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JVfUSIC IN HISTORY

H, Z>. j

ORPHEUS, THE GOD OF MUSIC
Statue by Carl Milles in Stockholm

MUSIC IN HISTORY

THE EVOLUTION OF AN ART

HOWARD D. McKINNEY and W. R. ANDERSON

Authors of Discovering Music

There is no truer truth obtainable
By man, than comes of music.

ROBERT BROWNING

AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY . New York Cincinnati
Chicago Boston Atlanta Dallas San Francisco

ALL RIGHTS RKSKRVKD

MUSIC IN HISTORY

E.P. 8

MADE IN XI *S. A.

Prelude

NO MERE introduction to such an art as music can satisfy an eager
student. After becoming aware of his capacity for participating in
the great heritage of the world's musical experience, it is natural that to
his enthusiasm he should wish to add knowledge; and that he should de
sire to increase his modest ability by every available means. This work
has been written to help him fulfill such purposes.

Prepared along the lines of a general historical survey of the whole
subject, it is meant for the average listener of today who has secured a
start on his journey of discovery into the extensive land of music and
would go further. It is not a work for the specialist who desires to become
versed in the intricate details of the historical development of his subject.
The writing of this book was motivated by the same pedagogic principle
that governed the shaping of the material in Discovering Music, namely,
the study of an art can " educate " only if it can be made to give a sense
of pleasure. The authors feel that the most potent reason for a music
listener's wanting to learn more of the rich heritage of his art is the
greatly increased sense of pleasure and satisfaction that he will derive
from the music he hears; and they have kept this viewpoint in mind
throughout.

Most works that treat of the story of the development of music
employ a different procedure. They are content to convey information
by a chronological arrangement of facts, with little attempt to relate
these to general cultural backgrounds and none whatever to make them
live by means of actual listening experience. The authors have avoided
this stereotyped method of arrangement and have adopted several car
dinal principles for their work which differentiate it in aim and scope
from the older types of musical histories:

Vi PRELUDE

First. Reading or hearing about music without being able to listen
to it is largely a profitless experience; the music is always the important
thing. Therefore the authors have arranged their treatment so as to
embrace, for the most part, only those works from the various composers
which are available in standard phonograph recordings, so that the stu
dent can actually know what he is reading about, without merely taking
the authors' word for it. The developments of the art are traced by dis
cussions of general periods, such as Medieval, Gothic, Renaissance, and
Romantic, as well as by study of the works of its greatest composers
Palestrina, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, Brahms,
Wagner, Strauss, Stravinsky together with those of such significant
though less eminent men as Monteverdi, Scarlatti, Telemann, and so
forth. Thus the reader gradually becomes familiar with a large and varied
listening repertoire.

Second. None of the arts and this is especially true of music has
developed in a void, unassociated with its time and period. Even the
specialists, once content largely to dig up facts and pigeonhole them
so that they might be used to verify or refute other facts, have become
conscious of the need for relating these neat parcels of data to the
larger influences which have shaped all the periods of history. To un
derstand music as we have it today, it is necessary to know something
of the forces which have shaped and conditioned the various epochs
of its growth jMusic reflects the temper of the time that gives it birth
and has a definite relationship to the political, economic, and cultural
conditions that surround its composers and practitioners. Therefore this
treatment has been planned to show the outstanding social and aesthetic
characteristics of the great epochs in art history Greek, Early Chris
tian, Romanesque, Gothic, and the rest. All the music has been dis
cussed against the general backgrounds of its time and co-ordinated
with some of the other arts painting, literature, sculpture, and archi
tecture. In a word, the authors have tried to show that music is an
integral element of the general spirit which informs the whole exterior
or interior world of a period. In carrying out this scheme they have
used a large number of pictures in order to give the reader a wider con
ception of the part which the other arts have played in the life of man.

PRELUDE Vll

Third. Owing to its very nature, music, in so far as the average indi
vidual is concerned, is more a matter of emotional significance than of
intellectual understanding. Real interest in music begins, therefore, for
everyone except the specialists, with the works of the eighteenth cen
tury. While recognizing this fact, the authors have paid the music written
before that time more attention than is usually accorded it in a work
of this kind. They have also given- an adequate description of the back
grounds out of which our modern music has come, with as complete
reference as possible to the works involved.

Fourth. An important factor in forming any good historical perspec
tive in art is the judgment of contemporary opinion. A wise essayist has
said that the best history of music that could be written would be one
composed entirely of contemporary judgments extracts from letters
and autobiographies of musicians and persons having musical experi
ence. As many of these as is practicable have been included in this work,
covering the most important periods and movements.

Fifth. An attractive style not only helps understanding but increases
enthusiasm. The authors have therefore tried to make their writing alive
and interesting as well as informing; they have avoided textbook phrase
ology and have not hesitated to use many quotations. This book thus
provides a humanistic background for the study of music, the compre
hension of which will increase the understanding and heighten the
enjoyment of every piece of music the average listener may hear, whether
it be by Guillaume de Machaut, Johannes Brahms, or Paul Hindemith;
whether it stem from the believing twelfth, the brilliant sixteenth, the
gallant eighteenth, or the cynical twentieth century.

Acknowledgments

The authors herewith offer thanks to the following, who have
kindly given permission to reproduce copyrighted material. Spe
cific credits for illustrations are given with the pictures themselves.

American Book Company for selections from Fluctuation of Forms of Art, Volume I

of " Social and Cultural Dynamics " by Pitirim A. Sorokin and The National Mind

by Michael Demiashkevich.
Breitkopf & Hartel, Berlin, for the selection from Geschichte der Motette by Hugo

Leichtentritt. By kind permission of Breitkopf & Hartel, owners of the copyright.
The Clarendon Press, Oxford, for extracts from The Works of Lucian of Samosata,

translated by H. W, and F. S. Fowler and The Mediaeval Stage by E. K. Chambers.

By permission of The Clarendon Press, Oxford.
The Cordon Company, Inc. for the extract from An Intellectual and Cultural History

of the Western World by Harry Elmer Barnes.
Covici Friede, Inc. for the excerpt from Fool of Venus; The Story of Peire Vidal,

translated by Ceorge Cronyn.
F. S. Crofts & Company for the paragraph from Hellenic Civilization by Maurice

Croiset, translated by Paul B. Thomas.
Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc. for selections from International Cyclopedia of Music

and Musicians; Debussy, Man and Artist by Oscar Thompson; and Palestrina, His

Life and Times by Zoe K. Pyne. All are reprinted by permission of the publishers,

Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc.
Gerald Duckworth & Co., Ltd. for the extract from Southern Baroque Art by Sache-

verell Sitwell.
E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, for selections from The Caedmon Poems,

translated by Charles W. Kennedy; Monteverdi, His Life and Work by Henry

Pruni&res; Gluck by Alfred Einstein; Letters of Mozart, edited by Hans Mersman

and translated by M. M. Bozman; and Raggle-Taggle by Walter Starkie.
Newman Flower for the extract from George Frideric Handel.
Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc. for an excerpt from the Introduction to The

American Songbag by Carl Sandburg.

William Heinemann, Ltd. for a selection from Giuseppe Verdi by Francis Toye.
Henry Holt and Company, Inc. for a selection from The Social Forces in German

Literature by Kuno Francke.

X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Houghton Mifflin Company for the poem from A Tropical Morning at Sea by Edward
Rowland Sill and an extract from Virgil's The Aeneid, translated by T. C. Williams.

Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., London, for the excerpt from Gtistav
Mahler by Bruno Walter.

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. for selections from Franz Schubert and His Times by Karl
Kobald, translated by Beatrice Marshall; Memoirs, 1808-1865, of Hector Louis
Berlioz, translated by Rachel and Eleanor Holmes and revised by Ernest Newman;
and Jean Sibelius by Karl Ekman.

H. Laurens Publishing Company, Paris, for the selection from Le Ballet de Conr
avant Lully by Henry Prunieres.

J. B. Lippincott Company for an excerpt from The Civilization of Babylonia and
Assyria by Morris Jastrow.

Liveright Publishing Corporation for the lines from Collected Poems of H. D,
(Hilda Aldington), published by Liveright Publishing Corporation.

London Observer for selections by Basil de Selincourt, April, 1933, and William
Clock, July 26, 1936.

Longmans, Green & Co. for a passage from The Theatre by Sheldon Cheney.

The Macmillan Company for selections from Art and Society by Herbert Read;
Gluck's Preface to Alceste in Music &" Nationalism by Cecil Forsyth; Beyond Good
and Evil by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, translated by Helen Zimmern; Music
Study in Germany by Amy Fay; and the map adapted from A Political and Cultural
History of Modern Europe, Volume I, by C. J. H. Hayes. These selections arc used
by permission of The Macmillan Company, publishers.

Music & Letters, London, for the selection by Eva Mary Grew, January, 1938.

Musical Courier for " My Dream " by Franz Schubert, translated by Cesar Saer-
chinger.

New YorJc Herald Tribune for the item by Lawrence Oilman; the Schonbcrg item

translated by J. D. Bohm; and the item signed " J. S., May 25, 1939.**
The New York Sun for the article by W. J. Henderson.

The New YorJc Times for the excerpt from Olin Downes's interview with Krncst
Bloch, January 22, 1939.

Novello & Company, Ltd., London, for the* extract from The Organ Works of Bach
by Harvey Grace.

Oxford University Press, London, for selections from The Music of Bach by C.
Sanford Terry and The Oxford History of Music, Volume J, edited by II. W,
Wooldridge.

Oxford University Press, New York, for the quotation from Shaw's translation of
The Odyssey and the poem by Ford Madox Ford from his Collected Poems.

Duncan Phillips, author, for part of his article on Giorgione from The Enchantment
of Art.

G. P. Putnam's Sons for selections from The Dance; A Short History of Classic
Theatrical Dancing by Lincoln Kirstein.

Random House, Inc. for a paragraph from Beloved Friend by C, S, Bowen and B.
von Meek.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS XI

G. Schirmer, Inc. for selections from the following articles in The Musical Quarterly:
" The Social Condition of Violinists in France before the Eighteenth Century "
by Marc Pincherle, " Music and the Centenary of Romanticism " by Julien Tiersot
(in which he quotes from Victor Basch), " Gluck and the Encyclopaedists" by
Julien Tiersot, "Haydn and the Viennese Classical School" by Guido Adler,
" Early Spanish Music for Lute and Keyboard Instruments " by Willi Apel, and
" Polyphonic Music of the Gothic Period " by Rudolf Ficker.

Charles Scribner's Sons for selections from The Dawn of Conscience by James H.
Breasted and The Opera, Past and Present by William F. Apthorp.

Bernard Shaw and Constable & Company, Ltd., London, for quotations from Music
in London.

Sheed and Ward, Inc. for the selection from In Search of Mozart by Henri Gh6on.

Miss Dorothy Thompson for the excerpt from her article on " The Grouse on the
English," New Yorlc Herald Tribune, May 12, 1937.

Ives Washburn, Inc. for the selection from Dufay to Sweelinck by Edna R. Sollitt.

A Table of Contents

PRELUDE

THE ARTS IN HISTORY 3

The Value of History Diverse Philosophies of History -The Seventeenth
Century, a Practical Example " Bigger and Better " Dangers to Be
Realized

THE CONJECTURAL BEGINNINGS
THE ORIGINS OF ART 1?

Art: What Is It? Anthropology's Conclusions The Origins of Art _ Art
as Ornament Art Arising from Use Art as an Imitation of Nature Art as
an Expression of the Sex Impulse The Artist as Priest -Art as an Individual
istic Expression of the Feelings and Emotions The Purpose of Art _ The
Beginnings of Music: Rhythm An Added Factor: Melody Music and
Magic The Use of Instruments In Conclusion

MUSIC IN THE LIFE OF THE NEAR EAST 33

The Cradle of Civilization The Sumerians The Significance of Music
among the Sumerians The Egyptians The Arts of Egypt The Place of
Music New-kingdom Luxuriance The Babylonians and the Assyrians
The Jews ~ Music in the Far East

THE MUSIC OF THE HELLENIC AGE 59

The Sources of Hellenic Thought and Culture The Minoans The Aryans

The Phoenicians The Arts in Greece The Function of Music The
First of Three Great Periods: The Archaic The Second Period: The Lyric
Age Culmination in the Golden Age Music in Private Life The Third
Period: Decline A Summary Our Musical Heritage from the Greeks

ROMAN AND EARLY CHRISTIAN MUSIC 93

The Roman Spirit Borrowed Ideals Later Trends The Early Church
The " Hymn of Jesus " Demoniac Songs The Problem of Instruments

The Church's Position

3dii

XIV CONTENTS

THE HISTORICAL PAST

MONODIC MUSIC OF A THOUSAND YEARS 113

Music IN THE CHURCH

Art in the Early Church Sources of Early Christian Music The Mystical
Power of Gregorian Chant The Development of Plainsong Technical
Characteristics of Plainsong Early Hymns Growing Magnificence in Art
and Ritual Later Phases of Gregorian History Gregorians, A Universal
Language of the Soul

MONODIC Music OUTSIDE THE CHURCH

The Universality of Folk Music The Church's Opposition Sacred Folk
Music

THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES 141

ROMANESQUE Music

The Art Called Romanesque The Carolingian Peak and After The Spirit
of the Romanesque Romanesque Music Speculations on Polyphonic Be
ginnings Living Examples

THE EARLY GOTHIC Music: TWELFTH AND THIRTEENTH CENTURIES
The Gothic Awakening The Cathedral, The Greatest Expression of the
Gothic Era The Gothic Spirit in Art Early Gothic Music The Motet
Use of Instruments

THE Music OF CHIVALRY: THE TROUBADOURS AND THEIR FELLOWS
A Romantic Movement in Medieval Times Types of Troubadour Art The
German Counterpart Dance Songs of the Time

A TRANSITIONAL PERIOD: THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES
A Period of Transition Hie Rise of Artistic Personalities The Casuistry of
the False Bass Machaut, a Typical Gothic Composer A Contemporary
Collection The Ars Nova in the South A Burgundian Master Josqnin
des Pre*s, Creator of a Universal Expression The Gothic Period in General

THE INSTRUMENTS OF THE MIDDLE AGES AND THEIR Music
Obscure Origins Instruments in Medieval Painting Secular Uses The
Organ The Nature of the Music

THE RENAISSANCE 321

CAUSES AND EFFECTS

Varied Interpretations A Plastic Illustration Gains and Losses What
the Renaissance Did for Music

THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY

An Artist of the Renaissance The Results in Music Folengo on Renais
sance Music Music in II Cartegiano The Renaissance Madrigal an Italian
Development Sacred Music of the Sixteenth Century Music in Venice

CONTENTS XV

THE RENAISSANCE IN FRANCE AND THE NETHERLANDS

The Rise of France as a World Power The Influence of Italy Music Fol
lows the Other Arts Religious Music of the Renaissance French Reforma
tion Music Instrumental Music and Dances

THE RENAISSANCE IN SPAIN

The Paradoxes of Spain The Roots of Spanish Art Spam's Place in Music

The Popular Lute Cabezon Morales and Victoria

THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLAND

"The English, Are They Human?" The Real Culture of the English
English Madrigals Ecclesiastical Music English Renaissance * Music for
Instruments Keyboard Instruments and Their Music Lute Songs Music
an Essential of Life

THE RENAISSANCE IN GERMANY

Germany's Early Background The Lieder Germany versus Italy Pau-
mann and His Followers The Reformation in Germany Its Effects on
Music Luther as Musician The Artistry of the Chorale

THE OVERTURE TO THE BAROQUE 307

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY IN EUROPE

The Emergence of the Baroque Spirit Music's New Mastery among the
Arts The Reign of Reason The Worship of Form

THE BIRTH OF OPERA

The Birth of a New Art Its Sources As Dryden Saw Opera The Char
acteristics of the First Opera Oratorio Popular Influence on Operatic Style

Monteverdi

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE OPERA

Baroque Opera in Italy Vocal Chamber Music Agostino Steffani The
German Spirit: Schutz French Opera and Ballet Lully Tendencies in
England: Purcell

THE INSTRUMENTAL Music OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
The Rise of the Violin Corelli Early Organ Music French Keyboard
Suites The Suite in General The German KuhnalP Concerted Music
Purceirs Instrumental Genius Music of the Guilds

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 3 6]L

GENERAL BACKGROUNDS
At the Turn of the Century The Castrafo, a Typical Baroque Phenomenon

Spiritual Characteristics The Rococo Spirit Symptoms of the Century

THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY OPERA

The Prolific Eighteenth Century Alessandro Scarlatti as Typical Opera Com
poser _ The Universal Neapolitan Style Opera Buffa in Italy Opera in
France In Germany And England

XVI CONTENTS

THE GALANT INSTRUMENTALISTS

Couperin, the Supreme Galant Pellucid Forms Doincnico Scarlatti
The Forgotten Galuppi The Prodigious Telemann Nietzsche and the
Eighteenth Century

A MUSICAL REFORMER GLUCK

Tumult in Mid-eighteenth-century Paris The Career of Gluck The Great
Man of Vienna: Metastasio Rival Librettists Gluck versus Piccinni
Cluck's Reforms

AND THERE WERE GIANTS IN THOSE DAYS 40-

THE SACRED Music OF BACH

The True Bach An Organist's Prosaic Life At Anhalt-Cothen In
Leipzig Bach, the Greater and the Lesser B Minor A lass St. Muff hew
Passion Use of Leitmotiv The Cantatas Voices Treated as Instruments

Organ Works The Baroque Bach Orchestra or Organ? The In teg
rity of Transcriptions

THE SECULAR WORKS OF BACH

Expressional Relationship and Organized Sound Bach's Use of Concerto
Form The Ouvertures A Solitary Pictorial Piece The Solution of a
Problem Fugues in General French Suites

HANDEL THE MAGNIFICENT

An Eighteenth-century Premiere Handel the Typical Baroque Figure His
'Operas The Oratorios Other Works The "Last Years

HAYDN AND MOZART 449

THE EARLY ORCHESTRAL EXPERIMENTERS

The Beginnings of Modern Orchestral Music Music for the Orchestra
The Mannheimers Their Shaping of Orchestral Style- The Contribution
of Another Bach

FRANZ JOSEF HAYDN

The Classical Experimenter His Achievements Summarized The Way of
His Life Mutual Motivation Haydn's Distinctive Qualities Creative
Periods in His Life The Symphonies The Quartets Oratorios

" IN SEARCH OF MOZART "

Mozart: The Necessity for Maturity of Taste Music versus Life The
Traveling Prodigy How Mozart Composed Tracing His Development
The Piano Concertos The Note of Sadness The Last Three Symphonies

The Climactic Figure of the Century

AN OPERATIC *APEX

Mozart and His Operatic Background His Operas Mirrors of Man Opera
Seria Opera Buffa The Marriage of Figaro Don Giovanni' Cost fan
tutte The German Operas

CONTENTS XV11

MUSIC BECOMES MORE PERSONAL 507

THE ROMANTIC IDEAL IN ART

Classic versus Romantic: How the Debate Began Etymological Roots
Present-day Applications Mistaken Usages The Springs of the Romantic
Spirit Romanticism as a Force in Art Links between Literature and Music
Music's New Vitality Historically Speaking Impulse and Idea

BEETHOVEN THE LIBERATOR

The Right Man at the Right Time Three-Period Biographies The Early
Years In Vienna The Second Great Period The Eroica Symphony
Concrete Thought Expressed in Music Events and Adventures The Last
Years The Ninth Symphony The Difficult Quartets Premonition of the
End

THE EARLY ROMANTIC COMPOSERS AND THEIR PROBLEMS 545
SCHUBERT, THE LYRIC POET

Intimations of Beauty A Parallel from Another Art A Misapprehended
Composer His Life New Depths Schubert's Qualities

'MENDELSSOHN AND SCHUMANN ^^

A Luxuriant Decade Mendelssohn and Schumann Felix the Happy
Schumann, the Striving Romantic

BERLIOZ THE UNPREDICTABLE

A Supersensitive Romantic His Early Career in Paris The Fantastic Sym
phony The Height of His Career Pursuing Beethoven's Freedom Tal
ent, Technique, and Cenius Developing the Leitmotiv

CHOPIN AND PIANO Music

Chopin the Enigmatic The Sand Episode The Supreme Master of the
Small Form A Poet of the Piano Chopin and the Romantic Movement

LISZT: A SOUL DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF

Jekyll and Hyde The Basis of Liszt's Style Piano Music At Weimar
The Princess and Wagner The Later Years

WAGNER HIS PREDECESSORS AND CONTEMPORARIES 589

ITALIAN OPERA OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Differences in the National Styles The Italian Spirit The Riddle of Ros
sini Donizetti and Bellini Verdi Puccini Lesser Italians

FRENCH OPERA OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Various Types of French Opera Cherubini the Classic-Romantic Berlioz,
Boieldieu, and Auber Meyerbeer the Magniloquent A Sentimentalized
F aus t A Parodizing Boulevardier A Genius and Some Talents

GERMAN OPERA OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Roots of German Opera Its Birth with Weber The Germany of Nature
and Legend Foretelling Wagner Meyerbeer Contemporaries An Iso
lated Figure: Humperdinck
MH-a

xviii CONTENTS

RICHARD WAGNER AND THE Music DRAMA

The Impossibility of Saying Anything New Wagner's Place in History A
Complex, Baffling Character Wagner as Romanticist Theory Practice
Wagner, the Culmination of an Epoch

THE LATER ROMANTICS 649

JOHANNES THE GREAT

A Composer Long Misunderstood The Reasons Brahms's Place in Music
HUGO WOLF AND STYLES IN SONG

The Lied, a Characteristic German Form The Styles of Its Composers

Wolf's Mastery

RICHARD STRAUSS

Two Parallel Careers Progress in Reverse Strauss's Early Power- The
Beginning of Decline A New Low The Operas The Scandals of Salome
and EleJctra Der RosenJbvalier The Songs

CESAR FRANCK AND MUSICAL MYSTICISM

A Belgo-French Composer His Individual Style The Symphony His
Strength and Weakness

THE VIENNESE TWINS BRUCKNER AND MAHLER

A Viennese Master Mahler, a More Complex Character His Place in the
Future

A LONE NORTHERNER SIBELIUS /**"

A Curious Situation Nationalism Overstressed Qualities of Sibclius's Great
ness The Complete Individualist Lapses A Diversity of Works Is
His Popularity Permanent?

THE TWILIGHT OF THE ROMANTICS

A Sunset Glow Elgar: The Enigmatic Englishman His Masterpiece A
Neglected French Craftsman The Ebullient Chabrier Fatire": A Fountain-
head Saint-Saens, the Eclectic Inheritors of the Franck Tradition
Faur6's Descendants The Italians The Cosmopolitan Jew, Block- Bax:
A Celtic Mystic The Romantic Side of Schonberg Max Regcr The
American Scene: Edward MacDowell

NATIONALISM IN ART 699

NATIONALISM THE MOVEMENT IN GENERAL

A Period of Intense Nationalization The Stimulus of the Arts- Nationalism
as a Factor in Art Its Place in Music The Climax of the Movement

THE RUSSIANS

Russian Nationalism Changes in Style The Rise of Two Schools The
Cosmopolites Tchaikovsky A Typical Russian His Wide Range -An
ton Rubinstein The Russian Kutchka Glinka's Patriotic Operas Dargo-
mijsky Balakirev Borodin Moussorgsky Cui Rimsky-Korsakoff -
Scriabin Later Russians

CONTENTS XIX

THE CZECHS AND THE POLES

Nationalism in Bohemia Smetana Dvorak Other Czechs Polish Na
tionalism National Music Its Flowering in Chopin Szymanowski

THE SCANDINAVIANS

Scandinavian Nationalism Grieg the Beloved Other Norwegians Sweden

Denmark Finland

THE SPANIARDS

Folk Music, the Basic Music of Spain Spanish Dances Internationally
Known Composers Modern Tendencies

THE HUNGARIANS AND THE RUMANIANS

The Background of History Doubts as to Authenticity Bart6k and Kodaly

Dohnanyi The Rumanian Enesco

THE ENGLISH TRADITION

Folk Music's Varied Appeals Vaughan Williams, an English Hierarch
An Overdue Renaissance

Is THERE A GERMAN NATIONALISM?

