II
Those who have been brought up on the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms can readily accept this theory of musical æsthetics. It is eminently satisfactory as an interpretation of all that we commonly call classical music. There are many people who do not want to listen to any other kind of music. They have heard of great names in the days before Bach, but they are easily inclined to take the view that such composers as Purcell and the elder Scarlatti were merely the necessary forerunners who prepared the way; that Palestrina was an exceptional and unaccountable expression of a peculiarly exalted age of religious belief, and that any one belonging to an earlier date can be dismissed as a primitive interesting only to the antiquary. But at the present day the antiquaries are coming into their own. Both in England and abroad there is a vigorous revival of interest in the music of the centuries before Bach. After long years of dusty research the antiquaries have at last begun to convince a younger generation that a great deal of this so-called primitive music can be given life in performance, and performance has shown that it has a surprisingly vivid power of appealing to the emotions of modern hearers. Leaders of contemporary music indeed are clearly feeling that pre-classical and even mediaeval music has in many cases a more intimate affinity with that of our own day than the music of the last two hundred years. It has even come to exercise a definite and admitted influence on the technique of modern composition.
To dissect out the causes and effects of this tendency would be a complicated and difficult task for which there is no space here. But there is one point which is a matter of common knowledge to the trained musician, and the general musical public is probably more or less aware of it though unable to explain it in technical language. From the year 1600 to the year 1900, roughly speaking, all Western music is based on the same fundamental principle of tonality. All music is composed in a key. One note is adopted as a centre. The remaining notes of the octave are brought into various clearly defined relationships to it. They may further be arranged in groups, sounded simultaneously, known as chords. Each of these chords has its own fixed arrangement and its fixed relationship to the centre. What has been done for one note of the octave may be done in exactly the same way for any other, forming what we call the key of that note. The musician may shift from one key to another in the course of his work, but it is understood that he must make his main key clear and definite at the outset and must re-establish it again with equal decision at the end. In the early years of the seventeenth century the efforts of musicians were directed chiefly to establishing one key clearly and towards the training of audiences to grasp the first principles of the system. As they became more and more accustomed to the system the composers were able to extend and elaborate it. The interrelations of notes and chords became increasingly subtle and delicate from the days of Monteverdi to those of Wagner; but the fundamental key-system and the rhythmical system which is inseparable from it remained always precisely the same. The language of music developed steadily and rationally just as the English language has developed from Shakespeare to Swinburne. It is no wonder then that most musicians regarded its foundations as indestructible.
Its grammar was codified by Rameau early in the eighteenth century, and later theorists saw no reason to repudiate the main principles of Rameau’s doctrine. In the passionate stateliness of Rameau’s own music, in the gigantic dignity of Handel, in the genial Gemütlichkeit of Bach, we see the same lucid and logical precision of language. It was only natural that eighteenth century criticism should regard the music of earlier centuries as crude and barbarous. The nineteenth century approached the older music with a more penetrating sense of scholarship, but could not help reading it in the same spirit. An age of antiquarian research inevitably tended to consider its discoveries as historical documents to be examined in the dry light of theory rather than as the expressions of intensely passionate humanity. The music of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was interpreted according to the system of Rameau, for no other system could be conceived. If under these conditions it failed to make any emotional appeal, that did not matter: reverence for antiquity discouraged the unveiling of passion.