“ Learning and culture had become a badge of nobility and the patronage of the arts an instrument of power. That music shared in the boon which came to art is unquestionable; a musical education was once again, as in ancient Greece, an essential part of a gentleman’s equipment; poets and musicians shared the patronage of princes, who themselves had no greater ambition than to be accounted men of genius—in truth, Florence had become the Athens of the modern world. ”

“ And upon all his pupils the spirit of the Renaissance was at work. Thousands of madrigals, of love songs, drinking songs, and hunting songs came crowding from their pens and jostled masses and motets in confusion. Program music was in the air, songs of battle, songs of gossiping women, of birds, of shepherds and of shepherdesses. It is hardly surprising that music for the church began to take on colors more and more brilliant. It is more surprising that the old ideal of exalted polyphony still endured and still called men to its standard. ”

“ A touch of courtly tenderness, a mood of courtly melancholy are the nadir of his emotion. His little works for the clavecin are masterpieces of form and style. They never suggest the great power of music to express the fire of man’s heart and the struggle of his soul.
Lacking the daring brilliance of Scarlatti’s sonatas, they are none the less perfectly suited to the thin, frosty instrument for which they were written. For many years they stood as perfect models of harpsichord style and their influence can be traced in the works of all his contemporaries, even in those of J. S. Bach. ”

“ The cast of his genius seems almost out of place in the general spirit of music at his age. That which makes his music supremely great sprang from out the depths of his own nature, depths which are to-day unsounded and mysterious, the never-failing source of highest inspiration. Famous in his own day as an organist, and a performer on the harpsichord of astounding skill, as a composer he passed unnoticed or misunderstood save by a few pupils and friends. The ideal toward which he worked was fast losing hold upon the world of musicians. ”

“ And, as to his power of expression through harmony, let one listen to the recitatives of the St. Matthew Passion, one of the immortal, unfathomable creations of man’s genius; consider how they move on phrase after phrase, page after page, bearing the whole weight of a mighty composition and unaccompanied save by a few scattered chords. It may well be doubted if any art has or could have added one touch more of inexplicable, unspeakable beauty to the story of the Passion, save only these few scattered chords of Bach’s genius. ”

“ No doubt the organ can render the notes of a symphony quite as well as the poor overworked piano, but a rudimentary knowledge of the mechanism of the organ will show us where lies its special capacity—in the sustaining and rolling up of great masses of tone, and not at all in that more intimate expressiveness through swelling and fading and through accent in which the violin is peerless. The organ is magnificent in a Bach fugue, unsatisfactory in a Beethoven symphony, ridiculous in a popular dance. ”

“ Beethoven knew the Well-tempered Clavichord.’ He is said to have won his first distinction as a pianist by his playing of those preludes and fugues in Vienna. And Beethoven called Bach the forefather of harmony.
Probably no collection of pieces has been so carefully studied and sounded again and again by generation after generation of composers and probably no other set of pieces will ever prove so impervious to every influence of time. It is like an eternal spring, forever fresh, forever marvellous. Scarcely less wonderful are the collections of two- and three-part Inventions. ”

“ The essence of music, and, indeed, of any art, cannot be caught by rules and theories. The stricter the rules the more surely will music rebel and seek expression in new and natural forms. We cannot believe that music in the Middle Ages was not a means of expression, that it was not warm with life; and therefore we cannot believe that this dry organum of Hucbald and Odo, of Guido of Arezzo, of Guy of Chalis, which was still-born of scholastic theory, is representative of the actual practice of music, either in the church or among the people. ”

“ With the invention of printing came a liberation from this restraint. Music circulated through the lay society—all kinds of music, both secular and sacred—it stepped from the dim vast cathedrals and went among the people and entered into their homes and into their lives. The world of men and women welcomed it and changed it, formed it to the expression of their joys and sorrows. The superhuman intricacies of counterpoint and canon little by little withered and fell by the way. ”

“ There was no more genuine critical appreciation of music in France during the gorgeous reign of Louis XIV than there was in Italy, Germany or England at the same time. According to M. Combarieu, [140] there was no more real public than there were true critics—a few wits writing verses and publishing their dislikes or their flatteries, their naïve admiration for banal prowess in virtuosity. The mark of the king is on all music; music for the king’s ballets, for the king’s opera, for the king’s suppers, for the king’s fêtes, and above it all the haughty, majestic king. ”