A Spirit Divided against Itself Phases of German History German Music
Universal Rather than National What of the Present?

THE MODERN REVOLT: REALISM 763

A Comprehensive Manifesto The Industrial Revolution Its Effects on the
Spirit The Teeming Nineteenth Century The Rise of Realism In Liter
ature In Painting Impressionism, Realism's Last Fling Symbolism
Realism in the Other Arts

THE MUSICAL IMPRESSIONISTS 777

IMPRESSIONISM IN GENERAL

Debussy: The Incarnation of Impressionism Unities in the Arts The School
of Musical Impressionism The Communication of Feeling Form Evolved
from Feeling After Impressionism, What?

DEBUSSY, HIGH PRIEST OF IMPRESSIONISM

Debussy among the Artists I lis Early Days His Springtime Flowering
Influences Ideals Fulfillment His Solitary Opera The Nocturnes
The Last Years The Piano Works The Songs Chamber Music His
New Technique The Great Artist-Reformer

RAVEL

Ravel the Classicist A Conscious Development of Self His Works

DELIUS, THE END OF A CHAPTER
Two General Categories Delius, the Intuitive Artist A Late Development

The End of Romanticism

THE AFTERMATH

The Difference between German and French Art Debussy's Influence
Some Other French Impressionists Impressionists in Other Countries

XX CONTENTS

THE PROBLEMATIC PRESENT

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 81;

THE AESTHETICS OF PRESENT-DAY ART

An Orthodox View Seeking New Worlds A Culture- weary Art Essence
Rather than Appearance The Expressionists The Abstractionists in Gen
eral Cubists Dadaists Neo-plasticists Surrealists A Modernistic
Credo A Counterreaction Three Simultaneous Strata of Thought- An
Embarrassment of Means Technical Usages of the New Music The Diffi
culty of Hearing Atonally A Simultaneous Advance on All Fronts

THE IMPACT OF STRAVINSKY

A New Individuality Develops Two Lonely Masterpieces Infertile Experi
ments Later Developments in France Italian Contemporaries

SCHONBERG AND HlS SCHOOL

The Great Man of Modern Music Schonberg's Middle Period A Still
Newer Device Schonberg's Present-day Position A More Humane Pupil
Diverse Followers The Musical Utilitarian <The Inevitable Conclusion

TENDENCIES IN OUR TIME

The Ballet Film Music Music for Records and Radio
"!N THE NATIVE GRAIN": AMERICAN HOPES

Three Phases of Activity The American Folk Tradition American Popular

Music Serious Music Music in the Other Americas What of the

Future?

A SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY 87^

INDEX 881

THE ARTS IN HISTORY

Trie Arts in History

Art must be recognized as the most certain mode of expression which
mankind has achieved. As such it has been propagated from the very
dawn of civilization. In every age man has made things for his use and
followed thousands of occupations made necessary by his struggle for
existence. He has fought endlessly for power and leisure and for mate
rial happiness. He has created languages and symbols and built up an
impressive fund of learning; his resource and invention have never been
exhausted.

And yet all the time, in every phase of civilization, he has felt that
what we call the scientific attitude is inadequate. The mind he has
developed from his deliberate cunning can only cope with objective
facts; beyond these objective facts is a whole aspect of the world which
is only accessible to instinct and intuition. The development 'of these
obscurer modes of apprehension has been the purpose of art; and we
are nowhere near an understanding of mankind until we admit the sig
nificance and indeed the superiority of the knowledge embodied in art.

We may venture to claim superiority for such knowledge because
whilst nothing has proved so impermanent and provisional as that which
we arc pleased to call scientific fact and the philosophy built on it, art,
on the contrary is everywhere, in its highest manifestations, universal
and eternal.

Herbert Read: Art and Society

THE VALUE OF HISTORY

WE must have a knowledge of what has been going on and how
and why it came to be if we are to be as wise and as happy as
possible in a word, if we are to possess the world in which we live.
The sum of such knowledge, order made out of a vast number of facts,
the significant separated from the inconsequential, is what we call his
torysocial, economic, political, and cultural.

4 THE ARTS IN HISTORY

Our generation is making an earnest attempt, as is shown by the new
tides appearing constantly in our bookstores, to see, as a whole, the
course of those forces which have brought about its present social and
economic crises. It is also turning from material insecurity and a loss
of confidence in the established social order to an attempt at realizing
something of the supersubstantial heritage of the human race. Such
projects as federal support of artists, municipal museums and orchestras,
and art and music high schools are some of the varied manifestations of
this effort we are making to appropriate art as a spiritual resource.

Goethe once said that if we are ever to possess that which we inherit
from our forefathers, we must earn it for ourselves. The possession of
art in this sense means that we must look on its history not merely as
definite and literal information on what has been accomplished in the
past but as a description of the social, political, and artistic milieu out
of which grew the music, painting, architecture, and sculpture of the
various periods and which explains how they came to be what they are*

DIVERSE PHILOSOPHIES OF HISTORY

The idea of the division of man's achievements into certain definite
periods has been used in historiography since early times. The philoso
phers of Greece Plato, Aristotle, and the rest thought of human
developments as occurring in a series of historical cycles, which always
returned to the original starting point. The Middle Ages looked to the
ancients as the source of all wisdom, and so the historical outlook was
a static one. It was the rationalistic seventeenth century, led by Rene
Descartes and his followers, which developed a philosophy of history
based on the idea of a cultural evolution, the various elements of which
were closely integrated.

Prior to the nineteenth century the most enthusiastic exponent of
the doctrine of history as progress was the Marquis Marie Jean de
Condorcet, who tried to show " through reasoning and through facts
that nature has assigned no limits to the perfecting of the human
faculties, that the perfectibility of man is truly indefinite, and that the
progress of this perfectibility, henceforth independent of any power

DIVERSE PHILOSOPHIES OF HISTORY 5

that might wish to arrest it, has no other limit than the duration of the
globe on which nature has placed us,"

The philosophers of nineteenth-century Romanticism added their
individual conceptions to this idea of history as a series of periods, each
representing definite progress. The need for a science based on the facts
of human relationships rather than on the abstract reasonings of philoso
phers was first expressed by Count Claude Henri de Saint-Simon and
developed as a system by his pupil and associate, Auguste Comte. In
the latter's Positive Philosophy, published in 1851-1854, history is
divided into epochs, each of which shows socialized progress. It was
Herbert Spencer in England who merged the idea of such sociological
progress with the new theory of cosmic evolution. From this resulted
the materialism and confidence in progress so largely current up to the
time of the World War. The doubts arising from the collapse of this opti
mism have led to a number of other theories of sociological fluctuations.

With or without the concept of " perfectionism," most anthropologists,
sociologists, and historians have used some scheme of periodizing of
dividing historical changes into certain phases in each of which there
is definite social and cultural integration. Let us put it in another way:
the observer, as he watches the long scroll of history unroll before his
eyes, is impressed by the fact that there are certain periods when man's
achievements in science, philosophy, religion, and the arts indicate that
there were characteristic patterns in thinking and acting, patterns which
are repeated and which show that the various phases of activity were
part of one living unity and the manifestation of one spirit. This was
recognized by the eighteenth-century philosopher Turgot, when he said:
" The same senses, the same organs, the spectacle of the same universe
have everywhere given to men the same ideas, just as the same needs
and the same propensities have everywhere taught them the same arts."
A recent and impressively documented sociological study by Dr. Sorokin
of Harvard University has gone so far as to maintain that the theories of
social and cultural development generally held are not valid, and to sug
gest a new classification of the fluctuation of the forms of art, systems
of truth, ethics, and law, as well as those of social relationships, war, and
revolution. But even this newest of sociological theories depends for its

6 THE ARTS IN HISTORY

validity on the fact that the various phases of the cultures studied are
logically and closely integrated. Sorokin states that not only the arts but
all the main components of a culture its science and philosophy, its
ethics and law, its forms of social, political, and economic organization
are interrelated and have changed their form at the same time and in
the same direction.

Most historians of art have followed some such periodizing as a
matter of course and have evolved in the process a great many " catalogue
histories " of painting, architecture, music, and so forth. These are of
importance if one wishes to know who painted a certain picture and
when he did so, how many operas Boieldieu wrote, how many sym
phonies Stamitz produced, or where the great buildings of the world
are located; but they give little understanding of these things as works
of art. Art, even considered in the most abstract way, is the result of the
desire of the artist to create something that will satisfy himself through
the manipulation of certain arrangements of shape, size, mass, time,
and so forth what the aestheticians call beauty. And all the arts,
especially music, have tended to express the sense of beauty in certain
periods according to definite ideals. Which means that the conception
of beauty has been a constantly changing idea during the ages, one
which has altered itself to suit the ideals of the historical period during
which it was produced. It means also that in order to appreciate the
manifestations of a work of art, we should know the general life and
thought of the period which brought it into being and how the sonata,
the sonnet, the cathedral, the painting, reflecting this life and thought,
are related to the other intellectual products of the time.

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, A PRACTICAL EXAMPLE

A concrete example may help to make this clear. No period in the
history of Europe was more active in liberating man's powers and shap
ing our modern life than was the seventeenth century. It was then, we
must remember, that some of the greatest discoveries ih science were
made: when Francis Bacon set the current of man's thought turning
toward material things, after it had dwelt so long on spiritual ones; when

BIGGER AND BETTER J

Galileo, the creator of experimental science, swept the heavens with his
telescope, discovering the Milky Way to be a track of countless separate
stars and the moon a dead satellite owing its light merely to a reflection
of the sun's rays; when Isaac Newton, through the observation of an ap
ple's fall, worked out the laws of universal gravitation; when Harvey pub
lished his discovery of the circulation of the blood and Pascal his treatise
on vacuum. This was the time when Shakespeare, Milton, Corneille, and
Moliere lived and wrote; when Rubens, Rembrandt, Velasquez, and Van
Dyck carried out to the full the traditions which had been handed down
by the masters of the Renaissance. If we realize all this and can sense
something of the great intellectual curiosity of the period, something
of its tremendous zest for living, then we can understand the develop
ments that took place at this time in music. It was during this era that
the Italians invented and developed their colorful and spectacular new
music, the opera. In Venice church music of gorgeous quality and luxuri
ant richness was being produced for both choirs and orchestras. In St.
Peter's in Rome, Frescobaldi, the greatest organist of the time, was play
ing to crowds of thousands of people; so great was his popularity that
his audiences followed him from city to city. In England a musical
culture so varied and rich that it has never again been equaled in that
country was in full flower; everywhere instruments were freeing them
selves from the shackles of being merely " consorts for the voice " and
were developing a new and outstanding kind of expression for themselves;
it was at this time that the violin came into its own and the keyboard
instruments first attained their popularity. /All this was part and parcel of
the daring, experimental attitude of mind that was common to the age,
an attitude which completely changed during the next hundred years
but which explains the operas of Monteverdi, the church music of the
Gabrielis and Schiitz, the instrumental works of Corelli and Purcell.^

" BIGGER AND BETTER "

It is through describing the characteristic thought and feeling of the
various periods in history and the sense of form and ideals of beauty
manifested in the art works of these periods that a history of art can

8 THE ARTS IN HISTORY

best help one to share the delight of those who produced them. In the
writing of such a history the traditional precedent of periodizing may be
followed, provided it is realized that overlapping is unavoidable and
that pigeonholing everything exactly and definitely is impossible. The
concept of rationalists and early sociologists that history is a series of
episodes inevitable in their progress must also be avoided. It is not a
matter of a sort of grand triumphal procession from something simple
and elemental to the superior and complex result that we know today.
Such a conception has been rudely upset by recent events in all phases
of life; and recent discoveries show that it has always been absolutely
untenable in so far as art is concerned.

Until 1895 the outstanding intellects of western Europe had dedi
cated themselves definitely to the conviction that the culture of their
time represented the highest to which man had attained that every
thing which had been produced before the beginning of history could
only be primitive and insignificant in comparison with the developments
that had taken place since, which culminated in the glories of the nine
teenth century. Then, from a French scholar, there came accounts of a
newly discovered series of rock paintings in Spain and France, paint
ings which showed that the men living in the ice age, thousands of years
before our era, had possessed a significant culture and produced an art
so advanced as to be not far removed from that of modern times an
art to which later sculptors and painters were to turn for inspiration.

Many historians of art have planned their works according to this
concept of inherent growth, a growth in which " individual events and
men sink into insignificance in comparison with the drama of which
they are only acts and actors" (Daniel Gregory Mason). Without mak
ing any attempt to settle the question of creative evolution, we can
undoubtedly say that this is not true. If it were, it would be necessary to
consider the Gregorian chant (a type of music which we have come to
appreciate as one of our most precious tonal treasures), or the secular
and sacred polyphonic music of the Renaissance, or even the works
of the great Sebastian Bach, as merely steps in an orderly progress from
the primitive music of the savages to the contemporary " perfection "
of Stravinsky and Schonberg. And we should have to think of the lovely

DANGERS TO BE REALIZED 9

lute songs of the seventeenth century as being but the early products
of an evolutionary process which was to lead to the later glories of
Schubert and Wolf, whereas these early songs are fully developed enti
ties, beautifully expressive of their time and period.

The best thought on the subject, while recognizing the reality of the
spiritual development of the human race, regards history as a process of
flowering rather than one of continual progress, one of practical and
cultural change rather than of constant improvement. Such changes are
due to a number of causes; but they do not necessarily make any one
period greater or more developed than another. Faure has said that the
Egyptian civilization was the equal of any that has yet appeared on the
earth; and from many aspects this is true, though it reached its zenith,
you will remember, in the fifteenth century B.C. There is no good reason
why we should try to think of the music of Palestrina either as superior
to or inferior to that of Beethoven. Our enjoyment of either is enhanced
if we know why the music of each is typical of the religious, social, and
general intellectual trends of the time in which it was written and how
it differs from the other things of the same period. Then we realize why
it affects us as it does.

Malvina Hoffman, the American sculptress, has said in her auto
biography, Heads and Tales, that the beauty of the Greek civilization as
revealed to her in the architecture and sculpture in Athens made her
" stagger, as if under a series of blows/' a statement which all lovers of
visual beauty will understand. But she does not infer that this beauty
was greater than that which was made manifest during the Renaissance
or than that which is being produced today. It was simply different,
suggestive of the ideals of the culture which gave it birth. And so it has
been through all history.

DANGERS TO BE REALIZED

There are, of course, certain dangers in any attempt to integrate the
arts; the process is not so simple as it seems. In the course of develop
ment, each art has naturally followed certain technical procedures pe
culiar to itself, which may or may not have their counterparts in the

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other arts; and an attempt to interpret these according to the same
principles is bound to result in confusion and misunderstanding.

And there are other difficulties. For one thing, history refuses to be
divided arbitrarily: at the time when the Gothic period was gradually
losing its force and vigor, the Renaissance was nearly at its height and
the Baroque was in the process of being born. Likewise certain styles
appeared earlier and developed more rapidly in some countries than in
others: the Gothic ideal arose in the north and was never fully under
stood in the south of Europe; the Baroque was essentially an Italian
style and never really reached England at all; and we are apt to think of
the Rococo as a purely French influence. Nevertheless the clearer under
standing that results from an integrated treatment of the arts against the
general background of history justifies the employment of such a his
torical method, no matter what the difficulties.

In making the differences between the various periods as clear as pos
sible, we have followed the usual procedure and chosen the epochs
shown on the chart on page 10 as most representative and of scope wide
enough to include all the materials pertinent to the treatment of our
subject. The dates given are, of course, only approximate.

Various classifications of the arts have been made during these differ
ent culture periods. Without maintaining that it can be absolutely justi
fied, we have followed the conventional distinction, usually taken for
granted today, between what have come to be known as the " major "
and the " minor " arts, and have confined our discussions to the former
as being more highly expressive and self-sufficient than the latter. The
difference between these two groups may be realized by comparing the
finest products of the silversmith or the cabinetmaker with the best
architectural, musical, or literary productions. When we refer in general
to art, we mean the arts of music, the dance, architecture, sculpture,
painting, and literature.

THE CONJECTURAL BEGINNINGS

The Origins of Art

They are content to be naked, but ambitious to be fine.

Captain Cook, in writing of the savages of Tierra del Fuego

ART WHAT IS IT?

T^HILOSOPHIES differing widely in point of time and conception
I of ideas have been in general agreement as to the importance in the
life of man of that which we have come to call art. From the time of
man's earliest existence on earth, even perhaps before he had devel
oped a written language, he has been possessed of an impulse to surround
himself with beauty. Sometimes he seems to have been largely concerned
with merely making designs for the pure pleasure of creation; at other
times he has tried to provide himself with beautiful examples of the"
things he had to use every day. As he has developed in experience, he
has attempted, through the expression of his emotions, to establish some
sort of contact between himself and the outer world " to bring into
order the whole world of the gods."

We can find these various aspects of art in the earliest phases of human
development and ca*i trace them through all conditions of society. As
man emerges from the dark chaos of the prehistoric centuries and starts
to form tribes, cities, nations, through all the simple as well as the com
plex processes which have transformed and shaped his life and made
and destroyed his civilizations the power and magilificenCe'-'of' the
Egyptians, the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome,
the turbulence and strife of the Middle Ages, the splendor of the Renais
sance, the exuberance of the Baroque, the grace of the Rococo, the
warmth and sentiment of the Romantic years, into the machine age of
today there has persisted this simple yet essential impulse of man to
produce art. Man seems to have been endowed from the first with a

l6 THE ORIGINS OF ART

certain intuition which has impelled him to create things according to
the laws of proportion and rhythm and has enabled him to invest his
symbols and sounds with eternal beauty and mystery.

Yet, because words are necessarily such poor instruments for convey
ing thought, the same expressions being sometimes employed for dia
metrically opposed ideas, and because in this case the ideas themselves are
so intangible, any exact definition of art seems impossible, although many
have been attempted. The Alexandrian philosopher Plotinus, writing in
the third century after Christ, said that art deals with things that are
beyond human definition; nevertheless, his successors through the age:
have spent a great deal of time and energy trying to explain just what
they considered art to be and how it affects the human consciousness.
It remains today, however, like electricity, one of those great forces
which have tremendous influence on our lives and yet which elude all
attempts at satisfactory definition.

If, however, we are to base such a work as this on the premise that
art is one of the supreme achievements of human endeavor and a repre
sentative activity of the various epochs of human history, we must make
some sort of attempt at describing its characteristics. The best way of
doing this is through an inquiry into the possible origins of this activity
in man. For art has remained essentially the same in spirit throughout
the centuries of its existence, and if we can learn something of the inter
play of forces to which it owes its beginnings, we can be brought to real
ize its essential characteristics and can better explain some of its later,
complex developments.

ANTHROPOLOGY'S CONCLUSIONS

There are two main sources for the materials of such a study: first,
the speculations of the anthropologists * and the archaeologists 2 regard
ing those remains of prehistoric art that have come down to us such

1 In its fullest sense anthropology means the study of man in general, his relation
to his physical character, environment, and culture; in practice it is usually limited to
the study of man in the earliest stages of his advance to full development

2 Archeology treats of man's past life and activities as shown by the relic? and
monuments he has left behind him.

ANTHROPOLOGY S CONCLUSIONS

Courtesy of The American Museum of Natural History, New York

THE ART OF PREHISTORIC MAN

This shows the entrance to one of his caves as a modem artist conceives it. The wall

paintings have been found deep in the recesses of such caves. (From a model of

Castillo Cave, Northern Spain )

things as the pictures drawn and painted on the walls of caves and on
rocks in the various parts of Europe and Africa inhabited by the Stone
Age men and their descendants, as well as the many sculptured objects
which they left behind; and second, the observation of such primitive
societies as still exist, living an elementary hunting life in the wilds of Af
rica and the other places of the globe not yet pre-empted by civilization.

An enormous amount of research has been made along these lines by
various societies and individuals, notably by Professor Frobenius and his
Institute for the Morphology of Civilization, founded at Frankfort on
the Main, Germany. These researches seem to prove that the art which
once existed in Europe lives on today among the descendants of its origi
nators in Africa. So that our knowledge of primitive man, now richer
than ever, gives us definite information from which to draw reasonable
conclusions regarding the life and art of his prehistoric prototypes.

Using all the information at their disposal, anthropologists have de
cided that man appeared in Europe sometime during the first of three

THE ORIGINS OF ART

Court?*!/ of The American .Museum of \atural I/ tutor y, \etf York

POLYCHROME PAINTING OF A BISON (Altamira Cave, Spain)

interglacial or warm periods, which are thought to have occurred between
the four great glaciated epochs when ice covered most of our globe/' 5 The
first beginnings of art that have survived the rock paintings and sculp
ture just mentioned are assumed to have occurred during the last of
these periods, in what is designated as the later Paleolithic period, ex
tending from about 20,000 to 10,000 B.C. These paintings, although
they were executed by men who were still primitive savages living in
caves in the earth, their food provided entirely through the hunt, and who
had no conception of the great benefits that were to conic later through
the development of agriculture, writing, and so forth, are neverthe
less masterpieces far removed from whatever may have been the primi-

8 In a recently published book, Earnest A. Hooton, Professor of Anthropology at
Harvard University, has made an interesting graphic " time clock " of the three bil
hon years which are supposed to represent the age of our earth. By reducing these to
the twelve hours which it takes for the hands to go around the face of a dock, he
shows that man has lived on the earth he is thought to have appeared some four
millions of years ago for only the last 21 seconds of the whole twelve-hour period.
If again we stretch this 21 seconds over a clockface, Mr. Hooton shows that it was
nine o'clock before man began to make his rough stone axes; that at 11.54 he began
to draw and paint pictures, and that fewer than 37 seconds before midnight he dis
covered the use of iron. What we speak of as modern times are, in such a scheme,
merely a fraction of the final second!

ART AS ORNAMENT 3 9

tive sources of art. At what stage, then, in man's long ascent from a
purely animal dependence on nature can we say that conscious art made
its appearance, and what was the nature of its origin? These are ques
tions that can hardly be given anything like scientific answers; but it is
possible to speculate somewhat on these origins in a larger sense and to
trace psychologically some of the probable forces to which the art im
pulse owes its origin.

THE ORIGINS OF ART

If we strip art of the intellectual connotations which civilized man has
given it and try to see it, as far as we can, from the viewpoint of mentali
ties many epochs removed from ours, we realize that it is an activity of
the senses * 4 elemental as the primary emotions of love, hate, and
fear/" We can reasonably conclude that such an activity arose in different
localities as the result of a number of varied influences. Among these
were probably:

1 i ) The innate desire of prehistoric man for ornamenting and dec
orating himself

(2) The serving of some definitely utilitarian purpose

(3) The impulse to imitate nature and the pleasure to be derived
from it

(4) The expression of some kind of sex-consciousness

( 5 ) The usefulness of art as an adjunct to a religion of idolatry

(6) The expression of some emotional necessity which had no direct
connection with ordinary life

ART AS ORNAMENT

There are many who agree with the contentions of Ernst Grosse, who,
in his book The Beginnings of Art, maintains that the first manifesta
tions of an art impulse in prehistoric man came through his desire to
make himself as beautiful and as attractive as possible by painting or
tattooing his body and decorating it with such ornaments as necklaces,
hairdresses, loincloths, and so forth. Such pleasure in adornment is to

20 THE ORIGINS OF ART

be found among all modern primitive peoples: we find them smearing
their bodies with striped bands of paint until they resemble American
barber poles; they blacken their teeth, pull out their ear lobes and pull
down their lips; they pile up their hair into all sorts of odd shapes. All this
activity seems to lead naturally to an elemental development of various
kinds of patterns and compositions.

