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

CHAPTER VII.

Nevertheless, there was a time when this picturesque figure became seized with an activity which shook Europe and Christendom to its very center. The voice of the prophet Mahomet awakened the Arab from his slumber. He aroused himself to the duty of proselyting the world to the doctrine of the One God and the Great Prophet. With sword in hand and the rallying cry of his faith he went forth, with such result that a vast proportion of the inhabitants of the globe at this very hour profess the tenets of his religion. Once awakened into life, he penetrated the distant east, and brought back thence the foundation of our arithmetic, the predecessor of our greatest of musical instruments, the violin, and discovered for himself the productions of the greatest of the Greek minds, the works of the philosopher Aristotle. He established a new state in Spain, and for several centuries confronted Christendom with the alternative of the sword or his faith. One of the best characterizations of this people upon the musical-literary side is that of the eminent M. Ginguène, who in his "History of Italian Literature," remarks as follows, concerning the points under immediate consideration:

"In the most ancient times the Arabs had a particular taste for poetry, which among almost all people had opened a way to the most elevated and abstract studies. Their language, rich, flexible and abundant, favored their fertile imagination; their spirit lively and sententious; their eloquence natural and artless, they declaimed with energy the pieces they had composed, or they sang, accompanied with instruments, in a very expressive chorus. These poems make upon the simple and sensitive auditors a prodigious effect. The young poets receive the praises of the tribe, and all celebrate their genius and merit. They prepare a solemn festival. The women, dressed in their most beautiful habits, sing a chorus before their sons and husbands upon the happiness of their tribe. During the annual fair, where tribes from a distance are gathered for thirty days, a large part of the time is spent in a contest of poetry and eloquence. The works which gain praise are deposited in the archives of the princess or emirs. The best ones are painted or embroidered with letters of gold upon silk cloth, and suspended in the temple at Mecca. Seven of these poems had obtained this honor in the time of Mahomet, and they say that Mahomet himself was flattered to see one of the chapters of the Koran compared with these seven poems and judged worthy to be hung up with them. Almansor, the second of the Abassides, loved poetry and letters, and was very well learned in laws, philosophy and astronomy. They say that in building the famous town of Bagdad he took the suggestions from the astronomers for placing the principal building. The university at Bagdad was honored and very celebrated. Copious translations from the Greek were made, and many original treatises produced in other parts of Arabia, but the most brilliant development of Arabic letters was in Spain. Cordova, Grenada, Valencia were distinguished for their schools, colleges and academies. Spain possessed seventy libraries, open to the public in different towns, when the rest of Europe, without books, without letters, without culture, was sunk in the most shameful ignorance. A crowd of celebrated writers enriched the Spanish-Arabic literature in all its parts. The influence of the Arab upon science and literature extended into all Europe; to him are owed many useful inventions. The famous tower at Seville was built for the observatory. It is to be noticed, however, that the Arabs, while taking much from the Greeks, did not take any of their literature, properly so-called—neither Sophocles, Euripides, Sappho, Anacreon, nor Demosthenes. The result is that their own literature preserved its original character; they preserved also in all purity the peculiarity of their music—an art in which they excelled and in which the theory was very complicated. Their works are full of the praises of music and its marvelous effect. They attributed very powerful effects not alone to music sung, but to the sound of certain instruments and to certain instrumental strings and to certain inflections of the voice."

Fig. 23.

THE ARAB REBEC.

The modern world is indebted to the Arab for at least three of its most important instruments of music. The ravanastron he brought home with him from India, and under the name Rebec it found its way into Europe, where in an appreciative soil it grew and expanded into that miracle of sonority and expression, the modern violin. The instrument of the south of Europe during the latter part of the Middle Ages was the lute, which had its origin in the Arab Eoud. (See Fig. 24.)

Fig. 24.

THE EOUD.

Still more familiar to domestic eyes is that descendant of the Arab santir, the modern pianoforte. This, under the name of psaltery, begins to figure in manuscript as early as the ninth century. The Arab canon, which is commonly taken as the immediate predecessor of the pianoforte, had the important difference of being strung with catgut strings. The essential foundation of the pianoforte was the metal strings, necessitating hammers for inciting the vibrations, and affording in the superior solidity incident to metal support a firmness and susceptibility to development. This is the santir. It has survived in Europe as the dulcimer, or the German hackbrett.

Fig. 25.

THE SANTIR.

Yet while the Arab wrote so abundantly upon the subject of music, and while it filled so prominent a part in his social and official life, and in spite of his sagacity in seizing perfectible types of instruments, there is very little in his treatment of the art which need delay us in the present work. His music belongs entirely to the ancient period of monody. He never had a harmony of combined sounds, nor a scale with intervals permitting combined sounds. He was sufficiently scientific to carry out the intonations of the Pythagorean theory, and when he went beyond this and formed a scale for himself he devised one which did not permit the association of sounds into chord masses; and, more fatal still, he not only invented such a scale, but carried it into execution so exactly that the ear of the race was hopelessly committed to monody, and has remained so until this very day. The scale of the Arabs in the latter times contained twenty-two divisions in the octave, of which only the fifth and fourth exactly correspond with the harmonic ratios. The place of the Arab in music, therefore, is that of an unintentional minister to a higher civilization and to the art of music.

CHAPTER VIII.