“ Elements of form and design, rich chromatic alterations of harmony, splendid dramatic effects of answering double choirs are woven into the intricate web of Netherland polyphonic [Pg 296] music, touching it with color and fire, making it fertile with new and vast developments. But all is gradual; the art grows slowly and only slowly changes. Amid the turbulent restlessness, the experiment and daring, the old ideal, the ideal of the monasteries and the great cathedrals, still awaits perfection—the touch of Lassus and of Palestrina. ”

“ His symphonies are like Greek statues of the great period in their infinite variety, their perfect unity. It may seriously be doubted whether music can ever a second time attain the harmony of all its elements that it found in this supreme master—that which one of his critics has happily termed ‘the perfect balance of expression and design.’
Certain it is that immediately after him, in large measure as a result of his own example, it took a pronounced turn toward picturesqueness, toward highly personal expression, toward all that is conveniently summed up in the vague word Romanticism. ”

“ We are almost inclined to forget that it is all, or nearly all, a matter of relations; it is only not a matter of relations when the music is false. When the composer does try to make his effects by violence and what he supposes to be the intrinsic power of tone-quality nobody is permanently taken in. That the basis of color effect is relation is a thing man is learning every day in the infinite variety of a gorgeous sunset and in the luxuriant blaze of his own flowerbeds. Indeed, the principle of relativity in art is nowhere likely to be more readily felt than in the matter of color. ”

“ To the modern amateur, good music is that which touches him. He wishes to be conscious of that indefinable spirit which is at once both simpler and deeper than intellect. The greater part of the contrapuntal subtleties of Okeghem must have left the listener cold, remaining in history only as amazing tours de force, whose artificial perfection could only be a stage in the development toward something higher. It was this higher quality, achieved by Josquin, which placed him at the head of composers of his time, and gives him importance in history. ”

“ Just as the artist ‘humanized the altar pieces and the cloister frescoes upon which he worked’ and so ‘silently substituted the love of beauty and the interest of actual life for the principles of the church,’ so the musician ‘humanized’ the service of the church, brought beauty, expression and emotion into his masses and motets, imbuing them with the dramatic spirit, the spirit of passion, which had never been absent from the secular music of the people, the music that is always indigenous to the soil. ”

“ When Beethoven, a classicist, deals with a human emotion—love, for instance, as in the Fifth Symphony—he aims merely to stimulate in us the most general feeling and let each of us interpret for himself; when a romanticist like Tschaikowsky writes almost equally beautiful love music he gives a fillip to our imagination by naming it an overture to ‘Romeo and Juliet’; but when Berlioz conceives his Symphonie Fantastique he must have his lover killed on the guillotine—he must even hear the knife fall. ”

“ It is by virtue of another quality, his gift for teaching, that Okeghem lives to-day. As the founder of the Netherland school merely, his influence must almost have ceased when the traditions of that school were superseded by the vital enthusiasm of another; but, as the teacher of the leaders of succeeding schools, he has achieved a kind of immortality sometimes missed by greater artists. In the whole history of music Okeghem as a teacher stands alone. Only Porpora, possibly, the great singing master of the eighteenth century, can be compared to him. ”

“ In all this historical study of the earlier volumes of ‘The Art of Music’ the reader will be primarily in quest of information, his interest will be that of the scientist in facts. Even here, however, he will soon find himself discriminating the good from the bad, or from the less good, setting up standards of comparison, in a word, mingling with his purely scientific interest in facts an artistic interest in values. In all periods he will find the great man distinguished from the little by nobility, depth, and variety of thought, and by purity of style. ”

“ When we contemplate the life of the savage we are to all intents and purposes observing the lives of our own primitive ancestors. As we see them to-day they without doubt portray for us a phase through which we ourselves passed on our way upward to civilization. No tribe of savages has yet been discovered who have not possessed some elemental fragments of music. No matter how barbaric the people, how rude their manners, or how savage their dispositions, music of some sort plays a vital and significant part in their lives. Most savage tribes have their war cries, songs, and dances ”

“ Many beautiful melodies still heard by the traveller in Brittany, Normandy, Provence, or the rural sections of Germany, date from the Middle Ages. Their charm and their vitality are such that they have survived the onslaught of advancing civilization for eight centuries or more. They take us back to the time when agriculture was the one great pursuit of man, when in solitude song lightened his labor and in company song cheered his rest; when every custom, ceremonial, occupation, had its songs; when music was a solace to all alike ”