That this impulse to decorate was transferred to the utensils and im
plements used by early man may readily be seen by examining the lance
heads, throwing sticks, magic wands, and daggers he left behind. Among
the abundant examples of lance heads of worked flint that have been
found in the caves of prehistoric man, there is a set in the British Mu
seum which shows that these heads were often made with a view to
appearance as well as usefulness as weapons, for they have a beautiful
form and show a delicate manipulation of surface structure. One of the
best-known single examples of early mobiliary art is a piece of reindeer
horn which clearly shows the anatomy of a crouching deer, treated in
such a way as to make an admirable dagger handle, the beautifully formed
animal figure lending itself perfectly to the grip of the human hand!
A similar love of design and ornamentation is to be found on early pot
tery and woven stuffs; whether or not it was accidental in origin is of
little moment.* Whatever its first occasion, there is no doubt that the
decorative impulse was a strongly determining force in the art of all
primitive peoples.

ART ARISING FROM USE

Those who believe that the beginnings of art, as well as all its later
developments, served some definitely practical or utilitarian purpose,
argue that the painting of pictures, the making of sculptured objects,
the practice of dancing, even self-adornment, were not isolated phe
nomena, unrelated to the life of primitive man, but a part of the very

* It has been suggested by some that the' geometrical designs on early pottery and
baskets go back to thumbprints or the imprint of instruments necessary to the process
of baking the clay, or to the necessity for using various types of grasses or threads in
the process of weaving.

ART AS AN IMITATION OF NATURE 21

texture of his existence, connected in various ways with such elemental
activities as the obtaining of food, the making of war, and the propaga
tion of the species. Man decorated his weapons and wove his baskets
as he did in order to increase their usefulness. He tattooed his body in
order to increase its sexual attractiveness and to enable him to stand out
as superior to his fellows.

ART AS AN IMITATION OF NATURE

Two of the oldest theories as to the origin of art maintain that it arose
from this source. First, Aristotle 5 observed that from his earliest child
hood man is an imitative animal, naturally drawing likenesses of him
self and his surroundings (we can all remember our own childish activi
ties in this line) and delighting in being able to recognize the original in
the copy. Second, Lucretius 6 traced the origins of music back to an
imitation of natural sounds, such as the songs of birds and the roar of the
wind.

The earliest art we know is full of imitative drawings and paintings
which show that our cave-man ancestors possessed alert powers of ob
servation as well as considerable technical ability as painters. Modern
savages display the same tendencies, tracing or drawing the likenesses of
animals and fish with evident pleasure. The mimetic dances described
later in this chapter, with their imitative poses and suggestive gestures,
are excellent examples of the importance of imitation as a genetic factor
in art; but we must guard against considering it as the only, or even the
most important, factor. While recognizing the importance of truth to na
ture in the representative arts, modern theorists are apt to look on imi
tation as a means for achieving beautiful and significant form rather than
as a purely genetic force.

e The Greek philosopher (384-322 B.C.) who discoursed in his Poetics on the
arts of poetry, music and the dance, sculpture, and painting, but significantly says
nothing about architecture. It would be difficult indeed to attribute a mimetic origin
to this, the most practical of the arts.

6 A Latin poet (96-55 B.C.) whose great poem De rerum natura strove to free his
countrymen from the trammels of superstition and to raise them above their natural
weaknesses.

22 THE ORIGINS OF ART

ART AS AN EXPRESSION OF THE SEX IMPULSE

There are various ways in which this universal human impulse has
affected the production of art, ranging from the sophisticated " com
pensatory satisfactions " derived by civilized man from such things as
his manner of dress, his practice of religion, his creation of art, to the
simplest and most obvious means of all, that of excelling in the matter
of sex rivalries. Primitive man, as we have already observed, used orna
mentation and decoration and dress as means for sex attraction. He tried
to please by showing his prowess in singing a love song or in doing an
athletic dance or in fighting his rivals. And it is natural to suppose that
the primitive woman of the Paleolithic era used much the same means
to attract her man as her modern sister does today.

All sorts of erotic and suggestive dances are common in primitive
societies, as are symbolic painting and sculpture. When we examine the
art work of primitive peoples we find sex characteristics greatly over
emphasized. And many of the large communal religious ceremonies of
primitive, as well as of civilized, peoples have been frankly sexual both
in imagery and in design the ceremonies of the aboriginal natives as
well as the phallic worship of the cultivated Greeks.

Because the popular doctrines of certain sects hold that all art is a sort
of disguised manifestation of inarticulate sex feelings, rebellious because
thwarted, the theory that art is closely related to sex has been recently
overemphasized. There is no doubt that there is a close connection of a
subtle as well as a direct type. The sexual impulse can be made to account
for some of the loveliest things in art; but we must remember that a great
deal of art has not been touched by it at all.

THE ARTIST AS PRIEST

Another theory of the beginnings of art, one which until recently has
had a wide vogue and which serves to explain many of the details of that
art with which we are primarily concerned music treats all art as an
adjunct to and outgrowth of magic and religion. The sculptured figures
which primitive man left behind him are thought to have been some

ART AN EXPRESSION OF FEELINGS 27

sort of idols or fetishes intended as offerings to the gods; the paintings
on the cave walls were designed to insure, through the practice of a kind
of magic power, the capture of animals necessary for existence; and music
was thought to have grown out of a type of dancing that was originally
ritualistic in its import.

ART AS AN INDIVIDUALISTIC EXPRESSION OF THE
FEELINGS AND EMOTIONS

But there are many for whom none of these explanations, singly or all
together, are satisfactory: they feel that art has arisen from something
more than mere utility, sex, or the impulse to adorn or to imitate. In
the previously mentioned book, The Beginnings of Art, Grosse expresses
this idea by saying that an artistic activity is not necessarily entered upon
as a means toward any end, but it is an " indefeasible faculty of man "
and exists as an end in itself, without any connection with practical
activities. Dr. Him of Helsingfors thus sums up the opinions of most
writers on aesthetics on this subject:

' " Most metaphysicians as well as psychologists, Hegelians as well as
Darwinians, all agree in declaring that a work or performance which
serves any utilitarian, nonaesthetic object cannot be considered as a
genuine work of art. True art has its one end in itself, and rejects every
extraneous purpose: that is the doctrine which, with more or less exact
ness, has been stated by Kant, Schiller, Spenser, and others, and popular
opinion agrees in this respect with the conclusions of science."

This may be interpreted to mean that art is an individualistic render
ing in a communicable form of the spiritual reactions established be
tween man and the outer world, an objectified representation of some
experience through which he has lived or by which he has been stimu
lated. While these expressions have nothing to do with practical reali
ties, they are communicated in such a vivid way as to arouse in the
reader, hearer, or observer reactions which in varying measure corre
spond to those which moved the artist. It is this power of art to stir
feeling, to arouse emotions, to influence attitudes, and to affect thought
which has made it one of the most important factors in human history.

THE ORIGINS OF ART

Courtesy of The American Museum of Natural History, Now York

A prehistoric artist has made his conception of a mammoth conform to the size and

shape of the elephant tusk on which he has drawn it, thus producing a real work of

art. (From Dordogne, France; now in the Museum of Archaeology, Paris)

THE PURPOSE OF ART

Fortunately any rational study of the early manifestations of the art
spirit in primitive peoples makes us realize that we do not need to hold
exclusively to any of these beliefs. If we trace the manifold causes and
influences which account for the significant importance of artistic cre
ation in the world today, we can but conclude that it is impossible to
select one of these exclusively to the neglect of the others. We need not
believe either that art is strictly utilitarian, something woven into the
very stuff of human existence and always associated with other values,
such as religion, morality, and idealism, nor that it is entirely ideological,
existing only for its own sake. The evidences made available through com
paratively recent discoveries of prehistoric art objects in Europe and in
Africa point to the fact that, at least from the Stone Age on, art has
served both purposes and has been influenced by many factors.

The naturalistic paintings and carvings of the cave dwellers of two
hundred centuries ago may have been created for the sheer delight
which their achievement gave to those who placed them on the dark
walls of their caves; but they also probably had a practical, utilitarian

THE BEGINNINGS OF MUSIC: RHYTHM 2^

purpose that of a magical propitiation of the gods or of acquisition of
a command over animals desired for food. Primitive man probably
thought of these painted animals as some sort of magic symbols and put
them where he did in order to assure the capture of the real ones.

The magnificent temples and monumental sculpture of Egypt were but
means for assuring the souls of the kings a life after death. " Sculpture
and painting to the Greeks were not merely a medium for aesthetic
pleasure; they were means for expressing and interpreting national life.
As such they were subordinated to religion: the primary end of sculpture
was to make statues of gods and heroes; the primary end of painting was
to represent mythological scenes; and in either case the purely aesthetic
pleasure was also a means to the religious experience " (Croiset: Hellenic
Civilization) . It is not necessary to do more than remind ourselves of the
fact that architecture, rnusic ? sculpture, and painting of the Christian era
up to the time of the Renaissance were conditioned almost entirely by
the aims and beliefs of the Church; yet we can hardly say that the artists
who executed these art works were not sincerely concerned with them
from the aesthetic point of view, as expressions of pure beauty.

Richard Wagner was certainly moved by the erotic instinct to write
some of his greatest music, and there is no doubt that sex played an
important role in producing the salty exuberance of Rabelais; but to say
that neither artist was seriously concerned with the production of work
of highest aesthetic value is gravely to misunderstand these men.

THE BEGINNINGS OF MUSIC: RHYTHM

A close study of the origins of our own art will show the same duality
of purpose. Among the earliest peoples the arts which we have come
to distinguish as music, poetry, and the dance were united in one com
mon whole the regulating force of which was rhythm, a factor which
determined alike words, music, and dance figures. This united art played
as important a role in the ideological and religious life of these early
people as it did in their everyday existence.

In his book Arbeit und Rhythmus Karl Biicher has established the fact
that the dance was a constant and persevering feature of the life of

THE ORIGINS OF ART

4|r

DANCE OF WOMEN
Rock painting from South Africa (Copied by George W. Stowe, 1867)

The following remarks by a present-day Bushman help in interpreting this early
painting: " They seem to be dancing, for they are stamping with their legs. This man
who stands in front seems to be showing the people how to dance, that is why he holds
a stick. He feels that he is a great man, so he holds the dancing stick, because he is
one who dances before the people, that they may dance after him. The people know
that he is one who dances first, because he is a great sorcerer,"

primitive man. " All people dance/' he says/ " dance till they arc in a
frenzy and their physical powers exhausted, often until the dancers sink
fainting to the earth/' Such a dance might have developed out of some
sort of uncoordinated, spontaneous movement of the body, perhaps
arising from a surplus of animal vigor, resulting in the kind of capering
and flinging about of the body, with accompanying shouts and cries, that
we see when a boy and his dog take their morning walk together. Or
the early dancers may have imitated the appearance and movements of
animals as they had observed them while hunting, a procedure that can
be observed in the play of young children and which illustrates Aris
totle's theory as to artistic creation being an imitation of nature.

7 Another writer on early music, Wallaschek, has said that there has never been
dance without music of some sort.

AN ADDED FACTOR: MELODY 2J

But whatever the beginnings, nothing in the way of art was achieved un
til some sort of control was applied to such movements. By applying the
principle of the rhythmic beat (the repetition of a measured sequence
of strokes or sounds), our progenitors systematized and co-ordinated the
movements of their dances so as to make them pleasurable and effective.
That there is a psychological effect in the repetition of rhythms for the
production of emotional states was probably discovered early. The hyp
notic effect of monotonous repetition and the exciting effect of accelera
tion of speed and vehemence can still be observed in the ritualistic
dances of primitive peoples both orgiastic dances and war dances.
The realization of these effects may well have been the source of dance
rhythm. At any rate, rhythm probably antedated melody, since it seemed
capable of satisfying both emotional and intellectual instincts of primi
tive man such as were shown in his simple ordering of the objects he
strung together in a necklace or the making of patterns in his drawings.

AN ADDED FACTOR: MELODY

Many theories have been advanced as to how man first began to make
melody. Herbert Spencer thought that singing was the result of some
intense emotion influencing the organs of speech and respiration so
strongly as to produce sounds, a fact that is shown by our natural grunt
ing while working or screaming when in pain. Darwin thought that it
originated in some sort of love call from man to his mate. Grosse be
lieved that song, as we have suggested of the dance, was some form of
play. Others have thought that it may have resulted from some biological
necessity or the attempts of the members of a group to co-ordinate their
work so as to make it most effective. A more recent theory, one which
does little honor to the memory of the great names in German philoso
phy, is that which bears the striking imprint of the Nazi Kultusministe-
rium to the effect that the art which this people has so signally enriched
had its beginnings in the strident war calls of the early Teutonic nations,
echoing and re-echoing from hilltop to hilltop. It is hardly necessary to
add that such a theory would receive scant credence outside the intensely
nationalistic circles of the totalitarian states.

THE ORIGINS OF ART

Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art

This picture of the dancing men behind a cow, with the fragments of three large

giraffes in the background, was found in one of the greatest of African deserts, the

Libyan. Dynamic and colorful, it is an example of the Levant tradition.

MUSIC AND MAGIC

There is probably some truth in all these ideas. Sorokin has well said
that it is likely that primitive people sang when they became excited or
when they had an overabundance of energy or merely because they en
joyed it, because singing and dancing are pleasant and biologically useful.
But undoubtedly one of the principal uses which primitive man found
for music and dancing was in the performing of acts of magic. Religion
was of great significance in the life of prehistoric society 7 just as it is
today in primitive communities. In its practice, as we have pointed out,
one of the chief activities was that of the performance of certain occult

MUSIC AND MAGIC 2Q

formulas and prescribed rituals in order to obtain the favor of the gods.
These rites seemed to have been carried out according to certain con
tracts which it was believed the gods had revealed and to which man
had agreed. Some of the tribes came in time to believe that the objects
of their desire could be obtained through the potency of the magic rites
themselves, without participation of the gods. It was in this manner that
music came to be thought of as having a special meaning.

Combarieu maintains that, if we are to believe the evidence of mod
ern primitives, there were in these prehistoric societies magic dance
incantations for all purposes for communicating with the spirits, for
subduing animals, for obtaining rain or good weather, for inspiring love,
for aid in childbearing, for assuring the birth of a boy, for obtaining
vengeance, for bringing back the spirits of the dead, for appeasement of
evil spirits, and so on. We have no idea, of course, as to the musical
nature of these incantations, aside from assuming that they were much
like those used among modern primitive peoples. But there is little doubt
that prehistoric man attached definite significance not only to the sounds
themselves but to the religious-magical values they represented.

So, too, with the dance movements associated with these rites. Sav
ages have a large number of magic dances, many of which are accompa
nied by both vocal and instrumental music dances of the chase, where
the figures imitate animals such as kangaroos, bears, wolves, and otters;
war dances, in which the actual movements of battle are imitated in
order to inculcate courage and insure victory; dances for celebrating the
conclusions of treaties between tribes, and so on. One of the most im
portant writers on the origins of civilization, Lubbock, says that among
savages and uncultured people the dance was never thought of as an
amusement without significance but always as a serious occupation and
a necessary factor in all the activities of communal life.

Travelers in uncivilized parts of the globe have brought back plenty
of accounts of such dances. Brown has cited some of them, notably one
taken from a book published in 1878, The Aborigines of Victoria, ac
cording to which the assembly dances of the natives of Central Australia
were held around a large fire, in front of which stood the conductor or
leader, a native of distinction, who indicated the rhythm by means of

MH-4

THE ORIGINS OF ART

AUMa Catti-Pix

A PRESENT-DAY MAMBUTI PYGMY

He enacts in dance pantomime the fight which he had with a leopard whose hide is

seen in the foreground.

the two staves of office which he struck together. On one side were the
women, squatting on the ground with opossum skins stretched between
their knees, upon which they beat with their fists. We do not have to
follow the description of the dance in its details to realize that all its
movements, engaged in simultaneously by a large number of individuals,
were performed in perfect time. At one moment there was a uniform
shout from all the performers, and the description suggests that it
sounded as if it had been uttered by a single throat.

Another dance described was of a mimetic kind and represented with
the utmost accuracy the browsing of a herd of cattle in a glade, the
movements of the creatures being reproduced with careful attention to
detail; then came a raid by a party of whites, perfectly camouflaged, and
a combat between them and the natives. Very likely such mimetic dances
were used in paleolithic days, for there are a number of figures in the

THE USE OF INSTRUMENTS

Attilio Qatti-Pix

VICTORY BALL

Music for the dance celebrating a successful hunt is supplied by tom-toms on which
the Mambuti drummers beat a rhythm with the palms of their hands.

art of the period which suggest such practices* How highly organized
they were and whether they were carried out in strict time we have no
way of knowing; but that they were, in contrast to the modern gym
nastic conception of the art, of magical nature, we are certain. When or
how they developed into such a form as that shown by the Greeks we
do not know, but it is likely that the change came rather early.

THE USE OF INSTRUMENTS

From the very beginnings of his music making man was furnished by
nature with two very serviceable instruments, his voice and his hands.
The wind instruments which he developed, flutes and reeds, are but
" prolongations " of the voice, means to increase its natural force and
quality. So the various percussive instruments which he made, drums,

32 THE ORIGINS OF ART

castanets, and so forth, were developments of the idea of clapping to
gether his hands or beating in gorilla-fashion on his breast, for the
purpose of indicating rhythm. The origin of the stringed instruments
was possibly the hunter's bow with which he shot his arrows. Even today
the savages of Central Africa speak of the bow as the source of all music,
Modern archaeological research has unearthed in Mesopotamia what
is supposed to be the oldest instrument known to man a double pipe
made of bone. This was probably human, since it was the custom of
primitive man to use parts of the human skeleton for such a purpose.
The experts have figured that this instrument was made during the
Chalcolithic Age, a period between the Bronze Age and the Stone Age,
some three thousand years before Christ. It seems that all three of the
instruments which appear first in history the pipe, the drum, and the
harp originated in Asia and were quickly distributed over the world
then known.

IN CONCLUSION

Even such a cursory survey of the probable beginnings of art as this
, should show the student that although it is impossible to say just when
and in response to what forces it first appeared, it has always been one
of the most important factors in the life of man. Nor is it necessary to
dogmatize regarding such a long-continuing, universal, and diverse
force. From the very beginning man's creative tendencies in art seem to
have taken two definite directions, the ideological leading to abstrac
tions and the utilitarian leading to achievement of material, realistic
form. The proportion of each of these has varied in the different arts in
different countries at different times: at one period there has been a
dominance of one ideal; at another, the opposite has prevailed- But if we
can realize that from the very first these aims have existed concurrently
and that both have been important factors in the production of art, we
shall avoid many of the misunderstandings that inevitably seem to result
from works on the appreciation of art*

Music in flie Life of the Near East

Thy dawning is beautiful in the horizon of heaven,
O living Aton, Beginning of lite!
When thou risest in the eastern horizon of heaven
Thou fillest eveiy land with thy beauty.

From a hymn by Amenhotep (IHinaton)

THE CRADLE OF CIVILIZATION

nnilERE is a wide and so far unexplained gap between the arts we
I have described as having been produced by primitive man and those
created by the earliest " civilized " peoples. What happened in between
has long been the subject of continued research on the part of eager
archaeologists anxious to solve the riddle of how the cave man developed
into the Egyptian architect or the Sumerian poet. As Durant lias re
marked, there are not many finer things in man's rather sorry existence
than this noble curiosity, this restless passion for understanding his past.
These researchers have come to the conclusion that the beginning of
civilization took place in the restricted area lying at the eastern end
of the Mediterranean somewhere around 5000 B.C. 1 As to just which
civilization was the earliest to develop or what people first evolved the
idea of conscious art, opinion seems divided. Both the Mesopotamian
valley and the Egyptian valley have their supporters among the scholars;
but the majority of opinions at present seem to favor the first and to
suggest that at the time our Stone Age forefathers in Europe were still
without written language or organized communities, there had devel
oped in the Mesopotamian peninsula a technique of life which was later
transferred to posterity intact in all its essentials.

1 Professor Woolley of the University of Pennsylvania, in "his researches at Ur
estimated that the Sumerians appeared to have reached civilization by 4500 B,c,

MUSIC IN THE LIFE OF THE NEAR EAST

EUROP

MEDITERRANEAN-
SEA

REFERENCE

- EXPEDITIONS OF THE. ORIENTAL
INSTITUTE. EXCEPT THE PREHISTORIC
SURVEY EXPEDITION. WHICH IS A
MOBILE UNIT
83 - FERTILE CRESCENT

Courtesy of The Oriental Institute of Chicago

Directly east -of the- Mediterranean Sea lies trie so-called Fertile Crescent, the region

where the early civilizations worked out the techniques of life which they transmitted

to the modern world through Greece and Rome.

THE SUMERIANS

One of the great romances of archaeology, a science in which there is
much more of romance than the layman generally realizes, has been the
recent unearthing of this civilization which represents the first evidences
we have of anything like a complete culture and which was, until these
investigations were undertaken during the latter part of the last century,
entirely unknown. The manner in which this discovery was made seems
almost fantastic.

During their study of the cuneiform writing of the Babylonians,
archaeologists gradually became convinced that much of this writing,
because of its non-Semitic character, must have been borrowed from an
earlier race; and, without knowing that such a people had actually ex
isted, the scholars posited them and gave them the name of Sumerians*

THE SUMERIANS

Courtesy of The Oriental Institute of Chicago

Aerial photography has been an invaluable aid to the modern archaeologist, since it
reveals the lines of old cities which are invisible from the ground. This picture is
an air view of a reconstruction of Khafaje, the great oval enclosing a Sumerian temple

Of 3000 B.C.

A few years later, two English archaeologists, working in the Tigris-
Euphrates Valley, uncovered the sites of a number of cities in which
some pre-Babylonian race had lived Ur ? which was already rich and
powerful in the year 3000 B.G., Eridu, and Urak. Later investigations
have revealed other important cities of these people, among them Kish,
the seat of the oldest culture so far found in these regions, and Agade,
capital of the ancient kingdom of Akkad.

Owing to the fortunate fact that by the time the Sumerians had made
their brief appearance on the rapidly changing stage of history the art
of writing had become fully developed, we have been able to reconstruct
this earliest of civilizations in detail. In spite of the fact that Sumerian
research is still in its infancy, we know much of its historical background,
its economic and social life, its religious beliefs and practices, and its gov
ernment, arts, and letters.

MUSIC IN THE LIFE OF THE NEAR EAST

Courtesy of The "University Museum* Phttaddphia

SILVER BOAT-SHAPED LYRE
(From the Royal Tombs at Ur, about 3000 B.C.)

The Sumerian epoch, stretching roughly from 4000 B.C. to 2300 B.C.,
has been called a synthesis of beginnings. In some respects primitive
enough, it nevertheless represents many " firsts " among man's activities
his first-known codes of law, his first use of irrigation, his first states
and seigniories, his first use of gold and silver as tokens of value, his first
business practices, including the use of a credit system, his first litera
ture, and his first architectural vault and dom^. The most striking fea
ture of this epoch was, as we have intimated/ the use of writing, evi
dently considered in the beginning merely a a tool for such business
transactions as the production of bills, receipts, and shipments. Then
it was taken up by the priests, who used it for the preservation of their
magic formulas, ritualistic rubrics, hymns, and prayers; and so it became
literature. The known origins of this art may be sought in such Sumerian
hymns and prayers as that of the great Gudea, noblest of the Sumerian
kings, addressed to the patron goddess of Lagash, his city, and written
about 2600 B.C.:

MUSIC AMONG THE SUMERIANS 37

" O my Queen, the Mother who established Lagash,
The people on whom thou lookest is rich in power;
The worshiper on whom thou lookest, his life is prolonged.
I have no mother thou art my mother;
I have no father thou art my father . . .
My goddess Bau, thou knowest what is good;
Thou hast given me the breath of life.
Under the protection of thee, my Mother,
In thy shadow I will reverently dwell."

Translated by Jastrow in TJie Civilization of Babylonia and Assyria

If we can trust the accounts on the thousands of clay tablets on which
the Sumerian priests recorded the history of their civilization, it is likely
that such prayers and hymns were chanted to music. There are a num
ber of descriptions of worship in which these were used, accompanied by
pipe, lyre, and drum.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MUSIC AMONG THE SUMERIANS

As has been true all through its history, one of music's principal uses
in this early civilization was in connection with religion. We have already
spoken of the fact that primitive man was certainly cognizant of the
peculiar capacity of music for stirring the emotions. A Sumerian clay
tablet of the twenty-sixth century B.C. attributes the same power to it:

" To fill with joye the Temple court
And chase the Citie's gloome awaie,
The harte to still, the passions calme,
Of weeping eyes the teares to staie."