NE of the earliest developments of popular music on the continent was that of the Chansons de Geste ("Songs of Action"), which were, in effect, great national epics. The period of this activity was from about 800 to 1100 or 1200, and the greatest productions were the "Songs of Roland," the "Song of Antioch," etc., translations of which may be found in collections of mediæval romances. The social conditions out of which these songs grew have been well summarized by M. Léon Gautier, in his "Les Épopées Françaises": "If we transport ourselves in imagination into Gaul in the seventh century, and casting our eyes to the right, the left, and to all parts, we undertake to render to ourselves an exact account of the state in which we find the national poetry, the following will be the spectacle which will meet our gaze: Upon one hand in Amorican Brittany there are a group of popular poets who speak a Celtic dialect, and sing upon the harp certain legends, certain fables of Celtic origin. They form a league apart, and do not mix at all in the poetic movement of the great Gallo-Roman country. They are the popular singers of an abased race, of a conquered people. Toward the end of the twelfth century we see their legends emerge from their previous obscurity and conquer a sudden and astonishing popularity, which endured throughout all the remainder of the Middle Ages. But in the seventh century they had no profound influence in Gaul, and their voice had no echo except beyond the boundary straits among the harpers and singers of England, Wales and Ireland.

"Upon another side, that of the Moselle, the Meuse and the Rhine, in the country vaguely designated under the name of Austrasia, German invasions have left more indelible traces. The ideas, customs and even the language have taken on a Tudesque imprint. There they sing in a form purely Germanic the 'Antiquissima Carmina' ["Most Ancient Songs"] which Charlemagne was one day to order his writers to compile and put in permanent form. Between these two extreme divisions there was a neutral territory where a new language was in process of forming—that of the 'Oc' and 'Oil.' Here the songs were neither German nor Gallo-Roman, but Romance. And here were the germs of the future epics of France."

Out of this combination of contrasting spirits of race, the movement of awakened national life, arose, first, what were called Cantilenas—short songs of a ballad-like character. The language is a mixture of German, Latin and French, intermingled in a most curious manner. For example, consider the following verses from the cantilena of St. Eulalie, as given by M. Gautier, p. 65:

Which being somewhat freely rendered into English, it says that:

And so the ballad goes on twenty-three verses more to narrate how she withstood the exhortations of the king of the pagans, that she would forsake the name of Christian; and when they threw her into the fire the fire would not burn her, for the fire was pure; and when the king drew his sword to cut off her head the demoiselle did not contradict him, for she wished to leave the world. She prayed to Christ, and under the form of a dove she flew away toward heaven. These charming verses of the ninth century were probably sung to music having little of the movement which we now associate with the term melody, but which was more of a chant-like character.

Of similar literary texture were a multitude of songs, of which many different ones related to the same hero. Hence in time there was a disposition on the part of the cleverer minstrels to combine them into a single narration, and to impart to the whole so composed something of an epic character. Thus arose the famous Chansons de Geste already mentioned, the origin and general character of which have been most happily elucidated in the work of M. Gautier, already referred to. He says:

"The great epics of the French had their origin in the romantic and commanding deeds of Charlemagne and the battles against Saracens in 792. The fate of civilization trembled in the balance at Ville Daigne and at Poitiers. It is the lot of Christianity, it is the lot of the world, which is at stake. The innumerable murders, the torrents of blood, these thousands of deaths have had their sure effect upon history. The world has been Christian in place of being Arab. It appertains to Jesus instead of Mahomet. This civilization, of which we are so proud, this beauty of the domestic circle, this independence of our spirit, this free character of our wives and children it is to Charles Martelle, and above all to William of Orange, that we owe them, after God. We possess only a limited number of these primitive epics, the Chansons de Geste, and are not certain that we have them in the second or even the third versions. At the head of the list we place the 'Song of Roland,' the Iliad of France. All the other songs of action, however beautiful and however ancient they may be, are far inferior. The text of the 'Song of Roland' as it has come down to us cannot have been written much before 1100. Besides this there is the 'Chanson de Nimes,' 'Ogier le Danois,' 'Jour de Blaibes,' all of which were written in the languages of Oc and Oil. All these have something in common; the verse is ten syllables, the correspondences are assonances and not rhymes. In style these Chansons de Geste are rapid, military, but above all dramatic and popular. They are without shading, spontaneous, no labor, no false art, no study. Above all it is a style to which one can apply the words of Montaigne, and it is the same upon paper as in the mouth. Really these verses are made to be upon the living lip, and not upon the cold and dead parchment of the manuscript. The oldest manuscripts are small, in order that they may be carried in the pocket for use of traveling jongleurs and singers. They have Homeric epithets. The style is singularly grave. There is nothing to raise a laugh. The first epics were popular about the end of the eleventh century. The idea of woman is purer in the early poems. There is no description of the body; there is no gallantry. The beautiful Aude apprehends the death of Roland; she falls dead. In the second half of the twelfth century our poets would have been incapable of so simple and noble a conception. We find, even in 'Amis et Amelis,' women who are still very German in physiognomy, and alluring, but they are Germans, so to say, of the second manner. They have a habit of throwing themselves into the arms of the first man who takes their fancy.

"Each one of the races which composed France or Gaul in the sixth or seventh century, contributed its share toward the future epics. The Celts furnished their character, the Romans their language, the Church its faith; but the Germans did more. For long centuries they had the habit of chanting in popular verse their origin, their victories and their heroes. Above all they penetrated the new poetry with their new spirit. All the German ideas upon war, royalty, family and government, upon woman and right, passed into the epic of the French.

"Our fathers had no epics, it is true, but they had popular chants, rapid, ardent and short, which are precisely what we have called cantilenas. A cantilena is at the same time a recitation and an ode. It is at times a complaint and more often a round. It is a hymn, above all religious and musical, which runs over the lips and which, thanks to its brevity, mainly, is easily graven upon the memory. The cantilenas were a power in society; they caused the most powerful to tremble. When a captain wished to nerve himself up against a bad action he said, 'They will make a bad song about me.'