“ The genius of the Netherland schools, dominating church music as it did for a space of two hundred years, was, like Janus, two-faced. On the one hand, it developed a musical technique so complete and perfect in form that any further progress without an entire change of principle seemed impossible; and, on the other, it fostered a dry, mathematical correctness that led, at its worst, to an utter disregard of expression and feeling. Only the genius of a Josquin or a Lasso rendered [Pg 312] learning subservient to beauty of expression and carried out the true mission of art. ”

“ As folk songs we are wont to designate those lyrics of simple character which, handed down from generation to generation, are the common property of all the people. Every nation, regardless of the degree of its musical intelligence, possesses a stock of such songs, so natural in their simple ingenuity as to disarm the criticism of art, whose rules they follow unconsciously and with perfect concealment of means. Their origin is often lost in the obscurity of tradition and we accept them generally and without question as part and parcel of our racial inheritance. ”

“ The polyphonic style, animated by rhythm and molded to [Pg 352] melody, became counterpoint, which, though in a sense the ‘mathematics’ of music and in the hands of an uninspired composer as dry as dust, is none the less the very essence of the art; and in the hands of a master the power and glory of man’s mind in music. We shall see it prepared in the course of the century for the hands of perhaps the greatest of all composers, John Sebastian Bach.
Spreading gradually through all the music of the century came the new warm force of harmony. ”

“ He began to compose when very young and in his brief life set his stamp upon almost every form of music then known, though he found the first expression of his remarkable genius in music for the stage and incidental music for plays. In this branch his opera ‘Dido and Æneas’ (1689-1691) maintains the highest excellence. What is most striking in it, and, indeed, is most striking in all Purcell’s music, is the genuineness of feeling. He gave his music lasting life. There is little trace of empty formalism or of arid conventionalism which stifled the music of so many opera composers of his day. ”

“ The great spirit of the Italian Renaissance, which was essentially a spirit of freedom and joy in individuality, thus took shape in Germany, England, and France, and laid a hand upon music as it had already done in Italy. On every hand it scatters its seeds, which will take root and later flower. ”

“ Okeghem was still alive, and Dufay less than a score of years dead, when Josquin’s fame sprang to the sky. So great a stir did his gifts create in Rome that beside him the fame of all other composers paled. The Duke Hercules d’Este of Ferrara, for whom Josquin composed a mass entitled Hercules dux Ferrariæ, called him the Prince of Music; and the Abbate Baini, director of the pontifical chapel in the early nineteenth century, says of him: ‘In a short time, by his new productions, he becomes the idol of Europe. There is no longer tolerance for any one but Josquin. ”

“ Putting such aberrations aside for the present, it is pleasant to realize that one of the privileges of an instinct for style is to be able to recognize the stage of organization which has been reached, both in diction and structure, by the qualities of any work of art, and to locate the type of organization and balance its proportionate relation to what is expressed, and, more subtly still, to discern even the intention. Men who have any artistic instinct estimate the quality of a work of art by such an adjustment. ”

“ Such a group of artists forms what we call a ‘school’ or ‘period,’ beginning usually with pioneers whose work is crude but novel, continuing with countless workers, most of whom are after a short time completely forgotten, and culminating with one or two greatly endowed masters who gather up all the best achievements of the school in their own work and stands for posterity as its figure-heads, or in some cases engulf it entirely in their colossal shadows. Pioneers, journeymen, geniuses—that is the list of characters in the drama we call an artistic school. ”

“ In the suppression of individual emotion, in the banishment of rhythm and other active startling elements of music in order to produce the effect of vagueness and mystery, in the limitation of music to ecclesiastical modes, the Palestrina style is the flower of the spirit of the Middle Ages, of a spirit that in the lifetime of Palestrina himself was already dissipating in thin air. He stands looking backward upon the centuries which had given him birth, while on every hand the activities of man were urging impetuously forward. ”

“ Peri, Caccini, Cavalieri, and the other brilliant young men who, just before the turn of the century, composed music in a so-called new style, are not inventors of anything new, but experimenters with the simple kind of music which must have endured among the people through all the civilized ages of man. They sought to raise simple song into an art, and their experiments turned the attention of all men to those branches of music which had for centuries been considered beneath the dignity of serious effort. ”