Among these there is no one that is correct or rational. The proper ratios are given in the diatonic intense, but the large and small steps stand in the wrong order. It is in Ptolemy's record of the determinations of Didymus (born at Alexandria, 63 B.C.) that the true tuning of the first four tones of the scale occurs. This is it:

Thus it appears that it was Didymus, and not Ptolemy, who proposed the tuning of the tetrachord which is now accepted as correct. It is very evident from the entire course of the discussion as conducted by Ptolemy that his calculations were purely abstract. He is to be reckoned among the Pythagoreans, who held that in time and number all things consist. It was not until some centuries later that the happy thought of Didymus came to recognition as the true statement of the mathematical relation of the first four tones of the scale, and then only through the ears of a race of musicians following the great thesis of Aristoxenos, that in music it is always the ear which must be the arbiter, and not abstract reasoning or calculation. The ratios of the major and minor third also occur among the calculations of Didymus; but here, again, they count for nothing in the history of art, because these intervals derive their value and expressive quality from their harmonic relation, while Didymus and all the Greeks employed them as melodic skips only, and reckoned them in with a multitude of other skips and progressions, without distinguishing them in any way.

The one characteristic instrument of Greek music from the earliest to the latest days was the lyre. In the oldest times, those of Homer and Hesiod, it was called phorminx, which is believed to have been the form so often represented on Greek vases of a turtle shell with side pieces like horns, an instrument having but little effective resonance. The later form was the so-called cithara, the most common shape of which is that made familiar to all by the pedal piece of the square pianoforte. This instrument rarely had more than six strings, and as it had no finger board it could have had no more notes than strings. Chappell, the English historian, attempts to demonstrate that certain ones of these instruments had a bridge dividing the string into two parts, thus largely increasing the compass, but the evidence supporting this hypothesis is not satisfactory. Plato speaks of instruments of many strings imported from Asia, which seem to have been the fashion or fad in his day. He disapproved of them very heartily, but the terms in which he speaks of them show that he cannot have been very familiar with their appearance, for it is impossible to make out what he is driving at.

There is considerable doubt as to the extent to which the larger instruments of Asiatic origin penetrated the general musical practice of Greece. Athenæus, in his "Banquets of the Learned" (B. xvi, C), quotes Anakreon as saying:

Most certainly the lyre of Terpander had no twenty strings.

The so-called Greek flute was a very reedy oboe or clarinet, a pipe played with a reed, the pitch determined by holes stopped by the fingers. These instruments were so hard to blow that the players wore bands over their cheeks because there were cases on record where, in the contests, they broke their cheeks by the wind pressure. The flute or aulos does not seem to have been used in connection with the cithara at all, and the Greeks had nothing corresponding to what we call an orchestra. The aulos was appropriate to certain religious services and to certain festivals, and it had a moderate status in the various contests of the national games, but the great instrument of Greek music, the universal dependence for all occasions, public and private, was the lyre.

In spite of the meager resources of Greek music upon its tonal side, this development of art has had a very important bearing upon the progress of music, even down to our own times. Opera was re-discovered about 1600 in the effort to re-create the Greek musical drama, and the ideal proposed to himself by Richard Wagner was nothing else than that of a new music drama in which the severe and lofty conceptions of the old Greek poets should be embodied in musical forms the most advanced that the modern mind has been able to conceive. Upon the æsthetic side musical theory is entirely indebted to the Greek. Nothing more suitable or appropriate can be said concerning musical taste and cultivation than what was said by Aristotle 300 years before Christ. For example, he has the following (Politics, viii, C. Jowett's translation, p. 245): "The customary branches of education are in number four. They are: (1) reading and writing, (2) gymnastic exercises, (3) music, to which is somewhat added (4) drawing. Of these, reading, writing and drawing are regarded as useful to the purposes of life in a variety of ways." He recommends the study of music as part of the preparation of the fit occupation of leisure. "There remains, then, the use of music for the intellectual enjoyment of leisure; which appears to have been the reason of its introduction, this being one of the ways in which it is thought that a freeman should pass his leisure; as Homer says:

'How good it is to invite men to the pleasant feast,'

and afterward he speaks of others whom he describes as inviting

'The bard who would delight them all' (Od. xvii, 385);

and in another place he says that there is no better way of passing life than when

Plato is particular that only the noble harmonies shall be permitted in his state. He says, "Of the harmonies I want to have one warlike, which will sound the word or note which a brave man utters in the hour of danger or stern resolve, or when his cause is failing and he is going to wounds or death, or is overtaken by some other evil, and in every such crisis meets fortune with calmness and endurance; and another which may be used by him in times of peace and freedom of action, when there is no pressure of necessity—expressive of entreaty or persuasion or prayer to God, or of instruction to man, or again willingness to listen to persuasion or entreaty or advice. These two harmonies I ask you to leave; the strain of necessity and the strain of freedom, the strain of the unfortunate and the strain of the fortunate, the strain of courage and the strain of temperance; these, I say, leave." These he explains will be only the Dorian and the Phrygian harmonies. In another place Plato shows himself a disciple of the Egyptian ideas of conservatism, already mentioned. "And therefore when one of these clever and multiform gentlemen who can imitate anything comes to our state, and proposes to exhibit himself and his poetry, we will fall down and worship him as a sweet and holy and wonderful being; but we must also inform him that there is no place for such as he is in our state—the law will not allow him. And so when we have anointed him with myrrh and set a garland of wool upon his head, we shall send him away to another city." (Republic, Jowett, iii, 398.)