Translated by Francis W. Galpin 2

2 In his book The Music of the Sumerians and Their Immediate Successors, the
Babylonians & Assyrians. This is by far the most exhaustive study yet made of the
music of these early peoples. In it Galpin appraises the effect of Sumerian music
and song and states definitely that the Sumerians or their compatriots, the Akkads,
had discovered a means of writing down their music centuries before the Greeks, to
whom we have hitherto looked for the earliest efforts in this direction, evolved their
systems of notation.

The book contains an example of a Sumerian hymn of creation transcribed into
our modern notation by Galpin, who thinks that it was based on a seven-tone diatonic
scale with the fourth step augmented C ,D,E,F# AA,B,C and that its rhythm

MUSIC IN THE LIFE OF THE NEAR EAST

Courtesy of The University Museum, Philadelphia.

A LARGE TEMPLE LYRE FROM UR (about 2700 B.C.)
The bull's head is of gold, with lapis-lazuli beard and shell inlays.

There was only the loosest sort of political unity in the Sumerian gov
ernment, each group maintaining its own patesi or priest Icing and ac
knowledging the power of a principal emperor only when one arose with
personality enough to make them his subjects. So in the Sumerian re
ligion there was no universal god, but rather a diverse number of deities
belonging to the different city-states and associated with the various
phases of human activity.

and stress were entirely dependent on the words, which must have been delivered, in
part at least, in a sort of free recitative.

It should be added that scholars do not agree on this matter. Dr, Curt Sachs in
the Archfv f tir Musikwissenschaf t, April, 1925, maintains that this notation, found on a
tablet at Assur, shows the Sumerian scale to have had a nonchromatic pentatonic basis.

MUSIC AMONG THE SUMERIANS 39

Most of these gods lived in temples, where they were liberally provided
by their priests with money, food, and even wives. In addition to the
gods there were spirits, beneficent as well as evil, seeking to possess the
Sumerian soul. Music was used in the worship of these temples, where
the priests were wont to deliver the revealed word of the god to the people
to the solemn accompaniment of the harp, a fact which caused this instru
ment to be thought of as that of the " decision of fate." There were
likewise music forces of liturgists and psalmists, both men and women,
in the temples, trained to sing and play in praise of the god. A late
account describes these forces as consisting of an orchestra, led by a
harp, with a seven-stringed lyre, a two-stringecl lute, pipes, and so forth,
and a large group of singers.

That there was Sumerian secular music as well as sacred music is shown
clearly by a catalogue which has been found of a music library of the
time, listing, in addition to liturgical and psalmodic music, folk songs
for craftsmen and shepherds, poems of victory and heroism, and love
songs for both sexes. All these, according to Galpin's ideas, were with
out the modal characteristics which are to be found in later music and
would sound more congenial to modern cars than would, for instance,
the music of the Greeks.

Their musical scale is not the only thing in the Sumerian culture
which would seem congenial to modern man; for many Sumerian ideals
were absorbed by later peoples and so have become the common heritage
of the ages. The exorcising power of music, later exemplified by the
playing of the Hebrew shepherd David before King Saul; the attribution
of some of man's powers to animals, an idea which persisted in the
Orpheus legend and which is to be found as late as Gothic times, when
the sculptors and wood carvers loved to depict animals playing instru
ments; the "blowing up of the trumpet in the new moon/' a later
religious practice of the Jews; the story of the Flood, adopted by the
writers of the Old Testament all these were part of Sumerian con
sciousness and so were absorbed into history.

The significant fact for musicians, however, is that the Sumerian art
when it first appears in known history occupies a position that was not
very different from that of later times. In other words, when music made

40 MUSIC IN THE LIFE OF THE NEAR EAST

its advent, it was as a fully established art, one which played an impor
tant role in the life of its time and established its standing for centuries
to come. It was used in connection with religious services; it was thought
to possess definite powers of magic; officially it was recognized by the
state and religious authorities, although there are evidences that it was
likewise pursued for pleasure's sake, in a " wine, woman, and song "
sense; it was both vocal and instrumental, employing the services of
many instruments, among them harps, lyres (both these types favorite
instruirtfents for accompanying the voice), flutes, drums, reed pipes,
double as well as single, and, in a later, more decadent phase, trumpets,
timbrels, and rattles (sistra); it passed through various developments,
reaching a " golden " period, after which it became more and more
sensual. In all these characteristics it differed little from its use in the
other civilizations which appeared in the Near East Egyptian, Baby
lonian, Assyrian, and Hebrew.

THE EGYPTIANS

A modern archaeologist has said that we know more about the details
of the daily life in the Egypt of the fourteenth century B.C. than we do
about those of England in the fourteenth century A.D. But such knowl
edge unfortunately does not extend to the field of music. There are two
reasons for this: first, the fact that the Egyptians interested themselves
a great deal more in the arts of sculpture and architecture than they did
in music; and second, the fact that the musical practices were largely
in the hands of the priests, who regarded them as magical and sacred
influences in the lives of the people and hence as something to be care
fully and secretly protected. No change or development was to be thought
of. They would not even take the chance of revealing their secret by
writing it down. As in other early cultures, the whole musical system of
Egypt was subjected to such " rigid religious and hierarchal laws that it
remained at its primitive form . . . and represents an immovable block
which resists the assault of the centuries " (H. Wollett). 8

8 He is writing of Chinese music, but his statement applies with equal truth to
Egyptian.

Archives Photographiques

FRAGMENT OF A SUMERIAN BAS-RELIEF

This shows what is evidently a religious procession. Several of the figures bear in their

hands utensils that were dedicated to the rites of that time. Underneath, two figures

provide accompanying music: one seems to be singing, and the other playing a large

lyre similar to that recently discovered at Ur.

42 MUSIC IN THE LIFE OF THE NEAR EAST

We have already said that scholars are not agreed as to the priority
of Sumerian to Egyptian civilization and that some of them, notably
the great American Egyptologist Breasted, consider that it was the other
way about that whatever ideas of agriculture and civilization the
Sumerians may have possessed came to them from Egypt. However that
maybe, with the exception of music the Egyptians developed that which
they may have borrowed from their neighbors to the northeast into a
civilization which was not only one of the most robust and powerful
but also one of the most polished in history. In spite of the advanced
conditions in agriculture and industry which were to be found in ancient
Egypt, its remarkable developments in science and letters, its well-
organized system of government, with a longer record of duration than
any other people has since attained, its advancement of science and edu
cation, the greatest achievements of Egyptian civilization, everything
considered, were its architecture, sculpture, painting, and applied art.
It is quite possible, as Faure has said, that " Egypt, through the solidarity,
the unity, and the disciplined variety of its artistic products, through
the enormous duration and the sustained power of its effort, offers the
spectacle of the greatest civilization that has yet appeared on the earth."
And Herr Ranke in his introduction to that book which givesf the best
of all possible records of this civilization, The Art of Ancient Egypt,
agrees that this art, in the course of the transformation which it under
went during the three kingdoms, 4 represents one of the greatest achieve
ments of human creation.

THE ARTS OF EGYPT

During the whole period of Egyptian history, from its earliest fixed
date of 4241 B.C., art seems to have served the material and spiritual
needs of the people: each tomb or statue or carving had a definite pur
pose to serve. The chief use of art was in religion, where it was em-

4 The term kingdom is not used here in its usual sense; it refers rather to long
periods of time, each of them comprising several dynasties. The usual division is as
follows: Old Kingdom, 2980-2475 B.C.; Middle Kingdom, 2160-1788 B.C.; New
Kingdom, 1586-1150 B.C.

King Khephren with Royal Headdress
and Sacred Falcon

King Amenemhet as Sphinx (about

l820 B.C.)

Hall of Granite Pillars in the Lower

Part of King Khephren's Funerary

Temple (about 2850 B.C,)

Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Colonnade of the Temple of Queen
Hatshepsut (about 1500 B.C.)

THE ART OF THE OLD AND MIDDLE KINGDOMS

44 MUSIC IN THE LIFE OF THE NEAR EAST

ployed to manifest the belief of man's continued life after his existence
here upon earth. The tombs of the prehistoric chieftains were filled with
objects which were thought to be of use in their life after death. The
huge Old Kingdom Pyramids of Cheops and Khephren were attempts to
memorialize the names of their creators in an impressive fashion that
man could never forget, as well as to provide an eternal resting place
for the bodies of these god kings. The rock tombs of the Middle King
dom, the mural paintings and funerary statues, the figures and articles of
jewelry and utensils placed in the tombs, which now give us a detailed
picture of the life of the time, all fulfilled the same purpose of serving
the dead. It is in the New Kingdom that the greatest glory is to be
found: royal funerary temples hidden in out-of-the-way valleys; temples at
Luxor and Karnak built for the luxury-loving monarchs in honor of the
foremost of all gods, Amon; beautiful fresco paintings adorning the tomb
walls with scenes from real life; and curiously modern sculptural por
trait heads and figures. -,

One of the outstanding developments of this New Kingdom was the
attempt of the " heretic king," Ikhnaton, to abandon the traditional
religion and social organizations which he had received from his fathers
in favor of a monotheism which transcended national bounds. This spir
itual and social rebellion brought about an aesthetic revolution which,
instead of following the impersonal conventions of the traditional sculp
ture and painting, inspired a series of portrait sculptures which are among
the most amazing and enjoyable things in the whole range of the art.
But Hdinaton, a poet and a visionary rather than a practical ruler, was
far ahead of his time, and after him Egypt returned to the old order
of imperialism and artistic convention. The priests deliberately de
stroyed all the manifestations of Ikhnaton's reforming spirit and saw to
it that the old order of privilege and prosperity was restored. Slow decay
ensued, a decay which paralleled the gradual lessening of the energy of
the nation, a decay which, however, was stayed long enough for the artists
and sculptors and poets of the Saite period (663-525 B.C.) to gather to
gether the traditions of their great predecessors, and so prepare them
for transference to the Greek, Persian, and Roman conquerors who were
to come.

Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

COLONNADE IN THE TEMPLE OF KARNAK (about 1250 B.C.)

Notice the luxuriant style of the New Kingdom in comparison with the architecture
of the Old and Middle Kingdoms.

MH-5

MUSIC IN THE LIFE OF THE NEAR EAST

Affi/ptimhes Museum, Berlin

KING AMENHOTEP (Ikhnaton)
About 1370 B.C.

Thus rooted in the religious conceptions and practical needs of the
people, Egyptian architectural and sculptural art flourished. We see it
early freeing itself from archaic rigidity and rising to heights which have
hardly been surpassed by the artistic achievements of any other country.

THE PLACE OF MUSIC

We can hardly say the same about Egyptian music. There is abundant
evidence in the tomb paintings, bas-reliefs ? and so forth, that it played
much the same role in the lives of the Egyptians as it had in those of
the Sumerians. During the first and second kingdoms the priests looked
upon it as invaluable in approaching the gods and in invoking their
aid for assuring immortality. As in Sumeria, these priests lived in the
luxurious temples of the gods; they ate and drank the sacrifices and liba
tions offered to the gods; their considerable revenue was derived from the
rental of temple lands and the fees which they demanded for their serv-

THE PLACE OF MUSIC 47

ices; they were exempt from most taxation and from all enforced labor.
Such prestige, together with their learning, gave them a position of great
influence. In time they came into concurrence with the civil power. The
king was looked upon as the chief priest of the faith, and thus both
church and state, as in so many later civilizations, secured continuance.

The chief duties of the priests were the performance of rites and the
invocation of spells designed to secure the help of the gods. Among the
rites with which we are familiar was one which Plato thought must have
been invented by a god, for its " ingenuity was entirely divine " the
Dance of the Stars. This was a special sort of ritual,, evidently designed
to show the whole cosmic order rather than to supplicate any special
divinity, and was danced entirely within the temple precincts, without
audience, Kirstein (in his book The Dance, a Short History of Classic
Theatrical Dancing) describes its choregraphy as probably devised by
astronomer priests and centering about a fixed altar which represented
the sun, the dancers, clad in brilliant robes, making signs of the zodiac
with their hands and turning rhythmically from east to west, following
the course of the planets. After the completion of each circle, the dancers
remained immobile in representation of the constancy of the earth. Thus,
by combining miming and plastic movements, the priests represented
the harmonies of the celestial system and the laws of the universe in a
manner that must have been much like that of the modern abstract
ballet. Bands of female singing dancers were kept in all the temples for
the honoring of the god, and the royal and princely houses maintained
similar groups, which were often used for secular purposes as well. Thus
music existed in the life of the Egyptians, as in that of the other early
civilizations, as an accessory but not as an independent art.

Flutes and harps (the latter an Egyptian invention, first found in the
monuments of the fourth dynasty, the time of the building of the
Pyramids) were the chief instruments used. At first hand clapping accom
panied the dances. To this was later added the more subtle means of
accentuating the rhythm afforded by the sistrum (a sort of rattle that was
made of wood, porcelain, or enamel) and the drum, both of which instru
ments first appeared about 2500 B.C. If we are to judge by appearances,
these religious rites demanded slow music and graceful dances.

48 MUSIC IN THE LIFE OF THE NEAR EAST

But music during the first two kingdoms was no prerogative of the
priests. A picture dating from 4000 B.C. shows a secular use of the flute
a child in a fox's skin trying to attract the attention of other animals by
playing a flute (the Orpheus concept again!). And Ptah-hotcp, prime
minister of the fifth dynasty and, incidentally, author of the oldest work
on philosophy known to us, gives a description of how he enjoyed his
music while being barbered," manicured, and pedicured. There is an
atmosphere of almost Hollywoodian luxuriance about the scene pet
animals, including monkeys, wander about as he sits in his palace; there'
are flowers and fruits in front of him, servants wait on him, and musi
cians play for him.

NEW-KINGDOM LUXURIANCE

The New Kingdom marked the zenith of Egyptian glory: Thutmosis
III in a series of fifteen campaigns made his country the master of the
world then known, conquering and annexing the Syrians and drawing
their enormous wealth into Egypt for the creation of art and for the
preparation of new conquests. It was during this period that Asiatic
luxuries were introduced such instruments as the cithara with its
five to eighteen strings, played either with a plectrum or the fingers;
the oboe; the guitar, with two or three strings and a long neck (thought
to be so e^QQinate by the priests that they tried to prohibit its use);
the harp, which in its earlier form had been only about five feet high
and possessed six or eight strings, now taking a larger form, having
ten, fifteen, or even twenty strings and a highly decorated frame orna
mented with inlays of gold, silver, or lapis lazuli; and the drum, which
was enlarged and, together with the trumpet (of small scale and sound
ing, according to Plutarch, like the " bray of an ass ") was used for mili
tary purposes. Music lost its former simplicity and the dances evidently
became much livelier. Significant is the fact that, beginning with the
New Kingdom, the bas-reliefs show only women as flute players. Instru
mental music at least seemed to have become the sole privilege of femi
nine musicians, perhaps on the theory that it was considered beneath th<
dignity of men.

NEW-KINGDOM LUXURIANCE 49

We see, in the mural tomb decorations of this period, fashionable peo
ple sitting at banquets and being amused by flute players and dancing
girls. We hear the song of a blind harper, accompanied by flutes and
strings, a song filled with the inscrutable mystery of death:

** The generations pass away ?
While other remain,
Since the time of the ancestors,
The gods who were aforetime,
Who rest in their pyramids.
Nobles and the glorious departed likewise,
Entombed in their pyramids . .
Their place is no more. . . ,

" Behold the places thereof;
Their walls are dismantled,
Their places are no more,
As if they had never been.

" None cometh from thence
That he may tell us how they fare;
That he may tell us of their fortunes,
That he may content our heart,
Until we too depart
To the place whither they have gone."

Translated by Breasted in The Dawn of Conscience

But there is no reason to believe that the collective mind of Egypt
dwelt only thus imaginatively on the long sleep of death; for Weigall has
shown conclusively that the Egyptians were at heart a gay people, given
to the pleasures of this life. If their speculations led them to ponder the
inevitability of death, they came to the conclusion that while man is here
on earth he might as well enjoy himself. And so, this Egyptologist in
sists, there was in Egypt sunshine, laughter, and feasting as well as mystic
contemplation. Music was a means for increasing enjoyment: there are
hieroglyphs signifying " songs of the harem " and " songs by domestic
singers " as well as " songs by the singers of god." We know even the
names of some of these pleasure-providing singers; and the boasts of
Snefru and Remery-Ptah that they have " fulfilled every wish of the king
by their beautiful singing " sound strangely like those of later times!

Rijksmutteum, Leydm, Holland

THE BLIND HARPER

Accompanied by strings and flutes, the blind harper plays and sings his song of the

mystery of death, while a priest offers sacrifices. The words of the song are inserted

above. This is the finest record now extant of music's place in the life of ancient

Egypt. (XVIII Dynasty, about 1350 B.C.; from a limestone relief)

THE BABYLONIANS AND THE ASSYRIANS 51

TOE BABYLONIANS AND THE ASSYRIANS

There remains little to be added regarding the music of the powerful
Babylonian and Assyrian civilizations which developed out of the earlier
Sumerian beginnings in Mesopotamia, the fertile land between the
rivers. The relationship of these three cultures is a difficult one to estab
lish, for there was a great deal of warfare, conquest, and interpenetration.
Durant has said that in general Simieria stood in the same relation to
Babylon and Babylon to Assyria as Crete to Greece and Greece to Rome:
the first created a civilization; the second developed it to its height; the
third inherited and protected it and passed it on as a " dying gift " to the
world which was to come. The center of this civilization moved from Ur
to Babylon and from Babylon to Nineveh.

At the very beginning of Babylonian history stands the great lawgiv-
ing king Hammurabi (2123-2081 B.C.), a contemporary of the Middle
Egyptian Kingdom, whose historic code of laws, like that of Moses later,
was supposed to have descended from heaven. It laid the foundations of
order and serenity upon which the rich empire of Babylon reared itself.
Shortly after the death of Hammurabi, Babylon was captured by a hardy
non-Semitic tribe from the cast, the Kassitcs, who continued as rulers for
over six centuries. They in turn were supplanted by the Assyrians, who
destroyed almost completely the glories of Babylon. But these were re
vived again under Nebuchadrezzar (605-562 B.C.), who in his reign of
forty-three years made Babylon the largest and most luxurious city of
the ancient world, surrounded, according to Herodotus, with a wall 56
miles in length. This was the city of the hanging gardens, one of the
wonders of the world; its very name became synonymous with a sort
of vicious luxuriance.

Essentially traders, businessmen, and warriors, the Babylonians
achieved more success in science than in art: their commerce made neces
sary the development of mathematics, and out of their religious beliefs
came the foundations of the modern sciences of astronomy and medi
cine. It was their laws that became the pattern for all ancient society.
Their legends, through adoption by the Hebrews, became known to the
whole world. Yet in the visual arts and music they accomplished little

52 MUSIC IN THE LIFE OF THE NEAR EAST

that was new. Because of the necessity for using bricks as building ma
terial, there being no stone available in the flat country of Babylon,
the Babylonian architecture was heavy and uninspired. Painting never
acquired any importance as an independent art; and sculpture, with the
exception of some fine bas-reliefs, remained undeveloped, stereotyped,
and crude; the best artistic results of the Babylonians seem to have been
achieved in ceramics, glazed tile, and pottery. Their music is but an
elaboration of Sumerian practices. They used, perhaps, more and bigger
instruments harps, citharas, lutes, single and double flutes, reeds,
trumpets, drums, cymbals, and tambourines. As in Egypt, the singers
sang and the orchestras played both in the temples and in the palaces
of the rich; but again, no real examples of Babylonian music have come
down to us ? and so we know nothing of its character.

Shortly after Nebuchadrezzar's death in 562 B.C. the Babylonian empire
fell apart and thus became a ready prey for Cyrus and his conquering
Persians, who captured it in 538 B.C. and made it an essential part of
their ambitious imperial scheme. Then two hundred years later came
Alexander; and through him the cultural elements of the civilization of
the Land between the Rivers were dispersed to become a part of the
great heritage of mankind.

The great man of Assyria, the imperial power to the north, was Ashur-
banipal (7-626 B.C.), whose empire at the height of its power embraced
Assyria, Babylonia, Armenia, Palestine, Syria, Phoenicia, Sumeria, and
Egypt. This empire was founded, as all such domains must be founded,
on military power. It recognized frankly that government is the " nation
alization of force/' and its chief contributions if they can be called
contributions to the progress of man were in the art of war. So we can
hardly expect any important developments in Assyrian art. Except in
their magnificent bas-reliefs filled with scenes from their wars and hunts,
the Assyrians did not distinguish themselves as artists. They copied or
imported everything from Babylon.

The one outstanding illustration of the use of music in the Assyrian
civilization is the great decorative relief (now in the British Museum)
from the time of Ashurbanipal, showing the royal musicians celebrating
the triumphant return of the king from one of his wars. In this proccs-

THE JEWS

British Museum

SCENE FROM AN ASSYRIAN WALL RELIEF
The relief is one from the time of the empire's greatest glory under Ashurbanipal,

668626 B.C.

sion are players on double flutes and harps, a player on a percussive in
strument, and singers, one of them, according to Conibarieu, holding his
hand to his throat in such a way as to produce the nasal tone so char
acteristic of oriental music, the others marking the rhythm by clapping
their hands.

THE JEWS

The history of the Semitic people, the Hebrews, has become familiar
not so much because of their importance as a people as through the
influence which they exerted on the later history of the world. As some
one has said, they did not make history; history made them. They were
settled on a narrow strip of land bordering the Mediterranean, between
Egypt and Assyria, and their country was the natural high road between
these powers. Their significance is due to the fact that, influenced by the
great civilizations to the south and east, they produced a written litera
ture, a history of the world which records their developing concept of
God, a collection of laws, songs, and religious rites, all of which were in
corporated into the Christian Bible and thus became known to the whole
Western world.

54 MUSIC IN THE LIFE OF THE NEAR EAST

The music of the Hebrews was probably similar to that of their neigh
bors and largely bound up with the ritual of their worship. It was King
David who assigned to one of the Jewish tribes the sole duty of providing
music in the temple, although there had long been a special caste of
" singers with instruments of music, psalteries, harps, and cymbals." It
was the Levites who sang and played and danced before the Lord; and
many of the texts which they probably used are to be found in the
Psalms. 5 These are of interest to us today not only because of the superb
lyricism of their poetry but also because they represent the sort of liturgi
cal texts that were probably used by the Egyptians and the Babylonians.
Commentators believe, for instance, that the rolling lines of the Twenty-
fourth Psalm were a liturgical chant performed when the ark of the
covenant arrived in front of the Temple, the priest singing half of each
verse, and the choir the remainder:

" The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof,
the world and they that dwell therein.
For he hath founded it upon the seas;
and established it upon the floods."

It is the opinion of scholars that the last four verses of this magnifi
cent psalm are the oldest:

" Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting cloors;
And the King of Glory shall come in.
Who is this King of Glory?
The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle/'

6 Modern research seems to show that Solomon's Temple (which he built on
Mount Moriah, a broad plateau east of Jerusalem, in order to provide a fitting setting
for the sacrifices of his people to Jehovah and a permanent shelter for the ark of the
covenant) consisted of a group of buildings surrounded by a strong fortress wall and
surmounted by a high, golden-roofed tower. This tower, about two hundred feet high,
contained the holy inner chamber where rested the tablets of the Ten Command
ments; before it was an inner court which contained the great altar where the priests
offered the sacrifices of animals and crops, required three times a year of every Jew. It
was probably before this inner court that the musical ceremonies of the temple took
place. The Levites, which were the singers (under King David 4000 men out of a
tribe of 38,000 were musicians), "being arrayed in fine linen, having cymbals and
psalteries and harps, stood at the east end of the altar, and with them an hundred and
twenty priests sounding with trumpets."

THE JEWS 55

And again, in ecstasy:

" Lift up your heads, O ye gates, even lift them up, ye everlasting doors;
And the King of Glory shall come in.
Who is the King of Glory?
The Lord of Hosts, he is the King of Glory. Selah."

