A Popular History of the Art of Music / From the Earliest Times Until the Present

by W. S. B. Mathews

Richard Braithwaite, a writer of the reign of Elizabeth, formulated certain rules for the government of the house of an earl, in which the earl was "to keep five musicians, skillful in that commendable sweet science"; and they were required to teach "the earl's children to sing and to play upon the bass viol, the virginals, the lute, the bandour or cittern." When he gave great feasts, the musicians were "to play whilst the service was going to the table, upon sackbuts, cornets, shawms and such other instruments going with wind, and upon viols, violins or other broken music during repast." In barber shops they had lutes and virginals wherewith the gentlemen might amuse themselves while awaiting their turn. It was the same in reception rooms; musical instruments were provided as the surest method of enabling waiting guests to amuse themselves.

If it be asked why it was that in spite of this high esteem for music so little came out of its cultivation in England that was creditable upon the highest plane, according to the scales in which we are accustomed to weigh the music of Italy and Germany, the answer is not hard to find. It was in consequence of the little attention paid to musical learning in the highest sense, as compared with the learning and training in musicianship on the continent. English music died out, or grew small, for want of depth of earth. High ideals and thorough training in the technique are two prime conditions of a successful development of an art. Besides, the art of music suffered irreparable damage in England at the hands of the Puritans. The protectorate lasted long enough to put the art under an eclipse from which it did not fully emerge until nearly our own time.

A similar fondness for this form of art pervaded all European countries. In Italy music was the delight of the common people and the favorite pursuit of the great. In Germany the Reformation and the influence of Luther had set the people singing. The organ had attained an advanced state there, and other instruments of every sort were cultivated. It was the same in France. The love for music was universal. Hence the times were ripe for a great advance in art. There was concentrated upon music an attention which it has rarely enjoyed at any other period of its history, and the advances now to be mentioned were correspondingly abundant and striking.

The contrapuntal schools had done more to educate harmonic perception than is commonly supposed. All the devices of counterpoint, as we have them to-day, were invented by the various schools of this period, and brought to a high degree of perfection. But the learning had somewhat overshot its mark. The multiplicity of parts in the compositions of Willaert, and the other masters of the polyphonic schools, served for the cultivation of chord perception just as surely as if they had intentionally written chord successions without troubling themselves with imitative canon in any degree. For, when there were so many voice parts as ten, fifteen or twenty within the limits of the compass of the human organ, that is to say, mainly within the limits of two octaves and a half, the parts had no recourse but to cross continually, and since there was no aid afforded the ear by differences in tone color between one voice part and another, it necessarily followed that they fell upon the ear with the effect not of voice parts, in which the melody of each could be followed independently of the others, but rather as chord masses, in which here and there a prominent melodic phrase occasionally emerged, only to be lost the next moment by the prominence of a bit of the melody of some other voice. The effect of a composition of this kind was no other than that of a succession of chords, and the ear was as thoroughly educated to chord perception by this class of music as if the composer had intended only to write successions of chords. Still the training of these schools, while incidentally affording education to the ear upon the harmonic side, was thoroughly contrapuntal, and the study of every composer was to make something more elaborate than anything that had been written by his predecessors.

Nevertheless there was an influence in another direction. An art form was invented, which by the end of this period had established itself as the type of a musical form whenever the composer would arrive at something more spontaneous than could conveniently be attained by the way of a motette or conduit. That form was the madrigal. The meaning of the name is unknown. Some have derived it from Mary, and point to the sacred madrigals, many of which were composed by all the contrapuntal writers. Others have assigned a different origin for it, and it is not possible now to decide which is the true one. Enough if we find this form emerging from obscurity by the middle of the fifteenth century. The first writer of compositions under this title whose name is known to us was Busnois, and in the same collection are compositions of the same class by many other composers of the Netherlandish schools. A madrigal was a secular composition, generally devoted to love, but in polyphonic style, and in one of the ecclesiastical modes. They were always vocal down to the seventeenth century, but from that time forward they were generally marked for voices and instruments. One of the best composers of madrigals was Arkadelt, of the Netherlandish school. The success of the great Orlando Lassus in this school has already been mentioned, together with the name of one of the best known of his compositions in this line ([p. 167]).

The strange modulations, like that from F to E flat in one of Arkadelt's madrigals, are current incidents of the ecclesiastical mode in which they are written. Many of the secular works of this class are hardly to be distinguished from those intended for the Church, and some are to be met with, having two sets of words, one secular, occasionally almost profane; the other sacred, some hymn or other from the offices of divine service.