In fact, upon the subject of music, Plato is one of the least satisfactory of writers. He has many noble sentiments which might well be printed in letters of gold and hung upon the walls of educational institutions to-day, as ("Laws," Jowett's translation, 668): "Those who seek for the best kind of song and music, ought not to seek for that which is pleasant, but for that which is true." In another place, however, he speaks of music as a kind of imitation. He says that music without words is very difficult to understand. ("Laws," ibid., 668.) All these inconsistencies disappear, however, as soon as we recognize the limitations of the music which Plato knew, upon its tonal side. All the richness of sense incitation, and all the definiteness of expression which come into our modern music through the magic of "tones in key," were wholly outside the range of Plato's knowledge.

The musical notation of the Greeks consisted of letters of the alphabet placed over the syllables to which the tones indicated were to be sung. The letters represented absolute pitch, and as, owing to the variety of genera, modes and chroa, the total number of tones was very large, parts of older forms of the alphabet were also employed, the whole number of characters thus demanded being upwards of seventy. There was little or no classification of tones, and the entire twenty-four letters were applied in regular order to the diatonic series of the Dorian mode. Tones in the chromatic or enharmonic modes were named by other letters, and the system was extremely complicated. The notes of the instrumental accompaniment were still different from those of the vocal part. No genuine example of this music has come down to us in reliable form, and curiously enough, no classical writer gives any idea of the notation of music. All that we know of this notation we derive from Alypius, who lived about 150 A.D. Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit of a monastery in Sicily, published in the last century the text of what purported to be a fragment of the first Pythic Ode of Pindar. (See page 69.) In the original the musical characters stood in immediate proximity to the words of the text. At the middle of the third line begins the chorus of Citharodists. As all the musical characters of the Greeks indicated absolute pitch, the student will discover the difference between the vocal and instrumental notation by comparing the notes in the early part of the ode with those of the same pitches noted for instruments later.

Three other pieces of similar apocryphal character have come down to us. It is likely that these melodies, if not really genuine, as related to the composition of Pindar, nevertheless belong to a period a little anterior to the Christian era.

FRAGMENT OF THE FIRST PYTHIC ODE OF PINDAR,

According to the musical notation given by Athanasius Kircher, (F.A. Gevaert's "La Musique dans l'Antiquité.")

[Listen]

Pythic Ode

[Transliteration of Greek lyrics]

CHAPTER IV.

VERY important developments of the art of music took place in India from a remote period, but dates are entirely uncertain. When the hymns of the Rig-Veda were collected into their present form, which appears to have been about 1500 B.C., music was highly esteemed. It was in India that the art of inciting vibrations of a string by means of a bow was discovered; and our violin had its origin there, but the date is entirely unknown. The primitive violin was the ravanastron, which the Ceylonese claim to have been invented by one of their kings, who reigned about 5000 B.C. The form of this instrument is given in Fig. 16. It must have been some time before the Mohammedan invasion, for they brought a rude violin back to Arabia, from whence it came into Europe after the crusades. They had many forms of guitar, instruments of percussion, and the varieties of viol, as well as trumpets and the like. The national instrument was the vina. This was a sort of guitar, its body made of a strip of bamboo about eight inches wide and four feet long. Near each end a large gourd was fixed, for reinforcing the resonance. In playing, it was held obliquely in front of the player, like a guitar, one gourd resting upon the left shoulder, the other under the right arm. It was strung with six strings of silk and wire, and had a very elaborate apparatus of frets, much higher than those of a guitar, many of them movable, in order to permit modulation into any of the twenty-four Hindoo "modes." The instrument had a light, thin tone, not unpleasing. A fine specimen is figured in "Hipkins' Plates of Rare Instruments" in the South Kensington Museum, a copy of which may be seen in the Newberry Library.

Fig. 15

Fig. 15.

JIWAN CHAH.

[Portrait of Jiwan Chah, one of the latest masters of the vina. He died about 1790.]

The Hindoos carried the theory of music to an extremely fine point, having many curious scales, some of them with twenty-four divisions in an octave. Twenty-two was the usual number. The pitch of each note in every mode was accurately calculated mathematically, and the frets of the vina located thereby, according to very old theoretical works by one Soma, written in Sanskrit at least as early as 1500 B.C. When this work first became known to Europeans, its elaboration led it to be regarded as a purely theoretical fancy piece, and it was thought to be impossible that practical musicians could have been governed by theories apparently so fine-drawn. A study of the structure of the vina, however, perfectly adapted to these theories, set all doubts at rest. None of the intervals of the Hindoo scale exactly correspond to our own. Harmony they never conceived. Well sounding chords are impossible in their scales. All their music was monodic—one-voiced.

