piano. It is true that it shows the forces which are to work in the future; but they are not yet brought into the line which they are constantly and exclusively to follow. This process begins rather in France; it unites itself later with a second movement which comes from Italy, and follows a broader and more lively path through Germany until it reaches our own times.
Oskar Fleischer, the founder of the splendid Berlin collection of old musical instruments, has endeavoured, in his book on Gaultier, the great French lute-player, to describe English and French relations in the seventeenth century. But the hints which, in his view, the elder Gaultier[33] gained in England, are only matters of execution. Flourishes which in England were marked, without precise discrimination, with / or //, found a more exact representation among French lutenists. I do not mean that every performer did not put his own interpretation upon them. Every lutenist or clavier-player issues a new code of these agréments; but the basis remains essentially the same, and it is possible that the flourishes were adopted, by an impulse derived from England, into lute-music and thence into clavier-music. Thence they soon spread themselves over the whole musical field. But it is a mistake to imagine that these agréments, which infest old French compositions like locusts, were a peculiarity of the country, the “style galant” of France. The peculiarity lies elsewhere, in the form, in the dance.
English clavier-music had attached itself to the song. From the song it derived its stiffness of form and the grace of its melodic outline—two important aids in the advance of music. But its treatment of these pieces was conducted in a manner which reminds us of the middle ages of music. The form, a continuous succession of variations, sprang from the idea of figuration, which constituted the essence of mediæval music; and the voice parts were worked out in general on the fugal principle or in canonic imitation, both factors of the mediæval music. The early ripening of English music, and its close connection with the old Dutch vocal or organ composition, brought it about that the form rested still partly on tradition, while the content already pointed towards the future. Even dances were worked out in this manner, which belonged especially to the time. In France the system was the exact opposite. There, the form of the variation, and the absolutely fugal clavier-exercise, are as seldom found as the simply-harmonised song.
The emancipation in France was due to the attainment of a point of departure which was as distant as possible from anything vocal. The dance—although of course there were some sung dances—had early allied itself with the purely instrumental exercise. It has never been treated so entirely “à plaisir des gorges,”[34] as Gargantua expresses it. It had a stiff arrangement in common with a stiff harmony. It never showed much affinity with the contrapuntal twists and turns of the voice, to which song associates itself so easily from its close connection with choral music. If we compare the earliest instrumental dances of the sixteenth century with the dances, in several parts, of the old song-books—the “Rat’s-Tail,” the “Crane-Bill,” “Fox-Tail,” “Cat’s-Paw,” “Peacock’s-Tail,” and the like, we see how rapidly the influence of the instrument over a clear and light vocal current was increased in France. Here especially does the dance, from the very earliest times, enjoy great popularity. It is very early set to the lute or the clavier, other instruments being but rarely employed. Men grew accustomed to pieces in a condensed musical style, harmonised simply and melodiously, contracted in form. These were regarded on their own merits, and not as subjects for variations and figurations. It was for this reason that the French clavier-piece was more fruitful, more musical, and more capable of development than the English.
The dance then is the darling conception of French music; and French dances are the nucleus of all instrumental music. So early as 1530—for we can go back a great distance—the Paris printer, Attaignant, the oldest of French note-engravers, published all kinds of musical volumes “reduict de musique en la tablature du jeu d’Orgues, Espinettes, Manicordions,”[35] etc. We wonder to-day how M. Attaignant could transcribe his pieces “out of music” into the script of organs, spinets and monochords. But by “music” he meant nothing more nor less than song, and song, down to his day, was nothing more nor less than music. A few years after the German music-publisher Agricola[36] wrote:—
“Drumb lern singen du kneblein klein