"The heroes and the deeds which gave birth to French epics are those of the commencement of the eighth century to the end of the tenth. France is then more than a mere land; it is a country; a single religious faith fills all hearts and all intelligence. Toward the end of the tenth century we see the popular singers arresting crowds in all public places. They sing poems of 3,000 or 4,000 verses. These are the first of the Chansons de Geste. Out of the great number of cantilenas dedicated to a single hero it happened that some poet had the happy thought of combining them into a single poem. Thus came a suite of pieces about Roland or William, and from these, in time, an epic. The latest of the epic cycles was that concerning the crusades. The style is popular, rapid, easy to sing. It recalls the Homeric poetry. The constant epithets, the military enumerations, the discourses of the heroes before combat, and the idea of God, are simple, childlike, and superstition has no place. The supernatural exists in plenty, but no marvels."

CHAPTER IX.

O the full account of the origin of the Chansons de Geste in the foregoing chapter, it remains now to add a few notes concerning the personnel of the different classes of minstrels through whose efforts these great songs were created.

The first of these singers were the troubadours, who were traveling minstrels especially gifted in versification and in music. Their compositions appear to have been short, on the whole, and of various kinds, as will presently be seen. The earliest of the troubadours of whom we have definite account was Count Wilhelm of Poitiers, 1087-1127. Among the kind of songs cultivated by these singers were love songs, canzonets, chansons; serenade—that is, an evening song; auberde, or day song; servantes, written to extol the goodness of princes; tenzone, quarrelsome or contemptuous songs; and roundelays, terminated forever with the same refrain. There was also what was called the pastourelle, a make-believe shepherd's song.

The so-called chansonniers of the north, who flourished toward the end of the twelfth century, were also troubadours. Among them the name of Count Thibaut of Champagne, king of Navarre, stands celebrated—1201-1253. He composed both religious and secular songs. The following is one of his melodies unharmonized. Its date is about the same as that of "Summer is Coming In." Another celebrated name of these minstrels was Adam de la Halle, of Arras in Picardy—1240-1286. Upon many accounts the music of this author is of considerable interest to us. He was a good natural melodist, as the examples in Coussemaker's "Adam de la Halle" show. He is also the author of the earliest comic opera of which we have any account, the play of "Robin and Marion." We shall speak of this later, in connection with the development of opera in general.

[Listen]

Immediately following the troubadours came the trouvères, who were simply troubadours of nobler birth, and perhaps of finer imagination. There were so many of these singers that it is quite impossible here to give a list of their names. Among the more celebrated, forty-two names are given by Fétis, the most familiar among them being those of Blondel, the minstrel of Richard Cœur de Lion, and the Châtelaine de Coucy (died about 1192), from whom we have twenty-three chansons.

It was the trouvères who invented the Chansons de Geste already mentioned—songs of action; in other words, ballads. One of the most celebrated of these was the "Story of Antioch," a romance of the crusades, extending to more than 15,000 lines. This poem was not intended to be read, but was chanted by the minstrels during the crusades themselves. One Richard the Pilgrim was the author. The song is, in fact, a history of the crusade in which he took part, up to a short time before the battle in which he was killed. Another very celebrated piece of the same kind, the "Song of Roland," the history of a warrior in the suite of Charlemagne, is said to have been chanted before the battle of Hastings by the Jongleur Taillefer. Other pieces of the same kind were the "Legend of the Chevalier Cygne" ("Lohengrin") "Parsifal" and the "Holy Grail." Each one of these was sung to a short formula of melody, which was performed over and over incessantly, excepting variations of endings employed in the episodes. A very eminent author of pieces of this kind was the Chevalier de Coucy, who died 1192, in the crusade. There are twenty-four songs of his still in the Paris Library.

Fig. 26.

REINMAR, THE MINNESINGER.

[From a manuscript of the thirteenth century, in the National Library at Paris.]

A similar development of knightly music was had in Germany from the time of Frederick the Red—1152-1190. These were known as minnesingers. Among the most prominent were Heinrich of Beldeke, 1184-1228, an epic writer; Spervogel, 1150-1175; and Frauenlobe, middle of the twelfth century. The forms of the minne songs were the song (lede), lay (lerch), proverb (spruch). The song rarely exceeded one strophe; the lay frequently did. A little later we encounter certain names which have been recently celebrated in the poems of Wagner, such as Heinrich von Morungen, Reinmar von Hagenau, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Gottfried von Strassburg, Walther von der Vogelweide, Klingsor, Tannhäuser, etc. All of these were from the middle of the thirteenth century. A portrait of Reinmar, the minnesinger, has come down to us with a manuscript now contained in the National Library at Paris. The last of the minnesingers was Heinrich von Meissen, 1260-1318. His poems were always in the praise of woman, for which reason he was called Frauenlob ("Woman's Praise"). An old chronicle tells us that when he died the women of Mayence bore him to the tomb, moistened his grave with their tears, and poured out libations of the costliest wines of the Rhineland. The following illustration is supposed to be a representation of this minstrel, although the drawing is hardly up to the standard of the modern Academy.

Fig. 27.

MASTER HEINRICH FRAUENLOB.

[From a manuscript in the Manesse collection at Paris.]

The work of the minnesingers was succeeded in Germany by a class of humbler minstrels of the common people, known as the Mastersingers, the city of Nuremberg being their principal center. A few of these men were real geniuses—poets of the people. One of the most celebrated was Hans Sachs, since represented in Wagner's "Meistersingers." Sachs was a very prolific poet and composer, his pieces being of every kind, from the simpler songs of sentiment and home to quite elaborate plays. About nine volumes of his poems have been reprinted by the Stuttgart Literary Union.

Fig. 28.

MINSTREL HARPS OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY.