Fig. 16

Fig. 16.

There was a curious development of the musical drama in India about 300 B.C., having certain of the traits of modern opera. Several of these ancient pieces have come down to us, but without the musical notes. They are long, consisting of as many as eleven acts, part of them sung, part spoken. Curiously enough, the different acts are not all in the same dialect. The musical acts are in Sanskrit, which had then ceased to be a spoken language for at least 500 years; the spoken acts were in Pakrit, a dialect of Sanskrit, which likewise had ceased to be spoken for several centuries. A fuller account of the Hindoo drama is given in Wilson's "Theater of the Hindoos." The curious circumstance of the drama of the Hindoos of this epoch is that it was contemporaneous with another very celebrated development of musical drama in Greece.

Besides the primitive form of the bowed instrument, the ravanastron (Fig. 16), many forms more advanced are figured among the instruments from India in European museums, but as they are all of absurd and impossible acoustical conception, besides being most likely of comparatively modern origin, we do not present them at this point. Later, in the history of the violin, one or two of the most curious will be given.

II.

China has had an art of music from extremely remote periods, and singularly sagacious ideas concerning the art were advanced there very long ago, at a time when Europe and most other parts of the world were still in the darkness of barbarism. For example: There is a saying of the Emperor Tschun, about 2300 B.C., "Teach the children of the great; thereby reached through thy care they will become mild and reasonable, and the unmanageable ones able to receive dignities without arrogance or assumption. This teaching must thou embody in poems, and sing them therewith to suitable melodies and with the play of instrumental accompaniment. The music must follow the sense of the words; if they are simple and natural then also must the music be easy, unforced and without pretension. Music is the expression of soul-feeling. If now the soul of the musician be virtuous, so also will his music become noble and full of virtuous expression, and will set the souls of men in union with those of the spirits in heaven." (Quoted by Ambros.)

Fig. 17

Fig. 17.

The principal instruments of Chinese music are the Kin and the Ke. The former is a sort of guitar, of which no illustration has come to hand. The main instrument of their culture-music is the ke, a stringed instrument entirely unlike any other of which we have accounts, saving the Japanese ko-ko, which was most likely derived from it. The ke is strung with fifty strings of silk. Originally it had but twenty-five, but in the reign of Hoang-Ti, about 2637 B.C., it is said to have been enlarged to its present dimensions and compass. The appearance of the ke and the arrangement of its bridges are shown in Fig. 17. The strings were plucked with the fingers.

In the earlier times the Chinese had the pentatonic scale, approximately the same as that of the black keys of the piano. Later it was enlarged to seven notes in the octave, and it is claimed by some that long before the Christian era they had a complete chromatic scale of twelve tones in the octave. The evidence upon this point, however, is insufficient. And even if they had this musical resource at so early a period the fact counts very little to their credit, since at best the chromatic scale is only an impure harmonic compromise, which they have never learned to use understandingly. Chinese music has always been monodic, and they use a great variety of melodic shadings composed of intervals of small fractions of a step. These they call lu. There are movable bridges which can be placed in such way as to divide the strings of the ke at proper proportions of its length for producing the lu. The places for the fingers upon the finger board are marked by small brass points. Besides the intonations due to stopping the strings, the players upon the ke are in the habit of adding expression in a manner analogous to that of the tremolo of the modern violinist. With the left hand he touches the string beyond the bridge and pulls it slightly, thus imparting to the tone a sliding intonation upward or downward, familiar to all who have experimented with strings. This habit the Japanese still have in playing their ko-ko, and the results are said to be not unpleasing. The volume of tone in the ke is very light, but the quality is sweet.

As a natural consequence of the long existence of this nation and their commercial relations to the other parts of the world, which with all their care they have never been able wholly to avoid, the Chinese have many other varieties of instruments, including many trumpets; an unexampled wealth of instruments of percussion, and a few of the ruder types of the violin kind, which seem to have come in from India or Thibet by the way of the Buddhist monks. The ravanastron is a common instrument with the mendicant friars of this order. The characteristic instrument of the Chinese, however, the one which stands as the representative of all their higher musical culture, is the ke.

In common with all other nations of antiquity, and with some of the present day, the Chinese have always held strong conservative opinions. The principle has been held among them from the earliest times that the pattern of a good thing, whether a religion, an art or a mechanism, having once been found satisfactory, should be made official and never afterward changed. This principle, taken in connection with the limited powers of their chief instrument, accounts for the small progress they have made in music within the past 2000 years. It must be remembered, however, that our knowledge of the music of this country is still far from perfect, the travelers and missionaries from whom it has reached us not having been practical musicians, nor having had sufficiently long opportunities for mastering musical systems so different from what they had previously known, and so contrary to all their inherited percepts of tone.

Fig. 18

Fig. 18.

The Japanese are a very musical people in their way. The chief instrument of their culture is the ko-ko. (See Fig. 18.)

In structure it much resembles the Chinese ke. They have also many other instruments, especially various kinds of imperfect guitars, a few rude violins, and the usual outfit of trumpets, reed pipes and instruments of percussion. Like all the other barbarous nations, they have never had harmony until since they began to learn it from the Europeans.

Book Second.

CHAPTER V.

ACCORDING to the division of the subject in the beginning of this work, the period from the Christian era to that of Palestrina, A.D. 1600, is one of apprentice work, in which the details of art were being mastered, but in which no music, according to our acceptation of the term, was produced. The history of this period is somewhat obscure, the writers who throw light on it averaging scarcely more than one to a century, scattered about in different parts of Europe. Nevertheless, the most important changes in the history of music took place during this period. The monody and empyrical tonality of the ancients gave place to polyphony and harmonized melodies resting upon the relations of tones in key. New instruments came in, and the entire practice of the art of music was deepened, ennobled and immeasurably enlarged in every direction. There were four causes co-operating in this transformation of the art, and it is not easy to say of any one of them that this one was the chief. First of these, in the Roman empire, or in the south of Europe more particularly, for about 800 years the Greek principles remained more or less in force. The Church is here the foremost influence, and its part in the transformation already noted will be considered presently. In the north of Europe the Goths, Celts and Scandinavians built mighty empires and impressed their enthusiastic and idealistic natures upon the whole form of modern art. The Saracens conquered a foot-hold in the south of France about 819, and remained there for twenty years. Their influence was very important in the development of music, and became still more active after the crusades, where the armies of the west came again in contact with this peculiar civilization. Besides these three sources measurably unprofessional and outside of music, or amateur, as we say now, there was the work of the professional musicians strictly so-called, who, from about 1100 in the old French school, commenced the development of what is now known as polyphony, which culminated in the hands of the Netherlanders, about 1580, Palestrina himself being one of the latest products of this school. These influences reacted upon each other, and all have entered into modern art, and have imparted to it their most essential elements.

All modern music differs from the ancient in two important particulars—Harmony and Tonality. Harmony is the use of combined sounds. These may be either dissonant, inharmonious in relation to each other, or harmonious, agreeable. All points of repose in a harmonized piece of music must be consonant; or, to say it differently, the combined sound (chord) standing at the beginning or end of a musical phrase must be harmonious. All the elements in it must bear consonant relations to all the others. Between the points of repose the combined sounds may or may not be consonant. Under certain conditions dissonances make an effect even better than consonance—better because more appealing. The law of the introduction of dissonances is that every dissonance must arise out of a consonance, and subside into a consonance. When this law is observed there is hardly any combination possible in the range of music which may not be employed with good effect. Here already we have a progress in perception of tones, in the ability to discriminate between those which harmonize and those which dissonate. All consonance and dissonance are purely relative. There is no such thing as a dissonant tone in music, by itself considered; a tone becomes dissonant by being brought into juxtaposition with some other tone with which it does not agree. This part of the development of a tonal sense had its beginnings in Greece, but only reached the point where the most elementary relations were regarded as agreeable. The octave, the fourth and the fifth, were the only consonances which they knew, and of these they used in the combined sounds of their music only the octave. The third, which with us is the most agreeable part of a pure harmony, because it adds so many elements of agreement to the combined sound into which it enters, was not only regarded as a dissonance by them, but actually was a dissonance as they tuned their scale.

The entire course of harmonic perception in modern music may be roughly divided into three steps: First, the recognition of consonance, especially of the most fruitful consonance of all—that of the thirds, and the differentiation between consonance and dissonance. A second step involved the recognition of dissonance as an element in musical expression, on account of the motion it imparts to a harmonic movement. Third, the establishment of these materials of music in the mind in such depth and fullness that their æsthetic implications became realized as elements of expression, so that when a composer had a certain feeling to express, the proper combination of consonance and dissonance immediately presented itself to his mind. The first of these steps was taken by the minstrels of the north, somewhere between the Christian era and the tenth century. The second was the particular work of the old French school, the Netherlanders, and of all who composed music between about 1100 A.D. and the epoch of Palestrina, about 1600. The third, the spontaneous application of musical material to the expression of feeling, had in it another element, that of tonality, concerning which it is proper to say something at this point.

By "tonality" is meant the dependence or interdependence of all the tones in a key upon some one principal tone called the Key-tone. The tonality of the music of the ancients was wholly artificial and unreal. A mode and a point of repose for the melody were chosen arbitrarily; the beginning was here made, and still more the ending was conducted to this point of repose. Between the beginning and the ending the same tones were employed, whether the melody proposed to repose upon re, upon fa or do. The usual points of repose in Greek music were mi, fa and re; never upon do, the real key tone, and rarely upon la, the natural tonic of the minor mode.

