VII
The appetite for music increases in the seventeenth century and the development of musical drama brings the commercial aspect into prominence. It is the age of the theatrical and rhetorical style. It is an age of speed. There was little music printed, but much circulated in manuscript. This does not mean that the general output was less than before. The manuscripts are much more easily legible than the printing from type; only engraving, rarely practised outside England, can rival them. It is the century of “figured bass,” a system of notation which enabled a composer to write down a mere outline of his accompaniments, leaving them to be filled up extempore by the player. It saved time in composition, time in writing out; copying by hand took less time than type-setting, and there was no need to multiply copies to any great extent. By the time that the copyist has made one the composer has produced another work, and his public want the very latest. One of the things that strikes us in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the incredible fertility of composers. Operas, cantatas, quartets or symphonies—it is nothing unusual to find composers reckoning them in hundreds. And we cannot dismiss this copious output with contempt. It is easy enough to say that one work sounds very much like another, and that even the greatest men have their moments of dullness; but even for people who have not specialized in antiquarian studies there is a vast quantity of this music which still seems to have power to stir the emotions. It must have been composed in a hurry, performed in a hurry and thrown away in a hurry; it is a marvel that at this distance of time we can still feel that even if we do not want to hear it often we are still glad to hear it once.
The agitated rhetoric of the seventeenth century becomes in the eighteenth a convention of grandiloquence. The intellectual basis of the classical key-system proves to be a foundation upon which structures of extraordinary massiveness and dignity can be reared. The immense productivity of the age was only made possible by the frank acceptance of convention, even in the case of those rare composers like Domenico Scarlatti and Haydn who systematically made fun of it. This acceptance of convention was stabilized by the fact that there had been time for the long accumulation of tradition. The constant demand for new music was in no way inconsistent with the preservation of tradition; it was preserved not so much by the practical revival of old music as by the absorption of its style into what was contemporary. It is significant that the eighteenth century marked the beginning of the study of musical history.