These magniloquent lines call for mighty music. How impressive they
must have sounded accompanied by the sweep of harps, the sound of
trumpets, and the clash of cymbals! Then it must have been that the
;. tnjpipeters and singers were as one, to make one sound to be heard in
praising and thanking the Lord; and when they lifted up their voice
with .the trumpets and cymbals and instruments of music . . . the house
was filled with a cloud, even the house of the Lord. The glory of the
Lord had filled the house of God."

The Jews believed that all music possessed this magic power. The
prophet Samuel, when he anointed Saul to be king, said to him: " It
shall come to pass . . . that thou shalt meet a company of prophets
coming down from the high place with a psaltery and a tabret and a pipe
and a. harp before them; and they shall prophesy. And the spirit, of the
Lord, will come upon thee, and thou shalt prophesy with them and shalt
be turned into another man." And it was when the " evil spirit from
God was upon Saul that David took a harp, and played with his hand;
sti Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from
him."

The Bible gives many evidences that secular music and dances were
likewise qopimcmly employed by the Jews; war and work songs, laments
and rejoicings are mentioned. Wandering minstrels, of whom Jubal, the
" father of all' such" as handle the harp/' wgs first, sang to the people.
After such national triumphs as the passing of the Red Sea or the con
quering of Goliath by David, there was rejoicing in song, with dancing
and tambourine beating by the women.

It is interesting to speculate as to the nature of this music. The more
recent research which has been done along this line has been able to
establish definitely the character of the liturgy used in the ancient Jewish
synagogues or meetinghouses established by the Jews at the time of their

56 MUSIC IN THE LIFE OF THE NEAR EAST

Babylonian captivity (586-538 B.C.). 6 There were portions of scripture
taken from the Pentateuch and the Prophets, sung in free rhythm to tra
ditional tunes of a highly decorated character (the process was called
cantillation) in a manner strongly resembling the later practices of the
Christians. There was also the great Shema or Credo; and there were spe
cial prayers and psalms for various occasions. Certain Jewish scholars,
particularly A. Z. Idelsohn and Lazare Saminsky, have proved, to their
own satisfaction at least, that the synagogical modes and melodies used
by the modern Transcaucasian Jews are much the same as those in use
during the great days of Jewish worship. These Babylonian and Persian
communities of Jews were established long before .the beginning of the
Christian era and have kept themselves isolated from European influ
ences. Their religious songs and cantillations reveal an astounding simi
larity of melodies and scales, entirely different from those used by the
Jews whose religious music has been subject to Arabic and European
influences. And so their religious music probably established a real con
tact with the traditional practices of pre-Christian times.

Canon Douglas (in his fine book Church Music in History and Prac
tice) has summarized the essential features of this Jewish Bible music,
features which were taken over by the early Christians into their musical
practices:

(1) The basic principle of monotonic recitation, or what we call
chanting

(2) Congregational refrains to the singing of the Psalms

(3) Elaborate musical exfoliations (melismata) on certain vowels

(4) The establishment of the principle that the rhythm of the music
depends on the rhythm of the prose

(5) A musical style of noble dignity, sharply distinguished from secu
lar melodies

H. G. Wells is fond of saying that the Hebrew's place in history has
been magnified out of all proportion to its real significance; and he likes

6 These stood in somewhat the same relation to the Temple as the modem parish
churches to the Cathedral. At the time of the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D,
there were over 400 of these meetinghouses in Jerusalem alone. They wore the
scenes of the preaching and worship of Jesus and of St.

THE JEWS 57

to remind us that even Solomon's Temple in all its glory was not much
larger, if the measurements given in the Bible are correct, than a good-
sized modern barn. Undoubtedly the accounts of Jewish magnificence
and importance as given in the Books of Kings and Chronicles have been
exaggerated by patriotic writers in an attempt to show that a small,
provincial people was able to keep up with the magnificence of its rich
and powerful neighbors. But even if this is true, the Jewish ritual and
music, representing, as they well may, something of the characteristics
of the music of the other civilizations of the Near East, deserve our
special consideration. For they are the nearest elements that we possess
to a living link with that great past.

MUSIC IN THE FAR EAST

It should be remembered that the diverse cultures of the Far East
China, Japan, India, and the Islamic Orient have pursued their own
courses of musical development, though on quite different lines from
those of the West. Only recently have sufficient investigations shown
the importance of these Eastern musical systems, for their written rec
ords have been extremely scanty and hard to come by. Nevertheless, it is
important not to overlook the significance of their ideals, which tended
toward the development of subtle and complex arrangements of scales,
ornamentation, and rhythm, rather than, as in the European system, of
polyphonic and harmonic enrichment.

The art of China is still underestimated by the great majority of Eu
ropeans, for the reason that it has for so long remained entirely a sealed
book to them. In all its ramifications, covering a period of at least four
thousand years, it is essentially mystical and symbolic rather than real
istic and objective. As Fairbanks puts it: " The Chinese does not deal
with a material, mechanical world. The world is still for him the passing
expression of eternal spiritual Being. ... He depicts not what he sees,
but what he feels." Chinese music is based, like most other Far Eastern
systems, on a five-toned scale, each note of which is considered to have
its own essential importance per se, without regard to its relationship to

58 MUSIC IN THE LIFE OF THE NEAR EAST

the other tones of the scale. These various pitches, as well as the texture
of the materials which produce them, are all involved, in the Chinese
mind, with a complex set of symbols having social, political, and cultural
implications. It is therefore not to be wondered at that the European,
ignorant of this symbolism, is apt to find classic Chinese music monot
onous and limited in appeal.

In the music of India, on the other hand, the individual tones have
little significance in themselves but derive their meaning from their
position in the scores of " ragas," or set melodic patterns making up this
music. These ragas have the power, according to Indian philosophy, of
arousing emotions and feelings motivating human conduct; therefore
Indian music, though impersonal, has definite emotional connotations.
Like the Chinese music, this expression of Hindu culture is entirely
monophonic, or one-voiced. Its rhythmic structure is fairly complex, and
the vocal part is often highly ornamented. This music is closely associ
ated with a conventionalized style of dancing, replete with postures and
gestures which are for the Indians symbolic and emotionally evocative.

The music of the Islamic tribes in North Africa, Arabia, and Persia is,
like their architecture, highly decorative rather than functional. This
music, while strongly rhapsodic, is concerned with arabesque-like orna
mentations, consisting of groups of coloratura melodies; since it uses
divisions smaller than the European ear is accustomed to, it has a pecul
iarly unrealistic quality.

After this necessarily very brief glance at the musics of the Orient,
we resume our tracing of the backgrounds of European developments.

The Music of the Hellenic Age

The nodding promontories, and blue isles,
And cloudlike mountains, and dividuous waves

Of Greece > basked glorious in the open smiles
Of favoring heaven: from their enchanted caves

Prophetic echoes flung dim melody.

Shelley: " Ode to Liberty '

f cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees . . .

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known: cities of men,

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honored of them all ...

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravefd world, whose margin fades

Forever and forever when I move.

Tennyson: " Ulysses ' :

THE SOURCES OF HELLENIC THOUGHT AND CULTURE

WITH the entrance of Greece into the arena of history, a new force
made itself felt in the world : a force which, by casting off the dead
weight of the superstitions of the past and by developing an insatiable
curiosity for penetrating the unknown future, achieved in a few short
centuries a cultural supremacy which, spreading over western Europe,
has remained down to this day one of man's greatest heritages. While
largely devoted to intellectual speculation, this spirit of free inquiry
of the Greeks enabled them to make important contributions to the
sciences as well as to the arts. It was Pythagoras who about 550 B.C., after

60 THE MUSIC OF THE HELLENIC AGE

experimenting with strings, first founded the science of mathematical
acoustics and discovered the octave; and other Greeks made many fun
damental contributions to the sciences of astronomy, medicine, and
biology, contributions which, generally speaking, were not transcended
until the seventeenth century. It is interesting to speculate as to what
might have happened if this intellectually curious people had been pos
sessed of a greater inclination for real scientific experimentation.

Modern historians like to remind us that these unique contributions
which Greece passed on to later civilizations were by no means original
with her but were based on the rich inheritances which she in her turn
had received from earlier peoples. It was Egypt and Mesopotamia which,
as Barnes has said, cleared the road and set up the cultural and intellec
tual signposts for the civilizations that were to follow; and through her
whole history Greece maintained constant contact with her eastern
neighbors, a fact which explains many of the characteristics of her art.

There were three sources which influenced the development of Greek
culture as we know it: first, that which developed on the island of Crete
in the Mediterranean and which later spread to the mainland of Asia
Minor, where its center was Troy, and into Greece, with its center at
Mycenae; second, the wandering tribes of fair-haired Aryans who lived in
central and southeastern Europe and who came down from there into
the Aegean cities; and third, the Phoenicians, those sea-Semitic traders,
wanderers, and colonizers who roamed the whole Mediterranean from
their bases at Tyre and Sidon. All three of these stand in the back
ground as a sort of preludial introduction to the great symphony whose
opening movement begins with the development of Greece.

THE MINOANS

According to the reckoning of the archaeologists, the Cretan or Mi-
noan civilization goes back as far as the Bronze Age (around 2500 B.C.),
and its early development coincides with that of the Old Kingdom in
Egypt. A high degree of culture grew up early, and these pre-Grecian peo
ple achieved some astonishingly beautiful results in painting, sculpture,
and such minor arts as bronze working and pottery making. The chief

THE MINOANS 6l

feature of their rich and civilized settlement at Knossos in Crete was the
huge palace of King Minos, built about 1500 B.C., a structure which evi
dently housed not only the monarch but the people as well. Recent ex
cavations of its ruins have given us a great deal of important information
regarding this almost forgotten civilization. We know that it delighted
in great festivals and shows, including a kind of bullfighting much like
that developed also in Spain. That there were dances and gymnastic dis
plays we are certain, Crete being looked upon by the writers of antiquity
as the cradle of their dances. One of the earliest ritualistic dances known
was found in the so-called Hymn of the Kouretes (young men just come
to maturity), discovered at Palaikastro in Crete. There have been found
terra-cotta figures dancing in circles, which the archaeologists date from
the sixteenth century before Christ. Frescoes of dancing ladies decorated
the palace of Minos. Indeed the excavations made show that this whole
structure was filled with an existence generously enlivened by the arts.

Perhaps music played as important a role in the happy, civilized life
of Minos at Knossos as it did in that of his contemporaries in Babylon;

Courtesy of The University Museum, Philadelphia

MINOAN ART A restored fresco from the palace at Knossos

MH-6

THE MUSIC OF THE HELLENIC AGE

Courtesy of The University Museum, Philadelphia

MINOAN ART Silver boat from the grave of the tower citadel, Mycenae

but aside from such discoveries as have been mentioned, little is known
about it. The last stages of this culture, contemporary with the Homeric
age, developed on the mainland. Fortified palaces became a necessity
during this time because of the inroads of the Phoenicians and the
Greeks; it is significant that these structures clearly anticipate the shape
and general style of the later Greek temples. So ? too, the Greek musical
theories may have come from this Minoan people, whose civilization
seems to have come to a sudden and awful end around 1400. The great
palace at Knossos was destroyed, probably as the result of a Greek inva
sion, and was never rebuilt; and after it was gone, the center of civiliza
tion shifted to the south.

THE ARYANS

The Greek tribes who may have thus ended the Cretan civilization
were descendants of the wandering Aryans who about 2000 B.C. lived in
the forests and cleared lands of a large part of central Europe and west
ern Asia and whose existence was hardly known to their civilized Baby
lonian and Egyptian contemporaries. Wells has given a good picture of

THE ARYANS 63

this Nordic people, which was destined to play such an important part
in the later history of the world. With their cattle pulling the rough
wagons on which they heaped their simple belongings, they wandered
over all northern Europe, settling down temporarily, raising crops of
wheat, plowing and cultivating the land in a primitive way, building huts
of wattles and mud. Their community life was social rather than religious;
their leaders were chieftains rather than priests.

Music was a real part of the life of the Aryans. They have been well
called a " vocal people/' for by way of enlivening their wanderings they
would foregather for communal feasts, on which occasions, in addition to
a great deal of eating and drinking, there would be entertainment by
their national poets, the bards. Their minds crowded with the memories
of the great events of tribal history, these poets went about among their
fellows reciting and singing the words they had composed, accompanying
their lines by their own harp playing. Thus originated that great series
of epics and sagas which has contributed so much to the world's en
joyment and which includes such masterpieces as The Iliad, The Odyssey,
The Nibelungenlied, and The Kalevala.

The Dorians, a branch of this Aryan stem, came down into Greece
from the north sometime before 1000 B.C. and, after capturing and de
stroying the cities and civilization established there by the Minoan peo
ples, settled themselves on the Aegean Islands and the narrow fringes of
the Mediterranean coast line. The direct ancestors of the classic Greeks,
these early tribes bore little resemblance to their famous descendants.
They were a barbarian people, living in open villages which they built on
the ruins of the civilized towns they had destroyed; and although they
adopted some of the ideas and habits of the peoples they had conquered,
they were without real culture. The first three centuries of the life of these
tribes in Greece (from about 1000 to 700 B.C.) were largely given over to
their establishment as an agricultural and commercial people. They
earned their living from the fringes of coastal plain and river valleys bor
dering the mountainous chain which comprises so much of the Aegean
archipelago and took to the sea in order to trade and barter with their
neighbors. During this time there were slowly laid the foundations of the
religious and social life out of which came the glories of the Athenian age.

64 THE MUSIC OF THE HELLENIC AGE

THE PHOENICIANS

Ethnologists seem to be completely baffled as to the origin of the Phoe
nicians, the people who in pre-Hellenic times lived on the narrow strip
of land along the east coast of the Mediterranean, whose ships sailed
every known sea, and whose bartering merchants were to be found in
every port. They were probably a western branch of the Semitic tribes of
Arabia who had conquered Sumeria and helped set up the Babylonian
empire. Forced by the geographical position of their country to make
their living from the sea, they became the means of spreading the cul
ture of Asia Minor among the countries of Europe.

As early as 2800 B.C. we find their ships in the Mediterranean, and
they soon became the busiest merchants in the world. They manufac
tured various sorts of artistic objects, glass, mctalware, jewelry, and so
forth; and they became well known for extracting from the sea animals
along their coasts the famous purple dye which was much in demand.
In addition, they transported the products of India and the Near East to
all the cities along the Mediterranean, carrying in return metals, ivory,
and wood, as well as slaves for the service of those who could afford them.
Their two great cities, Tyre and Sidon, rose to a place among the richest
and most powerful in the world; according to the account of the prophet
Ezekiel, they were " perfect in beauty and in them was sealed the sum of
all wisdom." Their culture and art, drawn from Egypt, Crete, and the
Near East, was carried abroad, along with their goods and merchandise;
and we owe a great debt to this commercial people for introducing,
among many other things, the Egyptian alphabet to the nations of
antiquity.

Music seems to have occupied much the same place in their civilization
as it did among their neighbors: we hear of its use at princely feasts,
played on the same instruments as in Egypt and Assyria. The Phoeni
cians used the aulos, a kind of double reed pipe made of wood with
mouthpiece of ivory or metal, which was later very popular in Greece.
It is thought that those elements of theory and practice which entered
the Greek music system from the East, elements which survived in the

THE PHOENICIANS

GREEK POET HOLDING HIS LYRE

names of two of the Greek scales, the Phrygian and the Lydian, 1 were
transmitted through the Phoenicians,

1 Phrygia and Lydia were two of the nations which became powerful in Asia
Minor, in the district to the east of Assyria, sometime after the ninth century B.C.
They linked the civilization of the ancient Hittites, who came from India, with that
of Greece. Whatever the Phrygian or Lydian musicians had inherited or found out
as to the structure of instruments or schemes of tonality had its echo Or Application
in Greece,

66 THE MUSIC OF THE HELLENIC AGE

THE ARTS IN GREECE

Not only Hellenic art but also European literature begins on a note
of epic grandeur, the Homeric poems. It is quite appropriate that the
origin of such grandeur should be shrouded in mystery: whether or not
there was a blind poet by the name of Homer, who, according to popular
legend, composed the two great epics of The Odyssey and The Iliad,
no one knows. Probably these epics were the result of the long accumu
lation of many generations of Aryan ballads, which may have been set
down by one man sometime during the eighth or seventh century B.C.
These great works deal with the adventures of the early Greeks in their
warfare with the Minoans and tell of the last years of the siege of Troy, as
well as of the adventures of Odysseus upon his return from these wars.

Written in flexible hexameters (lines of six feet) these two epics have
given rise to a great deal of discussion as to just how they were presented
in Homeric times. We know that they- were accompanied by the lyre,
an instrument originally made by stretching strips of an animal's skin
over a tortoise shell and adding branches from the side, joined by a
crosspiece. Probably the words were delivered in a free sort of recitative,
accompanied by the lyre. When in later centuries the renditions of the
Homeric epics had become events of national importance, the rhapsodes,
those who made the renditions, wore distinguishing costumes long
flowing cloaks of crimson when they recited The llhd> blue when they
declaimed The Odyssey. The accompaniment consisted of a prelude
played on the lyjre, a modest unisonal background for the voice, 2 and
interludes between verses, with a postlude at the end of the performance.

THE FUNCTION OF MUSIC

' The word music is of Greek origin (mousike) and meant originally
of the Muses; it was applied to a combination of poetry, music, and danc
ing, of which poetry was considered the ruler, music an accompaniment,

2 The term harmony employed by many of the Greek writers on music always
meant accompaniment at the unison. Chords, harmony, and counterpoint in our mod
ern sense did not exist in ancient times. Plato speaks of the introductions to these ac-
pbmpahied poems (nomos) as having been composed with " remarkable art/* ; -

F'U rt wangler- R eichold : Griechisch e Vasenmalerei

GREEK SCHOOL

(From a vase now in Berlin)

This vase, dating from the youth of Sophocles, shows boys being taught to read,
write, recite poetry, sing to the aulos, and play the lyre.

68 THE MUSIC OF THE HELLENIC AGE

and dancing an integral part and not a mere spectacle. 3 Although such an
association limited its own development as an art, it made music of tre
mendous significance in the life of the people. We have seen how the
epics of Homer were always declaimed to musical accompaniment; other
uses of music in this heroic age of Greek history, an age which extended
down to 600 B.C., were in connection with religious and civic festivals,
a fact that is commemorated by the survival of the names of the various
musical forms used.

The mixed races which had settled on the islands and the lands bor
dering the Aegean Sea had, by the seventh century, founded a number of
cities, the most important of which were Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes,
Samos, and Miletus. The last named, situated in Asia Minor, was the most
important of them all. These cities grew rapidly in size and significance,
but they never formed any strong political coalescence. Among the chief
influences which gave them a certain amount of common interest and
which held them together in a political sense was their religion. Basically
borrowed from the cults of preceding civilizations, the Greek religion
early developed its own rich mythology and striking thedfony. In many
of their dealings with the spirits who became their gods, the Greeks made
music a necessary feature, regarding it as a sort of charm between man
and the Invisible, and as possessing special effectiveness for their com
munications with the naturalistic inhabitants with which they had peo
pled Olympus, the home of their deities.

A number of accompanied chants, which went by the general name of
nomos, were used in honor of the various members of this pantheon. Spe
cial forms of these were used on occasion: the dithyramb, at festivals of
Dionysos, the wine god, wild and boisterous; the paean, a chant to Apollo,
the god of music; prosodies, marchlike chants used to accompany reli
gious processions; threnodies, perhaps the most primitive of all the chant
forms, employed in lamenting the death of an individual (The Iliad
closes with three magnificent examples sung on the death of Hector);

8 Among the Greeks the term musician had a special significance, one somewhat
similar to that of the eighteenth-century honn&te homme: a well-rounded individual
rather than a specialist. The study of music with the Greeks meant a training in sing
ing and playing, dancing and verse. It was considered to be the backbone of education
and to be closely associated with ethical and moral principles.

THE ARCHAIC PERIOD 69

songs of joy and thanksgiving, used after recovery from illness or for
invoking the protection of the gods in matters of health or in the midst
of battle or as part of a religious ceremony at a banquet. 4

THE FIRST OF THREE GREAT PERIODS: THE ARCHAIC

In the Homeric days the worship of these pantheistic people centered
about smoking, open-air altars and included the enjoyment of song and
dance, with sound of pipe and lyre. As they progressed toward a more
unified culture, the Greeks designated certain spots, such as Delphi, as
sacred places; and people came from far and near to sacrifice to the gods,
to consult the oracle who was supposed to reside there, and to enjoy them
selves generally while attending to their religious duties. Gradually per
manent buildings arose in these sacred places, shrines, " treasuries/' and
monumental temples designed to give an appearance of dignity and im-
pressiveness. The spontaneous games and play, the dancing and the
singing of earlier days were developed into huge festivals in honor of
Dionysos, Apollo, Aphrodite, or some other deity, festivals which came
to be considered among the most important functions in the country.
At first these festivals were concerned with elaborate pantomimic dancing
celebrating events in the life of the gods or of the human heroes who

4 Nothing gives the real character of these early religious rites better than does
Homer's description of such a banquet:
" Then they orderly employed

The sacred offering, washed their hands, took salt cakes; and the priest
With hands held up to heaven, thus pray'd:
O thou that all things seest . ."

Hear thy priest, and as thy hand, in free grace to my prayers,
Shot fervent plague-shafts through the Greeks, now hearten their affairs
With health renewed and quite remove th' infection from their "blood.
He pray'd; and to his prayers again the God propitious stood.
All, after prayer, cast on salt cakes, drew back, kill'd, flay'd the beeves,
Cut out and dubb'd with fat their thighs, fair dress'd with doubled leaves,
And on them all the sweetbreads prick'd. The priest, with small, sere wood,
Did sacrifice, pour'd on red wine; by whom the young men stood,
And turn'd, in five ranks, spits . . . which, roasted well, they drew.
The labor done, they served the feast in, that fed all to satisfaction.
Desire of meat and wine thus quench'd, the youths crown'd cups of wine
Drunk off, and filFd again to all. That day was held divine,
And spent in paeans to the Sunu"

7 o

THE MUSIC OK THE HELLENIC AGE

The Louvre

LADY OF AUXERRE
This is one of the oldest Greek statues known.

were raised almost to the rank of deities. There are long lists of these
dramatic dances performed for celebrating such events as the birth of
Zeus, the marriage of Zeus and Hera, or the battle of Apollo and the
python. 5 They were always performed to music. The aulos, the flute, and
the cithara were the instruments employed, and there seems to have been

5 One of the old authorities, Meursius, names over two hundred dances known to
him. He refers in many cases to steps rather than to whole dances; but in any event
the number is large. There were athletic, military, religious, and social dances.

THE ARCHAIC PERIOD

THE DORIC TEMPLE AT PAESTUM
(Middle of the fifth century B.C.)

a background of singing. Gestures were used as means for heightening
the effect of the words that were being sung. It was out of beginnings
such as these that the popular Attie drama, both tragic and comic, de
veloped.

The character of this early music was ? of course, entirely religious. <
There was not a hint of the subjects with which the later Greek mousilce
was so. concerned romantic love ? or man's gigantic and helpless straggle
against the Invisible. The choristers, always men, sang their parts in

7^ THE MUSIC OF THE HELLENIC AGE

unison (the Greeks had no idea of part music as we know it), with the
instruments playing the melody either in unison with the voices or an
octave above them, sometimes using a simple variation. The combination
of instruments beloved of the ancient civilizations, such as string, wind,
and percussion, were not used by the Greeks. They especially stressed
simplicity. Considering the large audiences which heard their musical
performances, the means they employed seem meager enough from
sixteen to twenty-four choristers and dancers and one or two auloi.

The other arts were as much concerned during this archaic period with
religious and mythological subjects as was music. In both painting and
sculpture the technique employed was simple in the extreme and made
no attempt to create a visual illusion of the objects rendered. The sub
jects used were the gods and incidents in Olympian life, straightforwardly
and almost geometrically conceived. Architecture was largely concerned
with the erection of temples serving the gods and the dead, simply and
yet beautifully proportioned, of modest style, and using with great effec
tiveness the Doric column, an architectural feature which, because of its
structural and organic unity, has never been surpassed for beauty. So, up
to the sixth century B,C. we may say that the great concern of all the arts
was that of the conveying of religious and ideational concepts.