One of the chief elements of modern musical expression, particularly in the expression of melody, is the unconscious perception of the "relation of tones in key." With every tone sung the singer conceives not only that tone, its predecessor and its follower, but all other tones in the entire course of the melody; and the expression of every tone in the series rests upon its place in rhythm, and still more upon its "place in key." Change a single tone in a melody, as, for instance, to make fa a half step sharp, and the expression of the entire melody is thereby changed, until such time as the hearer has forgotten the change of key effected by the introduction of the foreign tone. It is not at all unlikely that what little of melodic expression the music of the Greeks had, may have rested to some extent upon an unconscious perception of these relations, which, although foreign to their musical theory, may nevertheless have made their way into the ears of these acute minstrels. The discovery of simple tonality seems to have been due to the northern minstrels, for it is here that we find the earliest melodies purely tonalized. But the natural bounds of a melodic tonality as established by these northern harpers have been very much exceeded in modern times, so that now there is hardly a chord possible which might not be introduced in the course of a composition in any key whatever, without effecting a digression into the new key suggested by the strange chord. Not only all the natural or diatonic notes are regarded as belonging to a key, but also all the chromatics, the sharps and flats, and the double sharps and double flats.

All this implies a growth of tonal perception on the part of the hearers, and especially of the ability to co-ordinate tonal impressions over a wide and constantly increasing range. For the hearer has in mind not only the particular tone which at the moment occupies his ear, and the others which preceded it, and a sort of inner feeling of the tone which will follow the present one, but also all the other tones over which the singer would pass in going from one tone to another. And unless he has this he cannot realize the true place of the melody tone in key, and therefore rests unconscious of its real expression. It is, indeed, possible for him to make a mistake in regard to the tones which he unconsciously associates with the tones actually heard—as, for example, when one hears an E followed by a C higher, and one thinks of the four white keys of the piano between them, while the melody may be thinking of the black keys between them. In the one case the melody would be in the key of C, in the other of C sharp minor. And the expression of the melodic skip would be enormously changed thereby. This larger education of the faculties of tonal perception and tonal co-ordination has been the work mainly of the last century and a half, and more particularly of the present century itself. During this period the progress has been more rapid than within any other in the entire course of the history of our art, and it is to the successive steps preparing for this that we now address ourselves.

CHAPTER VI.

The Celts appear upon the field of history several centuries before the Christian era. Cæsar's account of them leaves no doubt of the place which music held in their religion, education and national life. The minstrel was a prominent figure, ready at a moment's notice to perform the service of religion, patriotism or entertainment. There is a tradition of one King Blegywied ap Scifyllt, who reigned in Brittany about 160 B.C., who was a good musician and a player upon the harp. While we have no precise knowledge of the music they sang in the oldest times, it was very likely something like the following old Breton air, which is supposed to have come down from the Druids. It is full of a rude energy, making it impressive even to modern ears. By successive migrations of Angles, Danes and Northmen, the Celts were crowded into Wales, where they still remain. The harp has always been their principal instrument, and for many centuries a rude kind of violin called the crwth, of which there will be occasion to speak in connection with the violin, at a later period in this work.

OLD BRETON SONG.

[Listen]

Old Breton Song

According to the best authorities the bards were divided into three great classes. The first class was composed of the historians and antiquaries, who piqued themselves a little upon their sorcery, and who, upon occasion, took up the rôles of diviners and prophets. The second class was composed of domestic bards, living in private houses, quite after the custom of ancient Greece. These we may suppose were chiefly devoted to the annals and glories of their wealthy patrons. The third class, the heraldic bards, was the most influential of all. They wrote the national annals. All these classes were poet-bards as well as musicians.

The musical bards were divided into three classes. In the first were the players upon the harp; they were called doctors of music. To be admitted into this class it was necessary that they should perform successfully the three Mwchwl—that is, the three most difficult pieces in the bardic repertory. The second class of musical bards was composed of the players upon the crwth, of six strings. The third class were the singers. From the wording of the requirement it would seem that these must have had the same qualification as the first class, and therefore have been true doctors of music. For, in addition to being able to accord the harp or the crwth, and play different themes with their variations, two preludes and other pieces "with their sharps and their flats," they had to know the "three styles of expression," and accent them with the voice in different styles of song. They had also to know the twenty-four meters of poetry as well as the "twenty-four measures of music." Finally, they must be able to compose songs in many of these meters, to read Welsh correctly, to write exactly, and to correct an ancient poem corrupted by the copyists.

The classification of new bards was made at an Eisteddfod once in three years. It was a public contest, after the custom of the Greeks. The degrees were three, conferred at intervals of three years respectively. The organization of the bards existed until the sixteenth century; it was suppressed under Queen Elizabeth. The Eisteddfod has been maintained until the present time. The learned musical historian, J.J. Fétis, attended one in 1829, of which he has left an interesting account. The performances of the blind minstrel of Caernarvon, Richard Robinson, excited his admiration beyond anything else that he mentions. He says: "His skill was something extraordinary. The modern harp of Wales has no pedals for the semitones in modulations. It is supplied with three ranks of strings, of which the left and right give diatonic notes, those in the middle the half-tones. Nothing more inconvenient could be imagined; in spite of his blindness, this minstrel, in the most difficult passages, seized the strings of the middle ranks with most marvelous address. The innate skill of this musician of nature, the calm and goodness painted upon his visage, rendered him an object of general interest."