In England this school had a great currency, and the madrigals of the British writers of the seventeenth century are every whit as free and melodious as the best of those of the Italian school. The number of writers of this class of works was innumerable, so much so that we might well class it as the ruling art form of the century, just as the dramatic song was in the eighteenth century, the fugue in the last half of it, and the sonata in the beginning of the nineteenth. Everybody wrote madrigals who ever wrote music at all. According to the dates of collections published, the English followed the Italian composers. The earliest Italian compositions of this class are contained in three collections printed by Ottaviano di Petrucci, the inventor of the process of printing music from movable type. These collections were published in Venice, 1501-1503, and copies are still retained in the library at Bologna and at Vienna. The English cultivation of this form of composition became general toward the last of this century, and in the first part of the next ensuing, and it is but just to say that the English composers finally surpassed the continental in this school, and developed out of it a beautiful art genre of their own, the glee. Toward the latter part of the sixteenth century certain attempts were made in Italy at something resembling our opera, but in place of solo pieces by any of the performers there were madrigals. When Juliet, for example, would soliloquize upon the balcony, she did so in a madrigal, the remaining four parts being carried by chambermaids inside. When Romeo climbed the balcony and breathed his sweet vows to Juliet, one or two of his friends around the corner carried the missing melodies in which he sought to improvise his warm affection. The absurdity of the proceeding was manifest, but it needed yet another point of emphasis. There was a grand wedding in Venice in 1595, at which the music consisted of madrigals, all in slow time and minor key. The contradiction between the doleful music and the festive occasion was too plain to be ignored, and led, presently, to the invention of a totally different style of song of which later there is much to say.

The seventeenth century was one of the most memorable in the history of music, not so much, however, for what it fully accomplished as for the new ideas brought out and in part developed. The specific part of the general development of music which this century accomplished was the development of free melodic expression. While, as already noticed, the musical productions of the preceding centuries had manifested an increasing melodic force and propriety, the secret of genuine melodic expression had yet to be found. In the madrigal and motette the conditions were wholly unsuited to the development of this part of music. Instead of one prominent voice, in which the main interest of the production centered itself, the composer of that period had a certain number of equally important voice parts, all taking part in the development of the one leading idea of his piece. Melodically speaking, the standpoint was wrong and the situation false. Melody means individuality, individualism; the free representation of a personality in its own self-determined motion. At the point of the year 1600, speaking with sufficient exactness for ordinary purposes, the ruling standpoint of musical production changed, in the effort to rediscover the lost vocal forms of the Greek drama. The new problem was that of finding, for every moment and every speech of the drama, a form of utterance suitable to the sentiment and the occasion. Thus entered into music, through the ministry of self-forgetfulness, the most important principle which has actuated its later progress, the principle namely, of dramatic expression—in other words, the representative principle, the effort to represent in music something which until now had been outside of music. Out of this principle, co-operating with that other idea of two centuries later, the inherent interest of the individual, has grown the richness and manifold luxuriance of modern romantic music, together with the entire province of opera and oratorio. We have now to trace the steps which led to this great transformation in the art of music; and to illustrate the application of the new principles to the province of instrumental music, which had no beginning of genuine art value before this period. When examined with reference to the matured productions of the century next ensuing, those of the seventeenth appear quite as much like apprentice efforts as those of the latter part of the period covered in the preceding book of our story; but they have in them, however, the seeds of the later development, and stand to us, therefore, in the character of first fruits. To state it still more unmistakably, we have to trace in the operations of the seventeenth century the origin of dramatic song, the beginnings of free instrumental music, the discovery of the art of voice training and the formation of what is called the "old Italian school of singing," and the operation of the representative element in music, together with the new forms created through its entrance into art.

The musical movement of this century in its entirety was a part of the general operation of mind, which was now of great amplitude and spontaneity. The fervor of the Renaissance indeed had passed, having resulted in the creation of masterpieces of architecture, sculpture, painting and poetry during the previous two centuries. Music came to expression last of the forms of art, and when mental movement was less intense. For this reason the Italian mind failed to rule in it after the early beginnings in the new direction had been made. The representative element entered the art of music in Italy; but the mastery of its application, and the development of new forms fully completing the representation, were carried on by other nationalities where the mental movement still retained the pristine vigor of new impulses and rich vitality.

The city of Florence was the center where the drama and song-like melody found its beginning. Almost immediately, however, Venice became the home of music, and fostered the growth of dramatic song for more than half a century. At this time, as for a century previous, Venice was the most active intellectual center of Europe. Perhaps nothing gives so clear a realization of this supremacy as the statistics of books printed in the leading centers of Europe from 1470 to 1500. The largest centers were Strassburg, with 526; Basle, 320; Leipsic, 351; Nuremburg, 382; Cologne, 530; Paris, 751; Rome, 925; Bologna, 298; Milan, 625, while Venice heads the list with 2,835. Toward the end of the century, the appearance of the genius, Alexander Scarlatti, effected the transference of the musical supremacy of Italy to Naples.