The principal influence of these different classes of popular minstrel was temporary, in keeping alive a love for music and a certain appreciation of it. The most of their music was rather slow and labored, and it is impossible to discover in the later development of the art material traces of their influence upon it. In this respect they differ materially from the Celtic and English bards mentioned in the previous chapter. Although the productions of those minstrels have all passed away, they have left a distinct impress upon musical composition, even to our own day, in certain simple forms of diatonic melody of highly expressive character. The troubadours, trouvères and minnesingers, on the other hand, never acquired the art of spontaneous melody, and as for harmony, there is no evidence that they made any use of it. Their instrument of music was a small harp of ten or twelve strings, but no more—a much smaller and less effective instrument than the Irish harp of the eleventh century, or the Saxon of the tenth. (See Fig. 28.)

CHAPTER X.

T is not easy to define the influence of the Christian Church in this transformation, for the reason that upon the technical side it was slight, although upon the æsthetic side it was of very great importance. From the circumstance that all the early theoretical writers from the sixth century to the thirteenth were monks or ecclesiastics of some degree, and from the very important part played by the large cathedrals in the development of polyphonic music, many historians have concluded that to the Church almost this entire transformation of the art of music is due. This, however, is wide of the truth. The Church as such had very little to do with developing an art of music through all the early centuries. The early Christians were humble people, for the most part, who had embraced a religion proscribed and at times persecuted. Their meetings were private, and attended by small numbers, as, for instance, in the Catacombs at Rome, where the little chapels in the dark passage ways under ground were incapable of holding more than twenty or thirty people at a time. Under these circumstances the singing cannot have been essentially of more musical importance than that of cottage prayer meetings of the present day. In another way the Church, indeed, exercised a certain amount of influence in this department as in all others, an influence which might be described as cosmopolitan. The early apostles and bishops traveled from one province to another, and it is likely that the congregation in each province made use of the melodies already in existence. The first Christian hymns and psalms were probably sung to temple melodies brought from Jerusalem by the apostles. As new hymns were written (something which happened very soon, under the inspiration of the new faith and hope), they were adapted to the best of these old melodies, just as has been done continually down to nearly our own time. Our knowledge of the early Church, in this side of its activity, is very limited. It is not until the time of St. Ambrose, who was bishop of Milan in the last part of the fourth century, that the Church began to have an official music. By this time the process of secularization had been carried so far that there was a great want of seriousness and nobility in the worship. St. Ambrose, accordingly, selected certain melodies as being suitable for the solemn hymns of the Church and the offices of the mass. He himself was a poet of some originality. He composed quite a number of hymns, of which the most famous is that noble piece of praise, Te Deum Laudamus, a poem which has inspired a greater number of musical settings than any other outside the canon of the Scriptures. The melodies which St. Ambrose collected were probably from Palestine, and he selected four scales from the Greek system, within which, as he supposed, all future melodies should be composed. This was done, most likely, under the impression that each one of the Greek scales had a characteristic expression, and that the four which he chose would suffice for the varying needs of the hymns of the Church. In naming these scales a mistake was made, that upon re being called the Dorian, and all the other names being applied improperly. The series upon mi was called Phrygian, upon fa Lydian; upon sol Mixo-Lydian. The melodies of St. Ambrose were somewhat charged with ornament, a fact which indicates their Asiatic origin. It is probable that a part of the melodies of the Plain Song still in use are remains of the liturgies of St. Ambrose. The Church at Milan maintains the Ambrosian liturgy to the present date. In this action of St. Ambrose we have a characteristic representation of the influence which the Church has exerted upon music in all periods of its career. Upon the æsthetic and ethical sides the Church has awakened aspirations, hopes and faith, of essentially musical character, and in this respect it has been one of the most powerful sources of inspiration that musical art has experienced. But upon the technical side the action of the Church has been purely conservative and, not to say it disrespectfully, politic. The end sought in every modification of the existing music has been that of affording the congregation a musical setting for certain hymns—a setting not inconsistent with the spirit of the hymns themselves, but in melody agreeable to the congregation. The question which John Wesley is reported to have asked, "Why the devil should have all the good tunes," has been a favorite conundrum with the fathers of the Church.

Notwithstanding the firmness with which the Church at Milan maintained the Ambrosian liturgy, in other provinces this conservatism failed; and within the next two centuries very great abuses crept in through the adoption of local secular melodies not yet divested of their profane associations. St. Gregory the Great (540-595), who was elected pope about 590, set himself to restore church music to its purity, or rather to restrict the introduction of profane melodies, and to establish certain limits beyond which the music should not be allowed to pass. St. Gregory himself was not a musician. He therefore contented himself with restoring the Ambrosian chants as far as possible; but the musical scales established by Ambrose he somewhat enlarged, adding to them four other scales called plagal. These were the Hypo-Dorian, la to la; Hypo-Phrygian, si to si; Hypo-Lydian, do to do; Hypo-Æolian, mi to mi. I do not understand that the terminal notes of these plagal scales of St. Gregory were used as key notes, but only that melodies instead of being restricted between the tonic and its octave, were permitted to pass below and above the tonic, coming back to that as a center; for we must remember that in the ancient music the tonality was purely arbitrary, and, so to say, accidental. While all kinds of keys used the series of tones known by the names do, re, mi, fa, so, la, si, do, it was within the choice of the composer to bring his melodies to a close upon any one of these tones, which, being thus emphasized, was regarded as the tonic of the melody. Whatever of color one key had differing from another was due therefore to the preponderance of some one tone of the scale in the course of the melody. The Plain Song of the Roman Church, and of the English Church as well, has been called Gregorian, from St. Gregory, and the majority of ecclesiastical amateurs suppose that the square note notation upon four lines was invented by St. Gregory. This, however, is not the case. The melody, very likely, may have come down to us with few alterations. The notation, however, has undergone several very important changes, of which there will be more particular mention in chapter XV. The Gregorian notation of the sixth century was probably the Roman letters which we find in Hucbald, as will be seen farther on. Several of the tunes well known to Protestants have been arranged from the so-called Gregorian chants. They are "Boylston," "Olmutz" and "Hamburg." The eighth tone, from which "Olmutz" was arranged, has always been appropriated to the Magnificat ("My Soul doth Magnify the Lord").