THE SECOND PERIOD: THE LYRIC AGE

Then there came a change. With the gradual expansion of the city-
states, the leadership of which was strongly maintained by the lonians
on the western coast of Asia Minor and on the adjacent islands, trade be
came more general, wealth increased, and intellectual interests became
general. Man was no longer concerned only with his gods but began to
take more interest in himself. Consequently, art became more personal,
expressive, emotional, and visual. This was the great age of lyric poetry
(the very derivation of the term lyric shows that this poetry was written
to be sung). The poets Archilochus, Simonides of Ceos, Sappho the
Lady of Lesbos, Anacreon, Pindar, and the great Athenian lawgiver Solon
sang with such ecstasy and beauty as to insure for their lays a permanent
place in the affections of lovers of poetry. No less a critic than Swinburne

THE LYRIC AGE 73

has said that he " agreed with all Grecian tradition in thinking Sappho
to be beyond all question and comparison the very greatest poet that ever
lived." And such simple beauty, a beauty which comes through even in
an English translation, as is found in her fragment written about a girl
who has remained unmarried, gives reason for such a sweeping judgment:

" Like the sweet apple which reddens upon the topmost bough,
Atop on the topmost twig, which the pluckers forgot, somehow,
Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now.

" Like the wild hyacinth flower which on the hills is found,
Which the passing feet of the shepherds forever tear and wound,
Until the purple blossom is trodden in the ground/'

Translated by Rossetti

All this poetry was sung, much of it by solo voices accompanied by the
lyre. Such things as the odes which Pindar wrote commemorating the
victories of athletes in the games which by his time had become such an
essential part of the religious festivals were chanted by a dancing chorus,
the movements of which were carefully prescribed. Like Sappho, Pindar
made his poetry a vehicle for individual expression rather than a matter
of group sentiment, as his predecessors had done. Anacreon's chief busi
ness seems to have been the writing of banquet songs on the subjects of
love and wine. 6 His " Address to a Dove/' given below in Samuel John
son's translation, is characteristic of his graceful style:

" Lovely courier of the sky
Where and whither dost thou fly?
Scattering, as thy pinions play,
Liquid fragrance all the way.
Is it business? Is it love?
Tell me, tell me, gentle Dove.

" Soft Anacreon's vows I bear,
Vows to Myrtale the fair;
Traced with all that charms the heart,
Blessing nature, sounding art . . ."

J. C. Stobart, in The Glory That Was Greece, reflects at some length on the mel
ancholy fact that these Anacreontics " were composed accotding to the poet's own
prescription < on ten parts of water to five of wine."

THK MUSIC OF THE HELLENIC AGE

The Lou we

A GROUP FROM THE TEMPLE OF ZEUS, OLYMFIA

CULMINATION IN THE GOLDEN AGE

The golden age of Greek life and art came during the sixth and fifth
centuries B.C., when Athens, after turning back the invaders from Persia
who were intent on conquering Greece, assumed the leadership of all
the Greek cities and established herself as the head of the Delian League
and the center of Greek life and culture, attracting money and scholars
and artists from the entire known world. During this fabulous period
there occurred such a development in the drama, sculpture, and archi
tecture -as the world has never experienced since. Originating in the
mimetic dances and chanted choruses of the religious festivals, especially
those connected with Dionysos, Greek drama, from its earliest stages
musically accompanied, may be said to have started with the works of

CULMINATION IN THE GOLDEN AGE

De Cou from Ewing Galloway, New York

THE PARTHENON AT ATHENS

Aeschylus (525-456 B.C.) , who was the first playwright to introduce indi
vidual characters into his plays and thus make them capable of expressing
personal ideas. Before his time, one character delivered formal speeches
against a background of the chorus, which commented upon the action
for the benefit of the spectators. Aeschylus kept the chorus but reduced
its importance, for he could carry on the action by means of his few
characters.

From the time of these early Aeschylian plays, the Greek dramas were
always chosen in open competition and produced at the time of the great
religious festivals, which included, in addition, processions, games, re
ligious rites, and contests in singing and playing. Participation in these
festivals was looked on as a religious rather than a social exercise, and dur
ing the spring days on which they were held the Greeks put aside their

j THE MUSIC OF THE HELLENIC AGE

other affairs for the time being. They loved competitions of all sorts,
dramatic and musical as well as athletic, and no greater honor could come
to one of them than the prize, a vase or a wreath, given to the winner of
one of these play competitions. Kirstein reminds us that a great deal of
the extraordinary fertility of the Greek poets of whose work only a
small part has survived was due to the interest taken in these compe
titions. He describes in detail the most important of these festivals, that
of the feast of Dionysos Eleutherios:

" The poet who won here could gain no greater prize. It was celebrated
on five days at the end of March, close to the spring equinox, when the
seas were again navigable after the winter winds, and the streets of Athens
would be full of visitors from the provincial leagues. Foreign emissaries
came especially for the tragic games, which were regulated by the state
under a delegated officer charged with each particular festival. On him
lay the responsibility of selecting competing dramatists; at first three, and
later five. On him lay the choice of actors, the distribution of roles, and
the preparation of the plays, but generally he would appoint or have
chosen a special choregos or chorus leader for detailed tasks.

" On the first day there was a grand Dionysiac parade, which, exhibit
ing the god's image, left it standing in his theater. The tragic, comic, and
satiric contests were followed by lyric competitions in the dithyramb.
These choirs were selected from the ten main tribes, and a victory for a
chorus meant a triumph for its tribe. Our first date for a competition,
virtually the very first record of a theatrical performance in history, is the
year 535 B.C.

" The populace had an intense interest in the theater. There were no
books then, nor films for a wide audience. No one was satiated by going
to see plays at dawn, watching tetralogies of independent or related sttl>
jects till sundown. Besides, it only happened once a year. The audi
ence met in the theater around the break of clay, well provided with food
which was consumed during the tedious parts and the intermissions.
Herald trumpeters announced the commencement of the performance.**

These plays 7 were given in outdoor amphitheaters that were built in
natural beauty spots about a circular stage, structures wonderfully suited
to their purpose. Originally merely a circle of benches about a level

7 Exclusive of fragments, forty-seven of these Greek plays have survived seven
of Aeschylus, seven of Sophocles, nineteen of Euripides, eleven of Aristophanes, and
three of Menander.

THE THEATER AND TEMPLE OF APOLLO AT DELPHI
These are beautifully situated on the slopes of Mt. Parnassus.

7 8

THE MUSIC OF THE HELLENIC AGE

titate Museum, B erf in

A GREEK DANCER FROM A FIFTH-CENTURY RELIEF

earthen stage tamped smooth for dancing, by the fifth century these
structures had developed into gently sloping tiers of seats arranged about
the orchestra and set into the slope of a hill in such a way as to provide
a beautiful and extensive view beyond the limits of the stage. On the far
side of the semicircular orchestra there was built the skene, a simple, two-
storied building which served as a background for the actors and the
chorus. The scenery was rudimentary, and there were few properties. The
actors were originally amateurs, the poet always acting in his plays and
writing the music for them as well as the lines. By the time of Aeschylus,
acting had developed as a separate art, and the poet called in other spe
cialists to help in producing his play. The actors wore masks and used a
chanted recitative, making necessary a slow timed and artificial style.

CULMINATION IN THE GOLDEN AGE 79

The chorus, with its members chosen from among the free citizens,
played an important role throughout the development of Greek drama.
Up until the time of Euripides its interludes of music, poetry, and dance
were an essential part of the dramatic design, and a definite plan was al
ways followed as to its use. After a spoken prologue came the parados, or
chorus entrance, an impressive procession led by coryphees or leaders
and accompanied by aulos players. Two by two its members came into
the orchestra, their pace slow and majestic, their faces proudly serious,
their flowing robes forming a sort of visual bas-relief against which the
action would be played out. The rhythm of this entrance was that of a
march, and the words sung were always anapaestic. Defiling around the
circular orchestra, the members finally came to rest in front of the skene,
to remain there until the end of the drama, commenting from time to
time on its development in solemn chant, lively song, or graceful dance.
Through it, often, the dramatist expressed his ideas on religion.

The action of the play was developed by means of a series of episodes
between the characters, interspersed with these stasima or musical chants.
As there was no division into intervals, the play going on from its be
ginning to its inevitable and frequently awful conclusion, some such re
lief from the stormier heights of the action was absolutely necessary. In
the earlier works, these dance-song episodes constituted the main design
of the drama; and even in the time of Euripides they were beautifully
decorative additions to its structure. Such a chorus as this from Jphigenia
in Aulis may not be necessary to the development of the plot; but what
a lovely accessory it must have made when chanted and danced!

44 May no child of mine
Nor any child of my child
Ever fashion such a tale
As the Phrygians shall murmur,
As they stoop at their distaffs,
Whispering with Lydians,
Splendid with weight of gold
Helen has brought this,
They will tarnish our bright hair.
They will take us captives
For Helen . . . if men speak truth.

80 THE MUSIC OF THE HELLENIC AGE

" But still we lament our state,
The descent of our wide courts.
Even if there be no truth
In the legends cut on ivory,
Nor in the poets
Nor the songs/ 7

Translated by Hilda Aldington

The choregraphy of the chorus interpreted the sense of the words it
sang. The dancing was not dancing in the sense we know it; for it
possessed none of the characteristics of the modern ballet or social dance

no pirouettes or pointes or demi-pomtes. There was no coupling of
figures among the dancers, for there were no women interpreters; the
movements were measured and graceful, well-proportioned and carefully
balanced, and made use of the hands in a plastic manner that was sugges
tive of sculpture. It must have been a superb art, this dancing of the
Greek chorus; and we find ourselves brooding with Euripides, who asks,

" Will they ever come to me again, ever again
The long, long dances,
On through the dark till the dim stars wane?
Shall I feel the dew on my throat, and the stream
Of wind in my hair? Shall our white feet gleam
In the dim expanses? "

The Bacchae, translated by Gilbert Murray

Sophocles (496?~4o6 B.C.) introduced more characters into his dramas

he wrote over a hundred and won productions for eighteen of them
and so was able to achieve more of a dramatic plot in the modern
sense, through the development of climax and suspense and the expres
sion of conflict between his protagonists. Although the characters gave
vent to emotions that were personal and individual, they did so in a
manner that had universal significance. The story of Oedipus the King,
doomed by the gods to marry his own mother, as it proceeds from dis
aster to disaster, is characteristic of Sophocles's treatment and is as simple,
inevitable, and dignified as the sculptured figures of his contemporary,
Phidias. With Euripides (480-406 B.C.) the individual, personal element
became even more pronounced: the dramatic conflict was drawn between

MUSIC IN PRIVATE LIFE Si

men and not gods: feminine characters were humanized, and the element
of love was for the first time adequately treated. Euripides was in fact a
romantic artist, emphasizing the personal and expressive, in rebellion
against the classic restraints of his predecessors. He was the last of the
great tragedists. After him came Aristophanes and the writers of comedy,
who, in dealing with the ordinary social problems of living, held them up
to the ridicule of the multitudes.

The character of the music changed with that of the drama. No longer
concerned with purely sacerdotal aims, it became more human and elabo
rate, and there crept into it an evident desire to please as well as to edify.
The classic balance, so carefully maintained between the chorus and the
actors in the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles, was gradually destroyed
by the introduction of more individual performers and the use of music
expressive of the passions and the emotions. In Euripides, whenever an
emotion was expressed by one of his heroines, the regular dramatic
rhythm gave place to one more adaptable for lyric singing. Such a love
song as the following, for instance, must have called for a musical utter
ance far different from that used in the classic dramas:

" One with eyes the fairest

Cometh from his dwelling,
Someone loves thee, rarest,

Bright beyond my telling.
In thy grace thou shinest
Like some nymph divinest,
In her caverns dewy:
All delights pursue thee,
Soon pied flowers, sweet-breathing,
Shall thy head be wreathing/"

Translated by Shelley

MUSIC IN PRIVATE LIFE

It should not be thought that because the Greek citizen was so inter
ested in the music and dancing used in religious and public festivals he
neglected them in private life. On the contrary, we find that from the
earliest days the Greeks loved to participate in and watch these dances.

82 THE MUSIC OF THE HELLENIC AGE

We remember the famous description of the " chain dance " in The
Iliad, one of the first accounts of dancing that we have:

" And with great skill he made a dancing floor, like that which Daeda
lus had done in broad Knossos for blonde Ariadne. These youths and
maidens worth many oxen were dancing, holding each other's hands by
the wrist. Of these some wore delicate linen dresses and others golden
swords hanging from silver belts. At one time they moved rapidly in a
circle with cunning feet, right easily, just as when a potter, seated, tries
the wheel fitted to the hand, to see whether it runs; at another time they
moved rapidly in file.

" And a great crowd stood round the charming dance, enjoying the
spectacle; and amongst them a divine bard sang to the cithara; and two
tumblers, when he began his song, whirled about in the middle."

And again, this time in The Odyssey, Homer tells of the love of his
people for dancing:

" They leveled the dancing ground, making its ring neat and wide. The
herald arrived with the minstrel's singing lyre. Demodocus advanced into
the cleared space. About him grouped boys in their first blush of life and
skillful at dancing, who footed it rhythmically on the prepared floor. . . .
Then Alcinoiis ordered Halias and Laodomas to dance, by themselves,
for never did anyone dare join himself with them. They took in their
hands the fine ball, purple-eyed, which knowing Polybus had made them,
and played. The first, bending his body back, would hurl the ball towards
the shadowy crowds: while the other in his turn would spring high into
the air and catch it gracefully before his feet touched ground. Then, after
they had made full trial of tossing the ball high, they began passing it
back and forth between them, all the while they danced upon the fruitful
earth. The other young men stood by the dancing and beat time. Loudly
their din went up."

Translated by T. E. Shaw

In later times there came a sharper distinction between the professional
dancers, who appeared at such functions as dinner parties and banquets,
purveying entertainment and amusement to the guests, and the amateurs
who danced for pleasure, either in social or religious groups. Speaking
generally, the Greeks were by nature participants, in contrast to the later
Romans, who were always spectators; and so they naturally looked on
the professional musicians and dancers as little better than courtesans.

THE THIRD PERIOD: DECLINE

THE OLYMPIEION (second century A.D.)

THE THIRD PERIOD: DECLINE

After the Golden Age all the arts music, the drama, sculpture, and
architecture underwent changes that paralleled those which took place
in the religious beliefs and the civil practices of the various city-states.
After the earlier devotion of the arts to purely religious purposes, there
came during the great Athenian period a happy balance between religion
and pure art, an equilibrium which was lost during the so-called Hellen
istic times, after Athens had lost her supremacy and the center of Hellenic
culture had moved to Alexandria and the cities of Asia Minor. The politi
cal and economic stability which had been the background of the period
of Athenian greatness passed, and there came transformations in all phases
of Greek life. Athens, and, with her, all Greece, came on troublous times.
The philosophers, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, and the rest, tried to explain
the reasons for these adverse circumstances. Instead of the Olympian
objectivity of the sculpture of Phidias and his contemporaries, we find an
increasing desire for the achievement of grace and beauty, a desire which

8 4

THE MUSIC OF THE HELLENIC AGE

The Louvre

A SATYR SUSPENDED ON A PINE-TREE TRUNK (second century)

finally brought about a sentimentality that was about as antipodal to the
severe virility and graceful serenity of the fifth century as can be imag
ined. The older tragedies gave way to comedies which, with their
spirited and witty satirization of contemporary foibles and their absorp
tion in the controversial issues of the day, made existence seem more
bearable, if less sublime. Architecture became more and more colossal
and grandiose, the Corinthian order being preferred above others because
it seemed so exuberant and afforded chance for theatrical effectiveness.
Music became more secular, sensual, and individual: the main aim of
the musician of the fourth century seemed to be, as Aristoxenus said, " to
get the applause of the multitude/' No longer concerned with religious

THE THIRD PERIOD: DECLINE 85

ceremony or dramatic expression, the musician was principally interested
in developing, with an ever-increasing complexity of technique, the theme
of the common man and his everyday affairs. Professionalism among both
the composers and the performers increased. The dramas had to be com
mercially sponsored, and traveling companies were formed for playing
them throughout Greece. The auloi were capable of " rivaling the trum
pet's tone "; large citharas with as many as fifteen strings were used; all
sorts of liberties were taken with the scales and rhythms; instrumental
music became disassociated from choral music, and large concerts, with
hundreds and even thousands of players, were given. Program music came
into vogue, and at all the festival games competitions between virtuoso
artists were instituted, musicians coming to compete from all parts of the
world then known. It has been estimated that at some of the games or
ganized by Alexander the Great as many as three thousand artists came
together. Music, in a word, became a popular, sensual means for pleasure,
indulged in for its own sake and cultivated more as a social fad than as
an inherent necessity of life. Aestheticians and philosophers wrote long
treatises on music, some of them dealing with speculations as to its na
ture, others with its psychological powers.

It is impossible to speak of Greek music as if it were an art possessing
uniform characteristics. Within the space of some seven hundred years
it passed through a cycle which, beginning with the stark simplicity of
the Homeric epics, developed into the dithyrambic lyrics and religious
chants of the classic age. Later came the marvelously co-ordinated unity
of the fifth-century music-drama-dance form, the humanization of the
Hellenistic period, which led eventually to the completely commercial
and social debasements of the Alexandrian times. Modern European mu
sic has passed through much the same sort of changes, but it has taken
nearly two thousand years for the process. When we speak of Greek
music, we think of that of the Golden Age, without realizing, perhaps,
that the later periods of its history brought changes as demoralizing and
debasing as any that have occurred in later times.

Perhaps this is as well. For, as Alfred Einstein has pointed out, the
knowledge which we have of the place which music occupied in Greek
life, together with our wonder at the highly developed style which it

Pkoto

THE VICTORY OF SAMOTHRACE (about 300 B.C.)

A SUMMARY 87

eventually reached, has suggested to us that it must have possessed a
unique and exalted character. It was this valuation which so strongly in
fluenced later centuries, from the Middle Ages down to the time of
Wagner, by " blazing up at important crises and stirring men's minds ";
and its effect has been all the more potent in that no concrete examples
of the music have survived. For all practical purposes, the music of the
Greeks remains the " dim melody " of which Shelley sings. 8

A SUMMARY

There is no calculating the debt which Western civilization owes to
Hellenic culture. Taking the material advances which had been made
before their time as a basis, these people of Ionia, Aeolis, Doris, and
Athens & developed a set of intellectual and emotional concepts which,
in their freedom from superstition and intolerance, their bold hypotheses
regarding the universe, their balanced rationalism, and their challenge
to the future, have never been surpassed. It was their ability to com
bine a definite feeling of humanity with a high degree of imagination that
enabled the Greeks to produce such expressive and lasting art. The Attic
citizen, altogether a very human individual, 10 while he may have pos
sessed few of the qualities of the superman that have been attributed
to him, nevertheless exemplified in his everyday life such real devotion

8 A few melodic fragments have survived, eleven in all. But these are of little value
for conveying any real idea of what Greek music of the Golden Age sounded like; for
they are mostly from later periods, some of them dating from the Christian epoch.
And there is no agreement as to how they should or could be interpreted by modern
musicians. We are still very much in the dark as to how Greek music actually sounded.
It is significant that even in such a highly specialized work as Dr. Margarete Bieber's
The History of the Greek and Roman Theater (Princeton University Press, 1939) , no
elucidation or even discussion of the nature of the music so intimately associated with
the production of Greek plays is attempted.

9 It was the poets, philosophers, and intellectual inhabitants of these and a few
other Greek states who made the great contributions to the progress of civilization
attributed in general to the Greeks. The majority of their city-states, as Barnes reminds
us, were no more cultivated than the regions of the Hottentots.

10 It was Plato who told of some Athenian gentlemen who debated during the
course of a banquet as to whether they should spend the night in revelry or in philo
sophic discussion. They decided on the latter, but the end of the discussions found
at least two of the guests under the table!

88 THE MUSIC OF THE HELLENIC AGE

to the principles of truth and beauty and such freedom of mind as to
make his conduct a desirable prototype for all time.

The education of Greek citizens was such as to make them aware that
what we call " culture " was an essential part of living and not some
thing that was to be extraneously sought after once the material de
mands of life had been taken care of. It has been said that every free
man in Athens could play the aulos; and he was also trained to take his
part as a member of the chorus in the drama. The plastic and architec
tural beauties of the Athenian Acropolis were matters of ordinary experi
ence to these men. No wonder that creative art flourished as it did, and
reached heights of excellence that have seldom been equaled or surpassed!

In summarizing the debt of Western civilization to Hellenic thought
and culture, Barnes has said that the greatest weakness of the Greeks
was their failure to develop a technology and an economic system that
was equal to these intellectual and artistic attainments. The material
foundations of Greek life being inadequate, the whole structure col
lapsed. Today, after we have devoted most of our attention to the secur
ing of such material foundations, we are, compared with the Greeks, cul
turally speaking, poverty-stricken. Is there no hope of achieving a balance?

OUR MUSICAL HERITAGE FROM THE GREEKS

Inasmuch as it was the Greek conception of intervals, scales, and
modes that affected all later music, the reader of music history should
know something regarding it. Pythagoras, a Greek mathematician, has
the distinction of being the first man in history to explain the laws
of proportion in music how changing the length of a vibrating body
affects the pitch of the musical tone it gives. Experimenting with
sounding strings, he found that dividing them in half raised their pitch
an octave; and this he established as the most important relationship in
music. Dividing his string at a point two thirds of its length he found
would raise the pitch by a perfect fifth; and this he considered the
second important relationship of intervals. Dividing the string at three
quarters of its length, he raised the pitch a perfect fourth; and this he
established as another fundamental relationship.

MUSICAL HERITAGE FROM THE GREEKS 89

These intervals of an octave, a fifth, and a fourth remain today, twenty-
four hundred years after the experiments of Pythagoras, the fundamental
intervals of music. The other ratios established may be stated as follows:

Octave 1:2; fifth 2:3; fourth 3 14; major third 4:5; minor
third 5:6

The unit of the system devised by Pythagoras was the tetrachord,
a group of four sounds, its name being derived from the early four-
stringed form of the cithara or the lyre. There were three kinds of
these tctrachorcls: the diatonic, composed of tones and half tones as in
our modern system; the chromatic, made up of an interval greater than
a tone (minor third) and two half tones; and the enharmonic, derived
from the East, in which a major third and two quarter tones were used.
The diatonic genus was that most often used, especially in vocal music;
but after the Golden Age, when music became progressively more and
more complex, the chromatic and even the enharmonic genera crept
into vocal use, after it had long been very popular with the instrumen
talists.

Tone Tone Semi- Minor. Semi- Semi- Major Quar- Quar.-

tone third tone tone t hirdter tone ter. tone

Diatonic Chromatic Enharmonic

Today we ordinarily use but two scales in our music; but the Greeks
employed a wealth of scales, the diatonic ones being formed by a con
joining and overlapping of tetrachords, always thought of in a descending
scries, contrary to modern practice. The most important of these scales,
named after the different Greek tribes, were the Dorian, Phrygian, and
Lydian. Others, among them the Mixolydian, Hypodorian, Hypophryg-
ian, and Ilypolyclian, were derived from these principal scales.

Tetrachordn Each tetrachord is Lydian

Dorian composed of the same

interval sequence.

Phrygian

90 THE MUSIC OF THE HELLENIC AGE

There is not enough evidence to show which of these scales the Greeks
considered the ideal for melodic expression. We moderns must always
remember that they did not use these scales, as we do ours, as foundations
for harmony, but only as a sort of framework into which the melodies
were fitted. The difference in general pitch and in the intervals used,
as well as the fact that the melodies clustered about different centers in
the different modes, gave the Greeks their doctrine of ethos, which re
garded each mode as capable of a distinct general impression. The
Dorian, for example, was considered suitable for virile, energetic music;
the Lydian was thought to be effeminate and likely to induce poor
morals. The modes which came from the East were used for amusement
purposes, for banquet and dance music.

Much of the treatment of the subject of music on the part of the
Greek philosophers consisted in elaborations of this idea that these vari
ous scales were capable of calling forth definite emotions within the
listener. This aesthetic doctrine of the ethos, established by the Pythago
reans, was later given great attention by Plato and Aristotle, 11 who con
sidered music as a valuable and important factor in educating the people;
and later the Peripatetics developed it still further. In the second century
of the Christian era, Ptolemaeus compiled a summary of the whole philo
sophic and aesthetic theories of the Greeks, which served as the basis
of later treatises by the Romans. So the Greek theoretical conceptions
regarding music have affected our present system in ways of which we
are hardly conscious. Even the doctrine of the ethos survives in the inves
tigations which have been made into the possibilities of music as a

a * " By some of them [the modes], as for example the Mixolydian r we are disposed
to grief and depression; by others, as for example the low-pitched ones, we are disposed
to tenderness of sentiment."

Aristotle
Which of the Harmoniai [modes] then are soft and convivial? *

* The Ionian/ he replied, ' and Lydian, and such as are called relaxing/

* Can you make any use of these, my friend, for military men? '

* By no means/ replied he.

4 Then, it seems, you have only yet remaining the Doric and the Phrygian. I do
not know/ said I, ' the modes; but leave me that mode which may, in a becoming
manner, imitate the voice and accents of a truly brave man, going on in a military
action, and every rough adventure/ "

Plato: The Republic

MUSICAL HERITAGE FROM THE GREEKS 91

therapeutic agent, possibilities about which modern scientists by no
means agree. 12

Some scholars maintain that the most important discovery in Greek
' music was the invention of musical notation a way of designating by
written symbols the notes which were being played or sung. Some of
the Eastern peoples may have antedated them in this, but the Greek
system is the first clearly defined musical notation in history. Each sound
could be registered in two ways, one for instruments and one for voices.
The characters used were mostly derived from the Greek alphabet, there
being 16 instrumental signs, capable of showing quarter tones, and 24
vocal ones. Some of these had slight rhythmic significance, although in
the vocal music the rhythm depended entirely on that of the words.
In general, we may conclude that rhythms meant much more to the
Greeks, so far as the general effect was concerned, than did melody.
Aristiclcs Quintilian said that rhythm is masculine, melody feminine,
and implied that the latter must always be subordinate to the former.

In this, as in other matters concerning Greek music, we can only the
orize; all possibility of recovering the expressive value it once possessed
has been forever lost.

12 The Greeks had no doubts, however. It is reported that Thaletas of Crete de
stroyed the power of an epidemic through the sweetness of his lyre playing. Con
temporary with the very important discoveries which the Greeks made in science and
medicine, as well as in music, we find such curious theories as those of Aesculapius,
who treated disorders of the ear with music; Theophrastus, who testified to the value
of soft aulos music (it had to be in the Phrygian mode) for the relief of pain; and
Caelius Aurclianus, who claimed that the agonies of sciatica could be mitigated
through music.

State Museum, Bertih

A GREEK GATEWAY

Roman and Early Christian Music

Let others melt and mold the breathing bronze
To forms more fair, aye, out of marble bring
Features that live; Jet others plead causes well;
Or trace with pointed wand the cycled heaven,
And hail the constellations as they rise;
But thou, O Roman, learn with sovereign sway
To rule the nations.

Virgil: The Aeiieid, translated by Theodore C. Williams

THE ROMAN SPIRIT

WRITERS on the history of music are wont to dismiss the subject
of the Romans with a brief epitome to the effect that since this
mighty people took its artistic ideals from the Greeks and contributed
nothing in the way of characteristic development, it is not worthy of any
extended consideration in a history of art. This, like most generalizations,
is only half true. The contributions of the Romans to world culture
may not have been so striking as those of the Greeks; but they were
nevertheless important and individual.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the general opinion of Roman art better
than the well-known and oft-repeated talc of the general who, while
engaged in removing to Rome some of the art relics which he had cap
tured in one of the Greek cities, warned his soldiers and slaves that if
they broke any of the statues they would be kept at work until they
produced others as good. Even if this incident never actually happened,
it would have been necessary to invent it, for it tells us so much about
the Romans: that they were a proud, mercenary, conquering people,
who thought that culture could be produced by " subjugation, borrow
ing, or compulsion "; that they never acquired that attitude towards life
from which inspired artistic .creation naturally and freely springs; and
Mii-8 93

Courtesy of German Tourist Information Ojfffa

A ROMAN GATEWAY

It would be difficult to find a better illustration of the essential difference between
the spirit of Greek and Roman art than two gateways now in the Pergarnon Museum,
Berlin. The first (see page 92 ), built in the second century B.C. in a Greek colony in
Asia Minor, reflects the calm spirit and austere restraint of the best Greek art. The
second, from the Roman colony of Milet, built about 150 A.D., is obviously copied
from the Greek style; but in comparison it is grandiose and overlavish.

PERIOD OF TRANSITION

CHOIR GALLERY IN THE CATHEDRAL, FLORENCE, 1433-1438

(By Donatello)

power of the Church, upon which man had learned to lean for so long,
there came a corresponding unfolding of man's personality. No longer
entirely dependent on either Church or State, man began to realize how
he could make his own spiritual approach to God and find his own place
in the world about him. It was a time of stirring interest and teeming
ideas, this close of the medieval period; there came, after a long time of
subordination to the wishes and desires of the Church, a release of new
power, a zest for the realities of life, and a love for the things of the world.
This spirit was everywhere manifest, but especially in Italy; and it had
its reflection in art, as might be expected. No longer satisfied with the
composite expression of the Cathedral, the individual began to seek out
ways to express his definite and personal viewpoint. The emphasis was
thus shifted from a collective, symbolic, and, therefore, impersonal spirit
of artistic expression to a more subjective, realistic, and personal one.
From this time the individual begins to stand out more and more in art,
and the period of the so-called " easel picture," made by a single artist
for a single person, begins.

ROMAN AND EARLY CHRISTIAN MUSIC

RECONSTRUCTION OF THE CIRCUS MAXIMUS, ROME

Nevertheless, the riches and the power acquired by the Romans, to
gether with the fact that the presence of one sovereign political power
enabled widely spread peoples to exchange and merge their cultural
contributions, produced what one historian has called the most success
ful and extensive assimilation of culture achieved up to that time. Rome's
great contributions to civilization were, of course, in the fields of law
and politics. But the art fields were all enriched by Roman contributions
of such a character as to affect strongly the generations that followed.

The austere beauty and the fine restraint characteristic of the best
Greek art made little appeal to Roman taste, it is true; and when the
Romans copied Hellenic models, they usually chose those of a decadent
period, for they loved grandiose magnificence more than artistic restraint;
Building was largely devoted to providing large public meetinghouses
and law courts (basilicas), baths, theaters, sports arenas, monumental
bridges, commemorative arches, and superb aqueducts. A desire for Gar
gantuan grandeur seemed to be an overwhelming passion: the great
Circus Maximus, a sort of " multiple political club, lounge, social ren
dezvous," had accommodations for hundreds of thousands of spectators.

Sculpture was devoted largely to a literal copying of personal attri
butes the making of a huge number of portrait busts of senators, gen-

THE ROMAN SPIRIT

State Museum, Berlin

THE EMPEROR MAXIMINUS
A fine example of the Roman portrait bust

crals, and merchants or to some sort of elaborate architectural orna
mentation. The best examples combined some of the Greek ideals with
an inherent desire for naturalism, but as a whole they were not very
impressive. It was this architecture and sculpture which so strongly
affected nineteenth-century European and American art. Any visitor to
Paris, London, or New York cannot help realizing how architects and
sculptors have based some of their most monumental creations on these
Roman models. In painting, the Roman artist tried to attain the same
naturalistic effects, simulating the appearance of depth by the devices
of perspective, and achieving some important atmospheric results.

The Greek dramas were not imitated. Instead, we hear of farces given
by the miiiii, and of pantomimic dance dramas divorced entirely from
words, and of the gorgeous spectacles of circus and arena which, con
trolled and exploited by the politicians, constituted one of the most
powerful influences in Roman life. Artists were looked on as minor per-
sonages, many of them being slaves who had been captured from sub
ject countries celebrated for excellence in learning or creative ability.

go ROMAN AND EARLY CHRISTIAN MUSIC

BORROWED IDEALS

So not much is to be expected in the way of musical development on
the part of the Romans. They borrowed their ideas and ideals from the
Greeks, but instead of developing them, they degraded them. Their
poetry was not recited to musical accompaniment as it had been, at least
in classic times, in Greece. In their productions of drama there was no
orchestra or choir, the monodies of the actors being accompanied only
by the aulos; these actors did not always sing their own part but kept
the declamation and dialogue as speaking roles and hired a singer for
the choral parts. One of the chief uses of instruments was in warfare, the
cornu and the tuba being especially developed for this purpose. In the
dance pantomimes into which the old tragedies had deteriorated, and
which became more and more popular as they became more and more
licentious and obscene, instruments were used for accompaniment. The
band consisted of players on the tibia (a sort of double flute), the Pan
pipe (syrinx), the lyre, and cymbals; and each player had two metal
plates fastened under his foot, so that he could mark out the time and
thus keep the band together.

Lucian of Samosata, who lived in the second century AJX, wrote an
essay on Roman dancing in which he makes one of his characters ask
how anyone can

" sit still and listen to the sound of a flute and watch the antics of an
effeminate creature got up in soft raiment to sing lascivious songs and
mimic the passions of prehistoric strumpets to the accompaniment of
twanging string and shrilling pipe and clattering heel? "

And another answers:

" The pantomime is above all things an actor: that is his first aim, in
the pursuit of which he resembles an orator, and especially the composer
of * declamations/ whose success, as the pantomime knows, depends like
his own upon verisimilitude, upon the adaptation of language to charac
ter: prince or tyrannicide, pauper or farmer, each must be shown with the
peculiarities that belong to him. I must give you the comment of another
foreigner on this subject. Seeing five masks laid ready that being the
number of parts in the piece and only one pantomime, he asked who
were going to play the parts. He was informed that the whole piece would

BORROWED IDEALS 99

be performed by a single actor. ' Your humble servant, sir/ cried our
foreigner to the artist, * I observe that you have but one body: it had es
caped me, that you possessed several souls/ . . .

" Other entertainments of eye or ear are but manifestations of a single
art: 'tis flute or lyre or song; 'tis moving tragedy or laughable comedy. The
pantomime is all-embracing in the variety of his equipment: flute and
pipe, beating foot and clashing cymbal, melodious recitative, choral har
mony. Other arts call out only one half of a man's powers the bodily
or the mental : as a physical exercise, there is meaning in his movements;
every gesture has its significance; and therein lies his chief excellence.
The enlightened Lesbonax of Mytilene called pantomimes ' manual
philosophers/ and used to frequent the theater, in the conviction that he
came out of it a better man than he went in. ...

" All professions hold out some object, either of utility or of pleasure:
Pantomime is the only one that secures both these objects; now the
utility that is combined with pleasure is doubled in value. [A typical
Roman viewpoint!] Who would choose to look on at a couple of young
fellows spilling their blood in a boxing match, or wrestling in the dust,
when he may see the same subject represented by a pantomime, with the
additional advantages of safety and elegance, and with far greater pleasure
to the spectator? The vigorous movements of the pantomime turn and

A GLADIATORIAL COMBAT TO THE ACCOMPANIMENT OF MUSIC

OF TUBA, HORN, AND ORGAN
(From the mosaics of the Amphitheater in Zliten. About 70 A.D.)

100 ROMAN AND EARLY CHRISTIAN MUSIC

twist, bend and spring afford at once a gratifying spectacle to the be
holder and a wholesome training to the performer; I maintain that no
gymnastic exercise is its equal for beauty and for the uniform develop
ment of the physical powers of agility, suppleness, and elasticity, as of
solid strength."

Translated by H. W. and F. S. Fowler

Enough has been written about the splendors and terrors of the
Roman public games with which the consuls, and afterwards, the em
perors, won the favor of the people at their own expense. These im
perial side shows might include anything that was exciting enough or
barbarous enough to form an absorbing spectacle: chariot races and
gladiatorial combats, fights between slave-manned galleys in the flooded
arena, hundreds of trumpeters playing in a chorus, wild African lions let
loose to be shot by specially imported archers, and so forth. Sad to relate,
music played an ignominious role of accompaniment to all this Roman
splendor, dismayingly like that which it occupies in similar Hollywoodian
revels. All the noisy instruments they could find were used by the Ro
mans in providing music for these spectacles, including tubas, horns, and
organs, the latter being known in Alexandria as early as 100 B.C.

LATER TRENDS

In the Augustan times and afterwards art began to be cultivated by
" the " people both nobles and bourgeoisie. Artists and singers and
players were sought after by Roman society and often received the
favors of princes. A knowledge of music was looked upon as essential to
social climbers who wished to get into society, and by the time of the
first century A.D. all the former prejudices against professional artists
had disappeared. Music was even cultivated by the emperors. We remem
ber Nero's aspirations along this line; he devoted much time and pa
tience to the cultivation of his " feeble, veiled voice," as one of his con
temporaries described it, by going through long periods of fasting or of
eating only pears and by exhibiting other foibles peculiar to singers. He
had other claims to fame, especially the spectacular punishments which
he devised for the Christians, a " sort of people who held a new and

THE EARLY CHURCH 1O1

impious superstition/* dressing them, according to Tacitus, in the skins
of wild beasts and exposing them to be torn to pieces by dogs in the
public games. Christians were sometimes crucified, sometimes con
demned to be burned, according to the dictates of Nero's fancy; and at
nightfall they sometimes served in place of lamps to lighten the darkness.

Loving to appear in public as a singer, Nero inflicted himself upon
audiences all over Italy; and in order to be sure of his reception, " he
chose young men of the equestrian order, and about five thousand robust
young fellows from the common people, on purpose to learn various
kinds of applause, called bombi, imbrices, and testae, 1 which they were to
practice in his favor, whenever he performed. They were divided into
several parties and were remarkable for their fine heads of hair, were ex
tremely well dressed, with rings upon their left hands. The leaders of
these bands had salaries of forty thousand sesterces allowed them " (Kir-
stein: The Dance).

Nothing better illustrates the depths of degradation to which Roman
art finally descended; for here, as Kirstein has remarked, we have the
spectacle of a spontaneous actor directing artistic applause, rather than
spontaneous applause given to an artistic actor! Legend has given a final,
aesthetically consistent denouement to this demoniacal career in the story
of Nero's setting Rome aflame for the sheer enjoyment of tragic beauty,
and fiddling while he watched it. Such a legend may have little historic
basis, but it shows into what disrepute music had fallen at that time.

THE EARLY CHURCH

The history of the world has seen nothing more dramatic than the
sudden reversal of the fortunes of that devoted group of religionists
which took the name of Christians during the first centuries of the pres
ent era, Jesus of Nazareth, who was considered a god by many of his
followers, but who was looked upon by the Roman officials of the time
as simply another of the fanatical Jews who had given them so much

i The term bombi was derived from the humming of bees, and meant a confused
din made by the hands or mouth; imbrices meant the sound of rain or hail on the
roofs; testae, the smashing of terra-cotta jars. Here are old ideas which have been
neglected by the modern purveyors of applause, the claques!

1O2 ROMAN AND EARLY CHRISTIAN MUSIC

trouble, was crucified in Jerusalem in the year 30 A.D. About thirty years
later another Jew who had takexi part in the spread of the religion of
Jesus, Saul of Tarsus, was put to death in Rome. In another ten years
Jerusalem itself was razed to the ground and its inhabitants scattered
over the face of the earth. Hundreds of its people were paraded through
the streets of Rome as prisoners in celebration of what the Romans must
have considered the end of the Judean fanatic and his religion.

But they were wrong: Christianity increased rapidly in popularity
and in numbers during the first three centuries of its existence. The rea
sons why it was able to achieve such significant triumph over its power
ful rival religions are many and complex. It happened to fit the needs of
its time better than did any of the others; it possessed an assured and
positive dogma; and it owed a great deal to the splendid organizing
and disciplining power of the missionary Paul, as he was called after his
conversion from Judaism. It was he who took the rather metaphysical
teachings of Jesus, addressed as they had been to a small circle, and
adapted them as the basis for a well-organized religion of universal
appeal.

It would be apart from our purpose to attempt any complete account
of the details of Christianity's triumph over Roman paganism. It is suffi
cient to note the fact that from a simple communal society formed from
the followers who were left after the Crucifixion of Christ a society
that had no need of extensive organization, for it expected Jesus to return
soon to earth it developed rapidly, especially among the urban middle
classes, during these first years, and in the process aroused the strong
suspicions of the Romans. Any comparative study of religions will show
that many of the fundamental doctrines which Christianity adopted
during these years of its early existence are common to most of them
and were inherited directly from the beliefs of the Jews who, in turn,
borrowed them from earlier prototypal religions. The Jews also con
tributed to Christianity the fundamental idea of a Jehovah God and the
hope of a Messiah to save humanity from its sins an idea which
Breasted has traced to Egyptian philosophy. The scholastic Greeks of the
early Christian centuries introduced the element of abstract reasoning
into the very personal, intimate teachings of Jesus. In their hands, as has

THE EARLY CHURCH

10 3

PAINTINGS FROM AN EARLY CHRISTIAN CATACOMB IN ROME
The subjects are figures from Christian mythology painted in Roman terms.

been said, Christian theology took on the color of Greek metaphysics,
centering about Jesus and his place in the world rather than about
Plato and his conception of truth. The religious practices of the Greeks
contributed also to the shaping of parts of the Christian ritual, notably
the rites of the Eucharist and baptism. The Persians are thought to have
been the first to believe in man's immortality, a belief that was absorbed
into Christianity through its becoming a constituent part of the Jewish
faith. Rome itself made a mighty contribution to the new religion, that
of its policy of organization and administration: as. .the Christian Church
spread over the eastern and central parts of Europe, it effectually adopted
for its own purposes the system of administration that had been found
to work well within the empire. Drawn from all parts of the world,
borrowing its ideas from all known cults, Christianity was able to im
pose such a strong element of emotional symbolism and didactic per
suasiveness into its teachings as to make them quickly popular.

104 ROMAN AND EARLY CHRISTIAN MUSIC

During its earliest days the Church had little interest in art of any
kind; for not only were many of the converts of the new faith drawn
from the middle classes, who were unused to artistic expression, but also
in the minds of these early members of the Church, art stood for every
thing to which the new faith was opposed. It was the symbol of a god
less, corrupt, pagan, and doomed world a world to which the early
return of Christ would bring a merciful close. Music especially was asso
ciated with the Antichrist, and painting was used merely to represent
visually some of the events connected with Old Testament history. The
close connection which these early Christian paintings had with texts
used in the services of the dead shows that they were meant to be sort of
visual prayers, the worshiper asking the Lord to receive the soul of the
departed one for whose tomb the painting had been made, just as the
Lord had accomplished the miracles depicted in the picture. The fact
that the motifs used often had a double significance a figure, for ex
ample, being capable of representing Orpheus to a casual pagan visitor
who might see the painting and Christ to the believing worshiper did
not change the essential nature of the art. It was purely a case of " safety-
first." The same walls on which were painted in Roman terms the im
ploring figures of Christian mythology may have reverberated to a simple
kind of chant adapted to the purposes of the Church from Hebraic and
Greek sources.

THE " HYMN OF JESUS "

There are only the vaguest indications of the actual use of music in
the Church during these first centuries. Not content with merely taking
over some of the usages of the Jewish synagogues which had sprung up
in all the important towns in Asia Minor, Syria, and even in Rome itself
after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem by the Roman Titus,
the new religion early began to develop its own chants. Besides the Jew
ish psalms, these early Christians sang hymns similar in character to
those connected with the Greek mysteries and used for the same pur
pose, that of invoking the god and coming into exalted, mystic contact
with him. There is a definite record of such a hymn in the Apocryphal

THE HYMN OF JESUS 105

" Acts of John " known, according to the Catholic Dictionary, to St.
Augustine; it is supposed to date from about 160 A.D. and from its con
tent we are justified in imagining that the music used must have been
of a Hellenic nature and that not only music but dancing formed a part
of the liturgical practices of the new sect:

" Before Jesus was taken by the Jews and unbelievers who hold to
Satan's law, he gathered us together and said: Before I am delivered over
to them, let us sing a hymn to the Father. We will then go to them, to
gether. Then he asked us to form a circle: we took each by the hand, he
being in the middle and said: Amen, Follow me; and he commenced the
hymn.

Jesus: Glory be to the Father (and we who were circling him re
sponded) : Amen. [Thus let it be.]

Jesus: Glory be to thee the word. Glory be to thee the grace.

Disciples: Amen.

Jesus: Glory to thee the Holy Ghost praise be to thy glory.

Disciples: Amen.

Jesus: We praise thee, Father we render thanks to thee, light where
no shadows dwell.

Disciples: Amen.

Jesus: Of that unto which we render thee thanks I speak to be saved
is my desire and I desire to save.

Disciples: Amen.

Jesus: To be delivered is my desire, and I desire to deliver.

Disciples: Amen.

Jesus: To be blessed is my desire, and I wish to bless.

Disciples: Amen.

Jesus: To be born is my desire, and I wish to engender.

Disciples: Amen.

Jesus: To be nourished is my desire, and I wish to nourish.

Disciples: Amen.

Jesus: To hear is my desire, and I wish to be heard.

Disciples: Amen.

Jesus: To understand is my desire, with all my intelligence.

Disciples: Amen.

Jesus: To be cleansed is my desire, and I wish to cleanse.

Disciples: Amen.

Jesus: Forgiveness is our choragus [dance leader] to sing is my de
sire, let us dance together.

1O6 ROMAN AND EARLY CHRISTIAN MUSIC

Disciples: Amen.

Jesus: I wish to be grieved for, weep you all.
Disciples: Amen.

Jesus: I am thy light, ye who see me. I am the gate, ye who enter.
The twelve disciples now dance.

Jesus: Those who do not dance will not comprehend what shall befall.
Disciples: Amen.

Jesus: Then all of you join my dance. You who dance, see what I have
accomplished."

We know that the spontaneous, ecstatic sort of songs that are char
acteristic of rather primitive religious rites (and which survive in the
Negro camp-meeting extemporizations and Salvation Army gatherings
of today) had a part in the early worship of the Church; they were ac
cepted as a valuable adjunct to the services by Paul himself, who, however,
insisted that they be intelligible to the rest of the congregation. None of
the melodies of this period have survived; but they were probably of small
compass and employed a simple form of melismatic decoration.