Independently of the minstrels of this high class, they had also wandering minstrels who played the crwth of three strings, and who made themselves useful in the customary dances and songs of the peasants and the common people.

There exists an old manuscript, supposed to have been begun in the third or fourth century, Y Trioeddy nys Prydain ("The Triads of the Isle of Britain"). It contains the traditions from the ancient times until the seventh century. Among the famous triads of this book are: The three bards who bore the cloth of gold, Merlin Ambrosius, Merlin, son of Morvryn, and Taleisin, chief of the bards. There were three principles of song: Composition of poetry, execution upon the harp, and erudition. In the sixth century we see the bards playing the harp and singing their stirring songs with inspiring effect in animating the hearts of their compatriots again in their successful combats against the Saxons. Edward Jones, bard of the Prince of Wales in the last part of the eighteenth century, preserved the names of twenty-three bards who lived in the sixth century. The principal were Taleisin pen Beirrd, Aneurin Gwawrydd, Gildas ab Caw, Gildas Badonius. Taleisin was bard of Prince Elphin, then of King Maelgwin, and in the last place of Prince Urien Reged. He lived about 550; a number of his poems remain, but no fragment of his melody. Aneurin was author of "Gododn," one of the best Welsh poems that has come down to us.

In the British Museum there is a manuscript supposed to have been begun in the eleventh century, containing much music for the harp. Among it are exercises in the curious notation of the Welsh, in which chords are freely used, and in positions suggesting the immediate occasion of their introduction—that, namely of supplementing the small power of the instrument by sounding several tones together, which, as octaves were impossible outside the middle range or pitch, were necessarily chords. Among the songs given are several which betray the transition period of tonality, when chords had come into legitimate use, but the true feeling for a tonic had not yet been acquired. The preceding, for instance, proceeds regularly in the key of G in all respects but the very ending of each strain, which takes place in the key of C. Or to speak tonically, the melody and accompaniment after being written nearly all the way in the key of Do, suddenly diverge to the key of Fa, and there close.

DADLE DAU—THE TWO LOVERS.

[Listen]

Dadle Dau

Dadle Dau

Another (p. 94) is quite modern in spirit and treatment. It is a vigorous love song, and there is a boisterous chorus of bards which comes in with the refrain. A curious feature of this melody is the full-measure rest, immediately following the strong chorus of the bards. During the rests we seem to hear the chorus repeated.

OLD WELSH SONG, IN PRAISE OF LOVE.

[Listen]

Old Welsh Song

In the eleventh century, Gerald Barry, an entertaining writer, made a tour of Britain, and his account of the people in different parts of the country is still extant and full of interest. Of the Welsh he says: "Those who arrive in the morning are entertained until evening with the conversation of young women, and the music of the harp, for each house has its young women and harps allotted to this purpose. In each family the art of playing the harp is held preferable to any other learning."

He adds (chapter XIII, "Of their Symphonies and Songs"): "In their musical concerts they do not sing in unison, like the inhabitants of other countries, but in many different parts, so that in a company of singers, which one very frequently meets with in Wales, you will hear as many different parts and voices as there are performers, while all at length unite with organic melody in one consonance, and in the soft sweetness of B-flat. In the north district of Britain, beyond the Humber and on the borders of Yorkshire, the inhabitants make use of the same kind of symphonious harmony, but with less variety, singing in only two parts, one murmuring in the bass, the other warbling in the acute or treble. Neither of the two nations has acquired this peculiarity by art, but by long habit, which has rendered it natural and familiar; and the practice is now so firmly rooted in them that it is unusual to hear a single and simple melody well sung, and what is still more wonderful, the children, even from their infancy, sing in the same manner. As the English in general do not adopt this mode of singing, but only those to the north of the countries, I believe it was from the Danes and Norwegians, by whom these parts of the island were more frequently invaded, and held longer under their dominion, that the natives contracted this method of singing." In further token of the universality of music among these people, Gerald mentions the story of Richard de Clare, who a short time after the death of Richard I, passed from England into Wales, accompanied by certain other lords and attendants. At the passage of Coed Grono, at the entrance into the woods, he dismissed his attendants and pursued his journey undefended, preceded by a minstrel and a singer, the one accompanying the other on the fiddle. ["Tibicinem præviens habens et precentorem cantilenæ notulis alternatim in fidiculare respondentem."]

Similar devotion to music he found in Ireland. He says: "The only thing to which I find this people to apply commendable industry is playing upon musical instruments, in which they are incomparably more skillful than any other that I have seen. For their modulation on these instruments, unlike that of the Britons, to which I am accustomed, is not slow and harsh, but lively and rapid, while the harmony is both sweet and gay. It is astonishing that in so complex and rapid a movement of the fingers the musical proportions can be preserved, and that throughout the difficult modulations on their various instruments the harmony is completed with so sweet a velocity, so unequal an equality, so discordant a concord, as if the chords sounded together fourths and fifths. They enter into a movement and conclude it in so delicate a manner, and play the little notes so sportively under the blunter sounds of the bass strings, enlivening with wanton levity, or communicating a deeper internal sense of pleasure, so that the perfection of their art appears in the concealment of it. From this cause those very strains afford an unspeakable mental delight to those who have skillfully penetrated into the mysteries of the art; fatigue rather than gratify the ears of others, who seeing do not perceive, and hearing do not understand, and by whom the finest music is esteemed no better than a confused and disorderly noise, to be heard with unwillingness and disgust. Ireland only uses and delights in two instruments—the harp and tabor. Scotland has three—the harp, the tabor and the crowth or crowd. Wales, the harp, the pipes and the crowd. The Irish also used strings of brass instead of catgut."

The brilliant time of Ireland was the reign of Sir Brian Boirohen, in the tenth century. After his victory over the Danes, and their expulsion from the island, he opened schools and colleges for indigent students, founded libraries, and encouraged learning heartily. He was one of the best harpers of his kingdom. His harp is preserved in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, and a well made instrument it is, albeit now somewhat out of repair. It is about thirty inches high; the wood is oak and arms of brass. There are twenty-eight strings fixed in the sounding table by silver buttons in copper-lined holes. The present appearance of the instrument is this:

Fig. 19

Fig. 19.

The Anglo-Saxons also were great amateurs of music. Up to the sixth century they remained pagan. Gregory the Great sent missionaries to them, and more than 10,000 were baptized in a single day. The Venerable Bede represents St. Benoit as establishing the music of the new church, substituting the plain song of Rome for the Gallic songs previously used.

While few remains of the literature of the early English have come down to us, we have enough from the period of the Venerable Bede and the generation immediately following to give an idea of the vigor and depth of the national consciousness here brought to expression. From the seventh to the tenth centuries there was in England a movement more vigorous, more productive and consequently more modern, than anything like it in any other part of Europe for three centuries later. The Saxon poets Cædmon, the Venerable Bede, Alcuin, the friend, teacher and adviser of that mighty genius Charlemagne, were minds of the first order.

King Arthur the Great was an enthusiastic and talented minstrel. It is told of him that in this disguise he made his way successfully into the Danish camp, and was able to spy out the plans of his invading enemies. The incident has also a light upon the other side, since it shows the estimation in which the wandering minstrel was held by the Danes themselves. King Alfred also established a professorship of music at Oxford, where, indeed, the university, properly so-called, did not yet exist, but a school of considerable vigor had been founded. All the remains of Anglo-Saxon poetry are full of allusions to the bards, the gleemen and the minstrels; and the poems themselves, most likely, were the production of poet-musicians classed under these different names. Many additional reasons might be given for believing that the art of music was more carefully cultivated in England at this time than in any other European country. For instance, at Winchester, in the year 900, a large organ was built in the cathedral—larger than had ever been built before. It had 400 pipes, whereas most of the organs previously in use had no more than forty or fifty pipes. There is reason to believe that among the other musical devices here practiced that of "round" singing was brought to a high degree of popular skill. Apparently also they had something like what was afterward called a burden, a refrain which, instead of coming in at the end of the melody, was sung by a part of the singers continually with it.

Nor was musical cultivation confined to England. In the eighth and ninth centuries the Scandinavians had a civilization of considerable vigor. The minstrels were called Scalds, polishers or smoothers of language. Fétis well says: "As eminently poets and singers as they were barbarians, they put into their songs a strength of ideas, an energy of sentiment, a richness of imagination with which we are struck even in translations, admittedly inferior to the originals. Not less valiant than inspired, their scalds by turns played the harp, raising their voices in praise of heroes, and precipitated themselves into the combat with sword and lance, meeting the enemy in fiercest conflict. Most that remains from these poet-minstrels is contained in the great national collections called Eddas, of which the oldest received their present form early in the eleventh century. The sagas contained in the Eddas form but a mere fragment of this ancient literature. More than 200 scalds are known by name as authors of sagas. These warriors, so pitiless and ferocious in battle, show themselves full of devotion to their families. They were good sons, tender husbands and kind fathers. The Eddas contain pieces of singular delicacy of sentiment." Their songs, when compared with those of other races, are more musical, the sentiment is richer and more profound, and the rhythms have more variety. The melodic intervals, also, indicate a more delicate sense of harmony than we find in other parts of Europe at so early a date. Their instrument was the harp. Iceland was the foremost musical center of the civilized world in the ninth century, and it is said that kings in other parts of Europe sent there for capable minstrels to lead the music in the courts.

A very highly finished English composition, a round with strict canon for four voices, with a burden of the kind already mentioned, repeated over and over by two other voices has been discovered. It is the famous "Summer is Coming In," composed, apparently, some time before the year 1240.