The following are the ecclesiastical scales and names, as established by St. Gregory:

[Listen: Dorian Phrygian Lydian Mixo-Lydian]

With the labors of St. Gregory the influence of the Church upon the course of musical development by no means ceased. At various epochs in its history synods, councils and popes have effected various reforms, every reform consisting in barring out a certain amount of novelty which had crept in, and in a supposed "restoration" of the service to its pristine purity. The restoration, however, has never been complete. Church music, like every other department of the art, has gone on in increasing complexity from the beginning until now. The main difference between the Church and the world in any century consists in drawing the line of the permissible at a different point. One of the latest reforms was that begun by Pope Marcellus and the Council of Trent, which ordered from Palestrina an example of church music as it should be.

Incidentally, in another direction, the Church has been of very great influence upon the course of musical development. The great cathedrals of the commercial centers of the world, in the effort to render their service worthy of the congregation, have afforded support to talented composers in all ages, and some of the most important movements in music have been made by ecclesiastics or officials deriving support from these sources. More extended particulars of this part of her influence will be given later. It may suffice to mention the cathedrals of Westminster and St. Paul in England, of Notre Dame in Paris, to which we owe the old French school and the beginning of polyphony; the cathedral at Strassburg, which supported important musicians; Cologne, where the celebrated Franco lived; St. Mark's, at Venice, where, from about 1350 to the end of the last century, an extremely brilliant succession of musical directors found a field for their activity.

CHAPTER XI.

HERE is very little in the Roman writers upon music that is of interest. Macrobus, an expert grammarian and encyclopedist living at Rome at the end of the fourth or beginning of the fifth century, wrote a commentary upon the song of Scipio, in which he quotes from Pythagoras concerning the music of the spheres: "What hear I? What is it which fills my ears with sounds so sweet and powerful? It is the harmony which, formed of unequal intervals, but according to just proportion, results from the impulse and movements of the spheres themselves, and of which the sharp sound tempered by the grave sound produces continually varied concerts." (Cicero, "De Republica," VI.) Commenting upon this passage, Macrobus says that Pythagoras was the first of the Greeks who divined that the planets and the sidereal universe must have harmonic properties such as Scipio spoke of, on account of their regular movements and proportions to each other. We find in the writings of Macrobus an advance upon the musical theories of Ptolemy. He shows that contrary to the doctrine of Aristoxenus there is not a true half tone, and that the relation 8:9 does not admit of being equally divided. In place of the three symphonies of the octave, fourth and fifth, mentioned by his predecessors, he makes five, including the octave and the double octave. "Such," he says, "is the number of symphonies that we ought to be astonished that the human ear can comprehend them."

Another of the Roman writers upon music was Martinus Capella. His work is called the "Nuptials of Philologus and Mercury" ("De Nuptiis Philologiæ et Mercurii"). The little upon music which the book contains was only an abridgment of the Greek treatise of Aristides Quintilianus.

The most important of the earliest treatises upon music, and by far the most famous, is that of Boethius, as it is also the most systematic. The following summary is from Fétis' "History of Music," Vol. IV:

"Born at Rome between 470 and 475, Boethius made at home classical studies, and went, they say, to Athens itself, where he studied philosophy with Proclus. He was of the age of about thirty-five when, in 510, he was made president of the senate. Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, called him to himself, on account of his reputation for wisdom and virtue; he confided to him an important position in the palace, and intrusted to him many important diplomatic negotiations. Boethius did nothing which was not to his credit, but this made him only the more hostile to the interests of the courtiers; he was therefore overthrown and cast into prison, where he composed his 'Consolations of Philosophy.' He was put to death 524 or 526."

Boethius' treatise on music is divided into five books. It is a vast repertory of the knowledge of the ancients relative to this art. Its doctrine is Pythagorean. The first book is divided into thirty-four chapters. In the first he develops the thought of Aristotle, that music is inherent in human nature. He there renders the text of a decree which the Ephori of Sparta rendered against Timotheus of Miletus, but which better critics have regarded as fictitious. The second chapter establishes that there are three sorts of music: the worldly, which is universal harmony; the human, which has its source in the intelligence, which reunites and co-ordinates the elements; finally, the third kind is artificial, made by instruments of different sorts. The chapters following treat of the voice as the source of music; of consonances and their proportions; of the division of the voice and its compass; of the perception of sounds by the ear; of the correspondence of the semitones; of the division of the octave; of tetrachords; of the three genera—enharmonic, chromatic and diatonic; of intervals of sounds compared to those of the stars; of the musical and different faculties.

All the second book, divided into thirty chapters, is speculative, and devotes itself to the different kinds and relations of intervals, according to the different systems of theoreticians. The third book, in seven chapters, is a continuation of the subject of the second. It is particularly employed in refuting the errors of Aristoxenus. The fourth book, in eighteen chapters, is entirely relative to the practice of the art, particularly to the notation. It is in this book that Boethius makes known the Latin notation of the first fifteen letters of the alphabet without preparation, without the slightest explanation, and as if he had done something which any one concerned with music at Rome would readily understand, as a matter of course. There is not one word to show that it was new, or that he claimed the invention. It was undoubtedly the usual notation.

