CHAPTER IV.
THE DANCE AND ITS DEVELOPMENT.

I. MUSICAL CHARACTER OF DANCES.

In the last chapter we studied the most important applications of the "polyphonic" style, which originated in music for voices, to the music of instruments. We saw how in such music the attention of the composer was divided among several equally important voices or parts, and how much he made of the principle of imitation; and in connection with the fugue we remarked that the very complex interweaving of the different voices in such music, one beginning before another leaves off, and all together making an intricate web, presented certain difficulties to the listener accustomed to the more modern style, in which a single voice has the melody, and stops short at regular intervals, giving the hearer a chance to draw breath, as it were, and renew attention for what is coming next. Listening to modern music is like reading a series of short sentences, each clearly and definitely ended by its own full stop. Listening to the old polyphony is more like reading one of those long and involved sentences of De Quincey or Walter Pater, in which the clauses are intricately interwoven and mutually dependent, so that we can get the sense only by a long-sustained effort of attention.

This more involved style, suitable to voices, but less natural to instruments, had historically a very long life. Much of the instrumental music of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries was in fact nothing but a transference to instruments of music really conceived for voices. Thus, for example, in the sixteenth century, when madrigals and canzonas, which were compositions for voices in the polyphonic style but of a more secular character than church music, were exceedingly popular, the composers for stringed instruments and for the then very fashionable lutes, "when they wanted something of a superior order, ... simply played madrigals, or wrote music in imitation of any of the varieties of choral music, not realizing that without the human tones ... which gave expression to the rising and falling of the melodic material, the effect was pointless and flat."[10] Even Bach and Handel, in the eighteenth century, were, by their deeply-rooted habit of thinking vocally, in some degree hampered in the search for a purely instrumental style. Instrumental music, having to get along without words, must find some principle of coherence, some kind of definite design, which will make it intelligible without the help of words, and enable it to stand on its own feet.

And here comes in the importance of folk-song, and of the folk-dance which grew up beside it, to our modern instrumental music. For both song and dance pointed the way to such a principle of independent intelligibility, through definite balance of phrases (see Chapter I), and through contrasts and resemblances of key in the various phrases and sections of a composition. Music intended to accompany songs or dances had to consist of balanced phrases of equal length—in the case of songs, because it had to reproduce the verse structure of the words, which of course were composed in regular stanzas of equal lines, and in the case of dances, because it had to afford a basis for symmetrical movements of the body. And when once it was thus divided up into equal phrases, it took musicians but a short time to find that these phrases could be effectively contrasted, and made the parts of larger musical organisms, by being put into different keys (as we have seen in the instances of modulation cited in Chapters II and III). How vital these principles of structure in balanced phrases and sections, and of contrast of keys, are to the entire modern development of music, we shall realize fully only as we proceed.

Again, both song and dance have proved supremely important to the development of the homophonic style (one melody, with accompaniment not itself melodic). In the case of song the reason is obvious. A song rendered by a solo voice, with instrumental accompaniment, naturally takes the homophonic style, since it would be highly artificial to make the subordinate element in the combination as prominent as the chief one. Dance is less inevitably homophonic than song; indeed many dances, as we shall see, are to a greater or less degree polyphonic; but nevertheless the tendency toward homophony is always apparent. In the first place, the interweaving of many melodies would tend to obscure the division into definite phrases, since an inner melody might sometimes fill up the pause in the main one, as we saw it constantly doing in the fugue. Secondly, the mode of performing dances tends to give prominence to a single melody. The old dances were generally played by one melodic instrument, such as a violin or hautboy, accompanied by chords on an instrument of the lute or guitar family, and frequently by a drum to strengthen the accents. Such a combination affords but one prominent "voice," and does not lend itself naturally to polyphonic writing.

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FIGURE XV.

Viens dans ce bo- ca- ge, belle A- min - te,
Sans contrain - te L'on y for - me des vœux; Viens,
Viens dans ce bo - ca - ge, belle A- min - te,
Il est fait pour les plai-sirs et les jeux: