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.
III
The construction of instrumental music on the basis of one central key with excursions or modulations into other keys for the sake of development and variety began to be understood about the middle of the seventeenth century. A very noticeable advance in this direction shows in the music of Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1644), one of the most brilliant organists before the time of Bach. Much of his music has an archaic sound to our ears. He is by no means wholly free of the old modal restrictions. But he stands as one of the pioneers in the relatively new art of organ music—a bold innovator, guided by the unerring taste of a great artist.
A romantic glory is about his name. As a player he was probably unmatched in his day, and his fame was widespread. It is said that when he played in St. Peter’s at Rome, where for many years he held the position of organist, the vast cathedral was filled with people come to hear him. One of the great masters of the next generation, the German Froberger, was granted four years of absence from his duties at the court of Vienna, that he might go to study with Frescobaldi in Rome. His compositions were published in several sets, which included ricercars, toccatas, preludes, canzonas, capriccios, and so forth. All these, not excepting even the preludes, are in the contrapuntal style which is the outgrowth of the old vocal polyphony. But they are greatly enlivened by rapid figures, scales and arpeggios as well as trills and ornamental devices. Such figures, being not at all suitable to voices but only to a keyboard instrument, mark the progress of the keyboard style toward a distinct individuality if not independence from the ancient past of vocal masses and motets, an independence which no great music has ever quite achieved.