The fifth book of this treatise has for its object the determination of intervals by the divisions of a monochord, and a refutation of the systems of Ptolemy and Archytas. We here find this proposition, remarkable if we recall the time when the author lived, that: "If the ear did not count the vibrations, and did not seize the inequalities of movement of two sounds resonating by percussion, the intelligence would not be able to render account of them by the science of numbers." After Boethius there is nothing in Roman literature concerning music. Notwithstanding that Italy fell under the dominion of the Goths and Lombards after 476, it preserved Greek traditions in music to the end of the sixth century.

Cassiodorus, who lived still in 562, aged almost 100 years, left a souvenir for music in the fifth chapter of his treatise on the "Discipline of Letters and Liberal Arts" (De Artibus ac Disciplinis Litterarum). He enumerates the fifteen modes of Alypius as not having been abandoned, and establishes them in their natural order, calling them tones. Here also we find the classification of six kinds of symphonies, about 300 years after this enumeration, first realized in notes by Hucbald. He gives a series of fourths and of fifths, occasionally for two voices, occasionally with the octave added. These are the most important of all the things concerning music to be found in that part of Cassiodorus' book dedicated to music.

In the seventh century the first, or perhaps the only author who wrote upon music was Bishop Isidore, of Seville. In his celebrated treatise on the etymologies or origins ("Isidori Hispaniensis Episcopi Etymologiarum, Libri XX") divided into twenty books, chapters XIV to XXII of the third book relate to music. These are the chapters published by the Abbé Gerbert, under the name of "Sentences de Musique," in the collection of ecclesiastical writers upon this art, after a manuscript in the imperial library at Vienna. While many of these chapters contain nothing more than generalities and pseudo historical anecdotes concerning the inventors of this art, this is not the case with the nineteenth chapter, the sixth in Gerbert's edition, for here he speaks "Of the First Division of Music, called Harmony." The definitions given by St. Isidore have a precision, a clearness not found in other writers of the Middle Ages. "Harmonic music," says he, "is at the same time modulation of the voice, and concordance of many simultaneous sounds. Symphony is the order established between concordant sounds, low and high, produced by the voice, the breath or by percussion. Concordant sounds, the highest and the lowest, agree in such way that if one of them happens to dissonate it offends the ear. The contrary is the case in diaphony, which is the union of dissonant sounds." Here we find St. Isidore employing the term diaphony in its original sense, as a Greek word, meaning dissonance—a sense exactly opposite to that of Jean de Muris.

The Venerable Bede was the light of the eighth century, and the glory of the Anglo-Saxons. His treatise upon music, however, deals in theories and generalities, throwing no light upon the music of his day. The elevation of his ideas may be seen in the following sentence, with which he introduces his subject: "It is to be remarked that all art is contained in reason; and so it is that music consists and develops itself in relations of numbers." ("Notandum est, quod omnis ars in ratione continetur. Musica quoque in ratione numerorum consistit atque versatur.")

Only two treatises upon music have come down to us from the ninth century. The first is by a monk, named Aurelian, in the abbey of Réomé or Montier-Saint-Jean, in the diocese of Langes, who appears to have lived about the year 850. His book, called "Musicæ Disciplina," in twenty chapters, is a compilation of older anecdotes and theories, throwing no light upon the actual condition of the art in his day. The sole remaining work of this period was by Rémi, of Auxerre, who had opened the course of theology and music at Rheims in 893, and afterward at Paris in the earlier years of the tenth century. His book, like the preceding, is wholly devoted to the ideas of the ancients.

II.

This brings us to the first writer on music, during the Middle Ages, whose work throws any important light upon the actual practice of the art in the period when it was written, namely, Hucbald, a monk of the convent of St. Armand, in the diocese of Tournay, in French Flanders. Gerbert gives two treatises upon music, as having come down to us from this author. Nevertheless there is reason to doubt the genuineness of one of them—whereof presently. The first of these, the so-called "Treatise," from a manuscript in the library of the Franciscan convent at Strassburg, collated with another from Cesene, bears this title: "Incipit Liber Ubaldi Peritissimi Musici de Harmonica Institutione." The other is called "Hucbaldi Monachi Elonensis Musica Enchiriadis," or "Manual of Music, by the Monk Hucbald." The former work is of little interest, and if a genuine production of Hucbald's, probably belongs, as M. Fétis suggests, to his earlier period, when he was still teaching at Rheims, along with his former classmate, Rémi, of Auxerre.

The manual of Hucbald is not to be regarded as a complete treatise upon music. It has three principal subjects, namely: The formation of a new system of notation, the tonality of plain song, and symphony, or the singing of many voices at different intervals—in other words, harmony.

In treating the scale he divides it into tetrachords, precisely according to the Greek method, as far as known to him, and he nowhere appears to perceive the inapplicability of this division to the ecclesiastical modes. For representing the sounds of the scale, divided into four tetrachords, Hucbald proposed the Greek letters, which in effect, would have been a notation of absolute pitch, with the farther disadvantage of ignoring the harmonic principles of unity already discovered, and in fact involved in his own method of enlarging a two-voice passage by adding a third at the interval of an octave with the lowest.

He recognizes six kinds of symphony; in reality he employs only three, the others being reduplications. His symphonies are those of fourths, fifths and octaves. In all parts of his work but one he uses the term diaphony as synonymous with symphony; there he gives its ancient meaning of dissonance.

He proposed a sort of staff notation, upon which all the voices could be represented at once. The following illustration represents his staff and his diaphony, or harmony:

[Enlarge]

POLYPHONIC NOTATION OF HUCBALD.

The initial letters, T and S, at the beginning of the lines in the preceding staff indicate the place of the steps (tones) and half steps (semitones).

DECIPHERING OF ABOVE.