On page 101 is given a reduced fac simile. It is written on a staff of six lines, in the square notes of the Franconian period. The clef is that of C. The asterisk at the end of the first phrase marks the proper place of entrance for the successive voices, each in turn commencing at the beginning when the previous one has arrived, at this point. Below is the pes, or burden, which is to be repeated over and over until the piece is finished. The complete solution is reproduced in miniature from Grove's Dictionary, on pages 102 and 103. The elaborateness of this piece of music led the original discoverers to place it much later than the date above given, but more careful examination of the manuscript justifies the conclusion that it was written some time before 1240. It is by far the most elaborate piece of ancient part music which has come down to us from times so remote. It indicates conclusively that early in the thirteenth century, when the composers of the old French school were struggling with the beginnings of canonic imitation, confining their work to ecclesiastical tonality, English musicians had arrived at a better art and a true feeling for the major scale and key. Following is the manuscript, the original size of the page being seven and seven-twelfths inches by five and five-twelfths inches. The reduced page before the reader represents the original upon a scale of about two-thirds. The Latin directions below the fourth staff indicate the manner of singing it.

Fac simile

FAC SIMILE OF MSS. OF "SUMER IS ICUMEN IN."

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"SUMER IS ICUMEN IN."

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Sumer is icumen in

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Sumer is icumen in

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Fig. 20

Fig. 20.

SAXON HARP.

[From manuscript in the library of Cambridge University.]

The harp was the principal instrument of these people, and their songs and poems contain innumerable references to it. Sir Francis Palgrave says in his "History of the Anglo-Saxons": "They were great amateurs of rhythm and harmony. In their festivals the harp passed from hand to hand, and whoever could not show himself possessed of talent for music, was counted unworthy of being received in good society. Adhelm, bishop of Sherbourne, was not able to gain the attention of the citizens otherwise than by habilitating himself as a minstrel and taking his stand upon the bridge in the central part of the town and there singing the ballads he had composed." One of the earliest representations of the English harp that has come down to us is found in the Harleian manuscript in the British Museum. It is presumably of the tenth century.

Fig. 21

Fig. 21.

KING DAVID.

[From Saxon Psalter of the tenth century.]

The harp was three or four feet in height. It had eleven strings. It was held between the knees, and was played with the right hand. In the thirteenth century it appears to have been played with both hands.

Two circumstances in this account may well surprise us; nor are there data available for resolving the questions to which they give rise. The presence of two such instruments as the harp and the crwth in this part of Europe is not to be explained by historical facts within our knowledge. The harp does not appear in musical history after its career in ancient Egypt until we find it in the hands of these bards, scalds and minstrels of northern Europe. The Aryans who crossed into India do not seem to have had it. Nor did the Greeks, nor the Romans. We find it for a while in Asia, but only in civilizations derived from that of Egypt, already in their decadence when they come under our observation. Inasmuch as there are no data existing whereby we can determine whether these people discovered the harp anew for themselves or derived it from some other nation, and greatly improved it, either supposition is allowable. Upon the whole, the probabilities appear to be that this instrument was among the primitive acquisitions of the Aryans. All of them were hunters, to whom the clang of the bow string must have been a familiar sound. As already suggested, it seems that the harp must have been the oldest type of stringed instrument of all. The Aryans who crossed the Himalayas into India may have lost it, in pursuit of some other type of instrument of plucked strings.

The crwth presents still more troublesome questions, which we must admit are still less hopeful of solution. (See Fig. 22.)

In this case we find an instrument played with a bow in northern Europe, far one side the course of Asiatic commerce, at a time when there was no such instrument elsewhere in the world but in India. Whence came the crwth? The rebec was not known in Arabia until nearly two centuries after we find the crwth mentioned by Venance Fortunatus. We have seen that the Sanskrit had four words meaning bow, a fact affording presumptive evidence of the knowledge of this mode of exciting vibrations, while the Sanskrit was still a spoken language. It is possible that the bow was a discovery of the Aryans in their early days, ere yet the family had begun to separate. The crwth may have been a survival of this primitive discovery, still cherished among a people not able to employ it intelligently, and not able to develop its powers. For while the crwth was in Europe two centuries before the violin, the improvement of this instrument was due to stimulation from quite another quarter. It was the Arab rebec that afforded the starting point for the modern violin, and this instrument was not known in Europe until it came in by way of the crusaders or the Spanish Arabs.

Fig. 22

Fig. 22.

Another popular instrument of music in all parts of Britain from the earliest of modern times, was the bagpipe, a reed instrument generally of imperfect intonation, the melody pipe being accompanied by a faithful drone, consisting of the tonic and its octave, and occasionally the fifth. It was the witty Sidney Smith who described the effect as that of a "tune tied to a post." This instrument was common in all parts of Britain until driven out by better ones. It still survives in Scotland. Its influence is distinctly to be traced in the Scotch melodies founded upon the pentatonic scale, of which the following is a specimen:

SCOTCH MELODY (IN THE PENTATONIC SCALE).

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Scotch Melody