[Listen]

M. Fétis gives a two-voice parallelism in fifths, which is progressively enlarged to three voices by adding an octave to the lower voice; and then to four by doubling the original upper voice in the octave above. Thus:

[Listen]

In addition to mechanical progressions of parallel motion in this way, Hucbald in another place gives an account of a so-called "roving" organum, in which, while parallel progressions of fourths and fifths still are found, there are also other intervals, while the beginning and the end must be in unison. This form of the harmony of simultaneous sounds has in it much of the character of counterpoint, especially in the restriction that the voices must begin and end in unison. This roving organum, or free organum, was also known as "profane" or "secular" organum, in contradistinction to the "sacred organum" already given, upon the sweetness of which Hucbald greatly prided himself.

Fétis has well said that Hucbald must be considered as one of those superior spirits who impress upon their epoch a movement in an art or science. Besides this, he merits particular mention in the history of music because his works are the first since those of Boethius—a period of four centuries—in which the art of music is treated systematically and without obscurity.

In the "Epistola de Harmonica Institutione ad Rathbodum Episcopum Trevinesem" ("Letter to Rathbodum, Bishop of Treves"), there is mention of the instruments of music during the seventh and eighth centuries. They are the cithara and harp as the stringed instruments; musetts, syrinx and organ among the wind instruments; cymbals and drums, instruments of percussion. In the tenth century there was a methodical treatise upon music in dialogue form, published by Odon, abbot of Cluny, who died in this monastery November 18, 942. This work, which was wrongfully attributed to Guido of Arezzo, contains a number of analyses of intervals showing an understanding of the exact dimensions of the various kinds of fourths, fifths, thirds and sixths. According to his doctrine, the intervals of the fourths, fifths and octaves are more natural for the voice than the others called thirds and sixths, because the former are invariable, while the latter may be larger or smaller by a half step. He makes a summary of ecclesiastical chant, mentioning the modes as established by St. Gregory, illustrating each of them by a selection from the "Plain Song." It is a fact significant of the unsettled condition of musical theory and the complete unconsciousness of musical amateurs that any essential change in the art was being undergone, that as late as 1000 or 1020 Adelbold, Bishop of Utrecht, published a treatise upon music in which the proportions of the tetrachords are calculated carefully according to the Greek theories, and demonstrated upon the monochord.

III.

The most important writer upon music in the eleventh century, and one of the most famous in the history of the art, was a monk named Guido, living at Arezzo, in Tuscany, a Benedictine in the abbey of Pontose. He was a remarkably skillful teacher of ecclesiastical singing, both in his own monastery and at Rome, and in the effort to systematize the elements of music he introduced a number of important reforms, and is credited by later writers with many others which he did not himself originate, but which grew out of some of his suggestions. He is generally credited with having invented the art of solmization, the introduction of the staff, the use of the hand for teaching intervals, and the introduction of notes. He was not the first who introduced the staff. Hucbald, as we have already seen, employed the spaces between the lines for designating pitch. Between his time and that of Guido, one or more lines were introduced in connection with the neumæ, as will be more particularly illustrated in chapter XV. Guido, however, employed both the lines and the spaces, but instead of notes he wrote the Roman letters upon the lines and spaces according to their pitch. The notes were invented shortly after his time. For determining the correct pitch of the notes of the scale he explains the manner of demonstrating them upon the monochord. He mentions organum and diaphony, and remarks that he finds the succession of fifths and fourths very tiresome. The last treatise of the thirteenth century was written by John Cotton, an English monk, whose entire theory of music is made up from the Greek works.

Fig. 29.

GUIDO OF AREZZO.

This summary of the didactic writers between Boethius and Franco at Cologne fully confirms the justice of the remark, in the chapter previous, concerning the influence of the Church upon music. At the very time when a well marked beginning was being made in counterpoint by the old French school at Paris, and when the English, Welsh and Scandinavian musicians were in possession of an art of expressive melody resting upon a simple harmonic foundation, these writers can find nothing to say but to repeat over and over again their tedious calculations concerning the intonations of nete hypate and the other Aristoxinean notes in the enharmonic and chromatic genera, which had been dead names in the art of music for more than ten centuries.

With the appearance of Franco at Cologne, there is something new in music. Late in the twelfth century he wrote a treatise upon measured music, the first one in all the history of the art, so far as we know, in which musical measure is treated independently of verse, and a notation given for representing it. He recognizes two kinds of measure—triple or perfect, and duple or imperfect. He gives four kinds of notes—the shortest being the brevis, an oblong note having twice the value of a whole note; a short stem affixed to this note doubled its value. It was then called the longa. A note head twice as long represented a still longer duration, called the maxima or longest. There was also a semibreve, a diamond-shaped note which was used when two or more tones were sung to one syllable. There were no bars for indicating the place of the strong pulse in the measure, but a bar was used to show the end of the musical phrase belonging to a line of verse. The notation was made still more uncertain by the license of the breve in triple time being equal to three semibreves, and so in general each long note in triple measure being equal to three of the next class shorter. In short, the time notation was of the most crude and imperfect description, but it was at least a beginning, and all the theoretical writers upon music for the next two centuries rest in the precepts of Franco of Cologne, as a sure stronghold, where no false doctrine can find admission. Franco remarks, concerning the dissonances, that the imperfect dissonances, the thirds and sixths, go very well between two consonances, showing that in his time the third and sixth were still regarded as licenses in harmony to be explained or excused. The general principle that any dissonance is admissible when smoothly placed between two consonances is a fundamental law of modern counterpoint.

There was another Franco whose work has often been confounded with that of the celebrated master at Cologne. Franco of Paris was connected with the Sorbonne or with Notre Dame, and his writing had mostly to do with harmonic music. He classifies the consonances as—complete, the unison and octave; the incomplete, the major and minor thirds; the middle, the fourth and fifth. This is the first instance in musical theory where the third has been recognized as a consonance. Among the dissonances he classes the major and minor sixth as incomplete, and says concerning these two only that immediately before a consonance any incomplete dissonance goes very well. From the superior celebrity of the Cologne Franco the work of the Parisian master was overlooked for many years, and it is only through the investigation of Coussemaker that his real standing and importance have been ascertained.

CHAPTER XII.

E here enter upon one of the most interesting and important chapters in the history of music. The art of polyphony had its origin at the same period as the pointed arch and the great cathedrals of Europe, which our architects strive in vain to surpass. In the province of music it represents the same bounding movement of mind, filled with high ideality, which gave rise to the crusades, and poured out in their support such endless treasures of life and love. And in the same country, too, arose the Gothic arch, the beauties of the shrine of Notre Dame in Paris, and the involved and massive polyphony of music. Polyphonic is a term which relates itself to two others, as the leading types of all effort toward the expression of spirit through organized tones. They are Monodic and Homophonic. The musical art of the ancients was an art in which a single melodic formula was doubled in a lower or higher octave, but where no support of harmony was added, and where the only realization of variety could come through the province of rhythm alone; or, perhaps, to a very limited extent through changes in the mode or color of the scale from which the melody had been derived. Monodic art was an art of melody only, rhythm finding its explanation and source in the words, and so far as we understand the case, scarcely at all in the music. Our modern art of homophony is like that in having but a single melody at each moment of the piece; but it differs from the ancient in the important particular of a harmonic support for the melody tones composed of "chords in key." This harmonic accompaniment rules everything in modern music. It is within the power of the composer to confirm the obvious meaning of the melody tone by supporting it with the chord which would most readily suggest itself, within the narrowest limitations in the concept of key; or, second, it is within his reach to impart to any tone, apparently most commonplace, a deeper and a subtler meaning, by making it a peculiarly expressive tone of some related key. Instances of this use of harmonic accompaniment are numerous in Wagner's works, and form the most obvious peculiarity of his style, and the chief reason why the hearers to whom his works were first presented did not recognize the beauties and the novelties of poetic expression in them. Half way between these two types of musical art stands polyphony, which means etymologically "many sounds," but which in musical technique means "multiplicity of melodies." In a true polyphony not only has every tone of the leading voice a melodic character, but all the tones which sound together with it are themselves elements of other and independently moving melodies. Polyphony comprehends the most recondite elements of musical theory, but its essence consists of one leading concept—that of canonic imitation. The simplest form of this is furnished by that musical construction known as "round," in which one voice leads off with a phrase, and immediately a second voice begins with the same melodic idea at the same pitch, and follows after. At the proper interval a third voice enters and follows the procession at a corresponding distance behind. Thus, when there is only one voice singing we have monody; when the second voice enters we have combined sounds consisting of two elements; and when the third enters we have at each successive step chords of three tones. If there are four voices, as soon as the fourth enters, we have combined sounds of four elements. This form of musical construction was much practiced in England, as already noticed. A round, however, does not come to a close, but goes on in an endless sequence until arrested arbitrarily by the performers. Such a form is not proper to art, since it lacks the necessary element of completeness, for at whatever point it may have been arrested there was no innate reason why it might not have gone on indefinitely.

The polyphonic compositions of the schools in consideration in the present chapter go farther than this. While they consist of imitative treatment of a single subject carried through all the voices, or of several subjects which come together in such a way that the ear is not able to follow them as individuals, there is a conclusion, and the canonic imitation has a legitimate ending. Besides those compositions consisting of repetitions of the same subjects, these schools gave rise to other works in which several subjects are treated more or less in the same manner as a single subject would have been in a simpler composition. Nevertheless, in the earlier stages of the development, all the chords arose as incidents, and not as ends. The composer brought in his leading melodic idea at the interval prescribed or chosen. If crudities arose when all the voices were employed, he took no notice of them; the hearers, apparently, being too intent upon following the individual voices to notice the forbidden parallels of fifths or octaves, which inevitably arose until the composer had learned which intervals might be used without harmonic offense, and which not.

Before proceeding to the story of this chapter, the definition of a few terms may be advisable, in the interests of clearness. By "imitation," then, we mean the exact repetition of the melody of one part by another part, at the same or a different pitch. Such an imitation may be "strict," as when the intervals and progressions are exactly repeated; or "free," as when certain changes are made here and there in order to lead the imitation around better to the principal key. Canonic imitation is one in which the imitation is strict, the repeating voice exactly repeating the melody of the principal. By "counterpoint" we mean a second voice added to a melody already existing, the counterpoint having a strict relation to the leading melody, but a wholly independent movement. This conception had its origin in the art of extemporaneous descant, in which, while the choir and congregation repeated the melody of the plain song, a few talented singers performed variations to it, guided solely by ear and tradition, returning to the tone of the plain song at all the points of repose. We do not know when extemporaneous descant gave place to written composition, but it was probably early in the twelfth century. By "double counterpoint" is meant a counterpoint which, although written to be sung an octave lower than the principal song, can be transposed an octave and sung higher than the principal song without giving rise to forbidden progressions. This will be the case only when the original relations of the two voices have been restricted to certain prescribed intervals. By "fugue" is meant a form of composition in which every voice in turn enters with the leading melody of the piece, the same given out by the leading voice at first, called the "subject," responding alternately in tonic and dominant. This form comes later than the period we are now about to consider, but it grew out of the devices of polyphony, and accordingly is always to be kept in mind as the goal toward which all this progress was tending.

The art of polyphony is to be understood as an effort toward variety and unity combined. The unity consisted in all the voices following with the same melodic idea; variety, in the different combinations resulting in the course of the progress. The limitations of polyphony were reached when the true expression of melodic intervals was lost through their intermingling with so many incongruous elements.