The third century was a period marked by a slow strengthening and a
gradual development of the Church's resources. As the social and eco
nomic conditions of the Roman Empire became progressively worse,
in spite of the reorganizing reforms and efficient administration of a few
emperors, the collapse of that once powerful institution was seen to be
inevitable; but there was little change in its official attitude toward the
Christians. The members of the new sect were regarded at all times
during these early centuries of the Church's existence with suspicion
and dislike in the empire and were subjected to intermittent persecutions
in the hope of breaking their morale. But in vain: the Christians con
tinued to flourish, especially in Alexandria and the eastern part of the
empire; important communities were founded, and many of the rich and
learned professed the new faith. 2 By the year 300 the problem of the
Christian Church was not so much that of defying the imperial power
of Rome as it was of securing a unity of organization for itself. This was
the great period of heretical discussion. There arose so many diverse

2 " Let cruelty, envious or malignant/' cries Cyprian, " hold you here in bonds
and chains as long as it will; from this earth and from these sufferings you shall
speedily come to the Kingdom of Heaven." (C. H. Dawson: The Making of Europe)

0EMONIAC SONGS 107

opinions as to what should constitute the essential doctrines of the
Church that its very life was threatened. For it was obvious enough that
if the new organization was not to split up at the very beginning of its
existence into a number of irreconcilable sects, each differing from the
others in some essential way, some method of repressing these individu
alistic spirits must be found. And so it was necessary to deal summarily
and harshly with such heresies as Arianism, a dispute revolving around a
difference of interpretation brought about by the change of a single let
ter in one Greek word; Gnosticism, an attempt to make the Christian
faith conform to Greek metaphysics; Montanisin, which preached the
immediate second coming of Christ; and many others of a similar na
ture. One of the historians of this period has made the statement that
these quarrels within the Church " made five or six times as many mar
tyrs in fifty years as the pagan emperors had in two hundred and fifty
years! "

DEMONIAC SONGS

Some of these heretical sects used propaganda songs, which they intro
duced on occasion into the worship of the Church, perhaps something
in the manner in which the Salvation Army makes such effective use of
modern melodies and rhythms. One of the problems of the early Church
Fathers was how best to deal with such matters; indeed, they were sorely
troubled as to what the general attitude of the Church should be toward
this disturbing matter of music, so popular with the people and so pagan
in its associations. They realized well enough its power to arouse feel
ings and stir passions; 3 they heard on every side its secular use, in work
songs, sailor chanteys, lullabies, and so forth, and were worried about
the effect which this sort of music might have on the hearts and minds
of the faithful. They knew that the pagan shows and pantomimes were
still popular with church members, both young and old, and they ranted
about the " demoniac and Satanic songs " to be heard on such occasions.
St. John Chrysostom observes bitterly that if a youth of the time was asked
to sing a psalm, he wouldn't know it; but if he was asked to hum one

* " Nothing so lifts the soul, gives it wings, frees it from earthly things, as a holy
song, in which rhythm and melody form a true symphony/' (St. John Chrysostom)

1O8 ROMAN AND EARLY CHRISTIAN MUSIC

of the popular revue songs from the current pantomime, he would be
sure to have it by heart! The councils of the Church tried ,to counter
act these evil influences by decreeing that no person connected in any
way with a circus or pantomime could be baptized and that any church
member attending the theater on holy days would be excommunicated
rules which, if they had been strictly enforced, would have thrown half
Christendom, including a good part of the clergy, out of the Church's
communion:

" From east to west, in Constantinople, in Antioch, in Alexandria, in
Rome, the mimic drama flourished, uniting together old pagans and new
Christians in the one common enjoyment of pure secularism."

Allardyce Nicoll: Masks, Mimes and Miracles

THE PROBLEM OF INSTRUMENTS

Another problem which taxed the ingenuity of the Fathers was that
concerned with the use of instruments in the services; if some of their
rulings seem strange to us today, we must always remember the infelici
tous association which music had for them. In the beginning, all the
Christian musical practices were vocal, if for no other reason than the
very practical one that it was necessary to use great caution while con
ducting the services; and so no loud instruments could be tolerated.
Later on, the lyre and the cithara were allowed, at least in private meet
ings; but even Clement of Alexandria, one of the most broad-mindecl of
the early churchmen and one well versed in all the amenities of instru
mental music, went on record to the effect that the Christians did not
need to use instruments in their services, their word " being peace and
not the psaltery, trumpet, aulos, and cymbals of those who prepared
for war." The early bishops did not hesitate to compare the aulos to the
evil serpent which tempted Mother Eve, and we read of their inveigh
ing against such pagan uses of music as those in a church in Asia Minor,
where they beat the hands, sounded little bells, and employed chore-
graphic movements of the body in accompanying the holy chants.

The Old Testament contains, of course, numerous references to the
use of instruments in the worship of God's house; and the tortuous and

THE CHURCH S POSITION 109

symbolical means of explaining these away on the part of the good Fathers
of the early Church make amusing reading. The injunction of Holy
Writ to " praise God with the timbrel and the dance and all instruments
of music " meant, according to their ingenious explanations, that the
" members of the body are like strings in accord in praising the Lord,
and its thoughts like cymbal's chime/' St. Basil saw in the ten strings of
the psaltery a likeness to the ten commandments, and therefore that
instrument was permitted,, especially since it was severe looking and in no
sense resembled the instruments used in theatrical performances. More
over, its upper strings were the ones which resounded the best and not
the lower, as in the lyre and the cithara; therefore it represented a higher,
purer form of music, and its use might be condoned.

Since music was the only one of the arts even mildly approved by the
early Church, it seems probable that its emotion-releasing effect was
much more powerful than if it had been one amongst various arts serv
ing as the handmaid of religion. We can thus better understand the
anxiety of the early Church Fathers to rationalize (as we would now
say) the effects of music and to explain them away in symbolic terms.

THE CHURCH'S POSITION

Out of all these backgrounds there crystallized very gradually the
general psychological attitude which the Church assumed towards music
an attitude which was to influence the history of the art for the next
thousand years and shape its general development for an even longer
period. With the Greeks, music was thought of as a moral and political
force, capable of exerting a tremendous influence on the lives of the
people; but it was also used as a means for giving pleasure. The Church
Fathers, who were strongly influenced by Greek thought in so many
things, adopted only part of this attitude. To them, as to the Hebrews,
all art was justifiable only in the sense that it could be made to serve
God; they never thought of it under any circumstances as existing for
its own sake. Therefore it must be brought under the control of the
Church. Even pleasure in its use for the glory of God was to be frowned
upon; an early manuscript now in the Library at Vienna tells of an

MH-9

HO ROMAN AND EARLY CHRISTIAN MUSIC

Egyptian abbot named Paulo who at the beginning of the fourth century
retired to the desert with some of his followers and of how one of them,
on being sent to Alexandria on business, returned with accounts of the
scandalous goings on in the churches there the praises of God were
actually being sung. Thereupon the old monk holds forth on the iniquity
of seeking divers melodies and diverse rhythms for the worship of God.
" When we stand in the presence of God we should assume an attitude
of contrition and not employ the voice of praise. Can there be any spirit
of penitence in a monk who, in church or cell, makes his voice resound
like that of a bull? " So even the honest pleasures of the anchorite en
joying the fine resonance of his cell as he sang the praises of his Creator
were to be denied him.

All these early chants of the Church, most of them confined to the
settings of the Psalms, were probably simple in character, their melodies
confined to the limits of the tetrachord and with no definite feeling of
tonality. Athanasius (2967-373), who formulated the doctrine of the
Trinity that was finally adopted by the Church, ordered that the Psalms
were to be sung with so little variety that they sounded, according to St.
Augustine, more like speaking than singing. There was an evident effort
on the part of the early authorities to keep the use of music simple and
avoid all extravagances. 4 Not only was music to be confined to the wor
ship of God, but its use in this connection must be so carefully con
trolled that no suggestion of its paganistic implications might appear.

It was not until after the triumphant emergence of Christianity from
the catacombs and its adoption as the Roman state religion that a more
liberal attitude prevailed and ritualistic music assumed something of the
importance it deserved in the worship of the Church. But that is an
other story and belongs to another chapter.

* The fourth-century abbot, Silvain, in rebuking a monk who had confessed to
having fallen asleep during vigils, said that undoubtedly his sin was the result of too
much fancy psalm chanting. Song, he maintained, had sent many a man (and some
priests as well) to hell, so impure were the passions it aroused.

THE HISTORICAL PAST

Monodfrc Music of a Thousand Years

MUSIC IN THE CHURCH

Take nonspecialists in music and non-Catholic clergymen; take con
temporaries, whether farmers, laborers, college students, college profes
sors, journalists, scientists, etc. Play the records of the Gregorian chant
on a phonograph without telling what it is, and then ask the listeners
whether they like it or not. I venture to say that at least 95, if not ioo 7
per cent would answer negatively. And in a sense they could not be
blamed. Because, from the standpoint of a sensually audible criterion,
the chant is no music at all; it is something queer, unen/oyable, primitive,
dry; in brief, it has none of the earmarks of what we are accustomed to
style music neither measure, nor harmony, nor polyphony.

"Pitirim A. Sorokin: Fluctuation of Forms of Art

ART IN THE EARLY CHURCH

IT was the fourth century which brought about the dramatic change
in the fortunes of the Christian religion which was to make it one
of the greatest forces in European civilization. In the beginning years
of this century, members of the strange new sect were being thrown
to the lions in the arenas because of their refusal to bow down to the
gods of the Romans; before the century was out, the same gods were
thrown down and dragged in the dust during the festivities attendant
upon the crowning of a Christian emperor. The citizens of Rome of the
year three hundred were accustomed enough to the sight of the persecu
tion of the Christians. Not many years later, the descendants of these
citizens were crowding the Christian altars, praying to their new God
for the forgiveness of their pagan fathers. The change came suddenly,
almost in the manner of a theatrical climax one decade, furtive secrecy
and clandestine worship; the next, triumph, victory, and honor.

113

114 MONODIC MUSIC OF A THOUSAND YEARS

By the year 300 AD. the Christians had become so numerous that the
Roman emperors realized that further persecution would be useless. In
311 the emperor Galerius revoked the edict of persecution and intro
duced an era of tolerance. In 313 Constantine signed the famous Edict
of Milan, an act which legalized Christian worship throughout the
Roman Empire. He moved his capital from Rome to Byzantium, which
was later called Constantinople, and from there he directed the practi
cal realization of his dream of a Holy Roman Empire and pushed it onto
the world stage. In 337, just before his death, this first Christian emperor
received the rites of baptism at the hands of a bishop of the Church.
Twenty-five years later, his nephew Julian died, after making a vain at
tempt to re-establish the pagan religion in Rome, murmuring, so the story
goes, Vicisti, Galilaee (Thou hast conquered, O Galilean).

For nearly two hundred years, during which time the Church was
able to consolidate her gains and lay the firm foundations for her future
developments, she rejoiced in her triumph; then in 476 came the banish
ment of the last of the western emperors (whose name was, ironically
enough, Romulus Augustus the Little) and the final collapse of the
Roman civilization under the impact of the invading barbarian hosts.
For a number of centuries the future of church as well as state seemed
dark enough; " western European culture retrogressed to the level of the
Cretan and Mycenaean civilizations" (Barnes) which had preceded
both Greece and Rome. But the years between the conversion of Con
stantine and the coming of the Lombards form one of the great epochs
in the Church's history and one of tremendous importance to art. It was
during this first brilliant flush of its power and wealth that the founda
tions of Christian liturgy, legendry, and art were laid, the site of these
early developments being Byzantium.

At the time the emperors of the West were still officially engaged in
persecuting the followers of Christ, the Church in the East had already
come to a state of maturity as a result of cultural traditions that reach
back to the beginnings of history. We are sometimes likely to forget
that the very beginnings of Christianity are Asiatic Christ and the Jews
lived in Palestine, not in Europe. So, too, the backgrounds of Christian
culture are Eastern and not Western. It was in Egypt, with its capital of

AN EARLY CHRISTIAN-BYZANTINE CHURCH

At the top is shown the rear view of the ruins of the Basilica at Turmanin in North
Syria, built during the sixth century; at the bottom, a front view of its reconstruction.

Il6 MONODIC MUSIC OF A THOUSAND YEARS

Alexandria, the center of the learning of the time, in Syria, with its mixed
Hebraic, Greek, and Mesopotamian inhabitants, and in Persia that its
first important development took place. Long before the Western Church
dared to worship openly above ground rather than in the dark cata
combs and secret places where it had furtively gathered, the Church in
the East had started on a brilliant period of growth, a development which
made necessary new buildings and suitable textiles, murals, and sculp
tures for their decoration, as well as elaborate liturgies and appropriate
music which could be used in the services.

Out of the attempt to meet these artistic needs of the Church there
came a glorious amalgam: the influence of the art of the Orient (an
influence which, of course, was strongly felt in this part of the world),
with its love of color, its stylized patterns, its rigid conventions, its sensu
ous feeling for mystical expression, was blended with the demands and
ideals of the new religious sect and the remains of the Greco-Roman tra
dition. The result was the style which has come to be known as Byzantine,
a style with so many cross-purposes and varying racial characteristics as
to make any attempt at exact classification impossible. Cheney has char
acterized it well by saying that it was Christian in purpose and Oriental
in expression. The churches which these Asiatic Christians built had
Eastern domes and Eastern barrel vaults; they were decorated with
painted murals and tapestries whose flattened composition, peculiar
iconography, rich color, and closely intertwined motives all suggest an
Eastern origin; their walls were covered with mosaics designs worked
out by setting small squares of colored glass or stone into a cement foun
dation. Everything about this art, its depths of infinite color, its sumptu
ous richness suggestive of the gold and jewels and spices of the Orient,
aroused the spirit of mystic exaltation and emotional fervor which the
Church wished to cultivate. So, in spite of later attempts on the part of
Europeans to purge the Church of this gorgeous Eastern art, it exerted
a strong influence on religious developments from the second century
clear down to the twentieth century.

Not the least important of these influences has been that on music.
Most modern investigators are agreed that it was here in these Eastern
communities that the type of Church music which has come to be known

SOURCES OF EARLY CHRISTIAN MUSIC

as the Gregorian chant had its origin; and that it was later introduced
into the Roman Church, there to become one of the great foundation
stones on which the structure of European music was erected. Anyone
familiar with this chant as it is still used in the Roman Catholic Church l
today is often startlingly reminded of these Eastern influences by the
frequent use which is made of the rich, florid vocal figures of the type
known as melisma a term which has come to be used for any deco
rative passage in which the original melody is spun out into embellish
ments. The people of the East have always had a strong predilection
for this sort of vocalization, and it can still be heard in the music of
India and the Orient. It was the practice in all the Eastern religions for
the cantor (the trained leader of the choirs) to embellish the melodies
he sang. The musicians of the early Church adopted the same idea, and
melismatic singing in which oftentimes a veritable torrent of florid vocal
ization occurs has been a constituent part of Christian music from earliest
times.

SOURCES OF EARLY CHRISTIAN MUSIC

We have but to listen to some of the traditional chants of the Jewish
liturgy such, for example, as that of the Passover JCaddish or the Day
of Atonement Abodah to realize how close is the bond between early
Christian and Jewish music. In our discussions in an earlier chapter we
have stated the features which were taken over into the music of the
Christian Church from the practices of the synagogue. Prominent among
these was the singing of the Psalms and Canticles, a feature of the oldest
portion of the Church's liturgy, used in the so-called " Offices of the
Hours " performed at fixed times during the day and night. The Church
kept the responsorial character of the Jewish psalmodic singing, a phrase
sung by the solo cantor or precentor being answered by the choir or
congregation; and this practice has been maintained to the present day. 2

1 It has also made notable progress in the present-day Anglican communion in
Great Britain and the Episcopal Church in the United States.

2 It may be that we have here the beginnings of " prima donnaism," for it is
clear historically that the cantor in both synagogue and church employed a certain ele
ment of melismatic coloratura.

11 8 MONODIC MUSIC OF A THOUSAND YEARS

A comparison of the music system of the early Christian Church with
that of the Greeks will also reveal many likenesses. It can easily be
shown that some of the Christian chants resemble the Greek melodies
that have been preserved; and there is little doubt that the general
musical traditions of those lands at the eastern end of the Mediterranean,
traditions which the new sect derived from the Greek practices, had a
great deal to do with the forming of the earliest music used in its wor
ship.

Jn fact, it has come to be generally agreed that the music which came
into use in the Church is an elevation of materials received from three
sources: the Jewish synagogical liturgy, the usages of Greco-Roman an
tiquity, and the spontaneous developments that occurred among the
early Eastern and Western Christian congregations. It was the result,
in the words of Artur Schnabel, the well-known pianist, of the cross
breeding of paganism, Hellenism, and Christianity.

THE MYSTICAL POWER OF GREGORIAN CHANT

But, we must always remember, there was something more: the raising
of music from a secondary to a sovereign role in the life of the early
Christian peoples came about because of a recognized spiritual necessity.
If we listen carefully to such a chant as that which has become traditional
for use on Holy Thursday, 3 a setting of the words " Christ became obedi
ent for us unto death, even to the death of the cross; for which cause
God hath exalted him and hath given him a name which is above every
name/' we shall note that the general effect is that of a quiet, simple
statement in which the melodic and textual divisions accord exactly.
From time to time there are melismatic embellishments of the melody
which give it added intensity, as if the simple melodic line could not
sufficiently express the emotional fervor of the words. It is evident enough
that the Church was able to create out of the material it borrowed from
earlier sources an art which is distinctly its own, a perfect medium for the
conveyance of its ideals and doctrines. The first part of this chant sug
gests, as clearly as does anything in pictorial art, the humiliation and

8 Christus Factus Est.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PLAINSONG

sufferings of the cross; the second, the triumphal exaltation of which this
suffering was the necessary preliminary. Thus the unknown composers
of this melody would sum up the doctrine of the Church as to the efficacy
of the redemption of mankind through Christ's death upon the cross.

In listening to this music we find ourselves far removed from the secu
lar surroundings and hurrying bustle of the world. It is a fitting counter
part to the beauty of the architecture, the majestic, varicolored pageant
of the ritual, the visual impressions of the incense mounting to heaven
like the prayers of the righteous, with which the Church surrounded her
worshipers from early times, seeking thereby to supplement and stimu
late their natural emotions and lift them out of themselves into a region
completely detached from everyday existence.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PLAINSONG*

It must not be thought that all the chants of the early Church were as
fully developed or as expressive as this. The history of early Christian
music is inextricably bound up with that of the development of the
liturgy, that is, the public rites and services used in the Church's wor
ship. The earliest of these liturgies, together with the music used in it,
came out of the East, and for the first few centuries of the Church's ex
istence innumerable local and territorial liturgies were used, all of them
different Syrian, Egyptian, Persian, Byzantine, Gallic, Hispaho-Gallic.
Even the Roman liturgy, which later supplanted the others and remains
today (with a few exceptions 5 ) the standard in the Rqman Catholic
Church throughout the world, was at first Greek in form and language.
By the seventh century this had become homogenized, had adopted
Latin as its official language, and had gathered to itself a vast body of
effective music of scope wide enough to cover the needs of all those who

* This term is usually applied to the whole traditional ritual melody of the
Western Church; it is derived from cantus planus, implying a plain melody without
counterpoint, and is used interchangeably with the term " Gregorian/' which comes
from the name of one of the greatest exponents of the chant, Gregory the Great,
elected Pope in 590.

5 Notably the Ambrosian liturgy, still in use at Milan, and the Mozarabic rites in
Spain: each of these has its own peculiar type of music, differing from Gregorian
plainsong.

12O MONODIC MUSIC OF A THOUSAND YEARS

participated in the services. By this time, bishop, cleric, choir, and congre
gation each had an important and individual part in the common worship,
with a definite type of music adapted to the particular requirements.

There was, first of all, the essentially dramatic dialogue, set to simple
chants, which took place between the Celebrant of the Mass (the offi
cial name of the Eucharistic Sacrifice and of its liturgy of prayers and
ceremonies) and the entire congregation. Then there were the more
elaborated chants sung by the choir, set to psalm texts, with refrains var
ied for the seasons and feasts of the liturgical year such things as the
Gradual and Alleluia responds, the Introit, the Offertory, and so forth.
Finally there were those parts of the Mass (three in number at this time,
the Kyrie eleison, the Gloria in Excchis Deo, and the Sanctus 6 ) designed
for singing by the congregation alone and therefore set to very simple
chants which strongly contrasted in character with those sung by the
trained choir.

These developments were not accidental; they came about over a long
period of time and through the agencies of a number of individuals.
Leaders in the movement were (i) St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, the
man generally credited with introducing the musical usages of the East
ern Church into the West (he it was who brought order out of the great
confusion arising from the use of so many liturgies and who codified, from
the usages of the time, four scales to be used in singing); and (2) Pope
Gregory, Who at the end of the sixth century again had the entire matter
reviewed,^ added four more scales, and collected and recast, in his Aiiti-
phonale Missarum, the whole repertoire of chants then available.

An important factor in this standardization of the plainchant during
these centuries was the great Roman Schola Cantorum, a school of sing
ing founded, according to tradition, during the fourth century, immedi
ately after the Edict of Milan, which officially freed the Christians from
Roman persecutions. For nearly eight hundred years this institution

6 The first of these was taken bodily from the Greek liturgy; the second and
third were adaptations from Greek and Hebrew sources. The final details of the
Mass as we know it. today were not complete until the eleventh century, by which
time two other portions were added, the Credo and the Agnus Dei. These portions
are referred to as the Ordinary of the Mass, and to them are added the choral
parts with variable texts, called the Proper introits, graduals, alleluias, and so forth.

TECHNICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF PLAINSONG

121

AN EARLY CHRISTIAN CHURCH: ST. CLEMENTE, ROME
In the center of the nave is the space reserved for the singers.

maintained its identity and helped spread the traditional manner of
singing the music of the Church throughout all her domains, even as far
afield as England. As Douglas puts it, in all that welter of migration, war,
political turmoil, and social transformation which we call the Dark Ages,
the " Song Schools of many a monastery and cathedral, faithful children
of a great mother, preserved the ideals and advanced the practice of
purely religious music. We are in their debt today for a very large part
of what is best in our choral worship."

TECHNICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF PLAINSONG

These chants contained in the Gregorian Antiphonale Missarum still
stand as a model and standard for the worship of the Church. But their
melodies are bound to sound somewhat foreign to modern ears, and
their general lack of rhythm, in the sense in which we understand it

122 MONODIC MUSIC OF A THOUSAND YEARS

today, accentuates this strangeness. As we listen to these melodies, we are
conscious of the fact that they seem to have been designed to emphasize
the modulations of the natural speaking voice, like the changes in pitch
of the voice of any speaker who has to make his words carry through
large spaces for instance, a train announcer in a huge modern terminal.
No more practical means could have been found for the conveying of
thought throughout the reaches of the large churches of the time. The
chants use musical scales that are entirely diatonic (that is, made up of
only tones and half tones) , thereby giving the senses a feeling of peaceful
assurance that is far removed from the restlessness and strivings of secular
music with its colorful variety of chromatic intervals. TJ*ere are no wide
skips or nervous leaps in melody; everything proceeds by steps which
suggest the quiet inflections of the voice in normal speaking. None of the
effects of modern rhythm, with its regularly recurring stresses of accent,
are present here; our impression is rather that of a wavelike flow of
melody, uniting the various textual elements into a series of intelligible
phrases. There are delicate dramatic effects, but nothing that is strained
or overpowering. The whole feeling of this music is one of secure peace-
fulness, yet of strange mystery. All its elements melodies, rhythm, and .
dynamics flow from a single idea, simply because they sprang from the
mood which best expresses this idea. They do for the text what faith
does for the reason carry it beyond its own limitations. According to the
ideals of the Church this chant music has been made the true language
of the worshiping soul.

Whereas modern music makes most frequent use of but two scales
the major and the minor, each of which has its own characteristics the
Church chant used eight scales, each with its individual flavor. The dif
ferent feasts of the Church year vary naturally in mood some joyful in
character (Christmas and Easter), some hopeful (Advent) , some sorrow
ful (Lent), some triumphant (Ascension). So the music that was com
posed for these various occasions was joyful, hopeful, sorrowful, trium
phant in turn, and those who composed the chant melodies employed
different scales to express this. They considered the first and second scales
("modes," they called them) as producing music of a "discreet, re
strained, grave, contemplative character." The third and fourth they're-

TECHNICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF PLAINSONG

garded as the modes of ecstasy, giving as much an impression of humanity
as this impersonal music ever gave. The fifth and sixth modes, strongly
resembling our modern major scale, they thought of as imparting a bright
and spirited character to the music, filling it with hopeful buoyancy. The
seventh, according to an authority, was the mode of solemn affirmation.
The eighth mode was the " musical expression of that serenity of mind
which is the characteristic feature of the wise/' It is certain that our mod
ern ears will never hear all that these old writers felt in their ancient scales;
but it is interesting to know how they believed in these various possibili
ties and chose their modes carefully to suit the type of expression they
wished to convey.

It is obvious enough that theoretical conceptions such as these were
transplanted from the ideals of the Greeks. The two men who seem to
have been largely responsible for transmitting these classical conceptions
of musical theory into the Middle Ages were the Late Roman philoso
phers, Boethius and Cassiodorus, 7 both of the sixth century. Somewhere
in this process the names of the Greek modes, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian,
and Mixolydian, were misapplied to the medieval scales, so that which in
Greek music had been called Dorian was called Phrygian in medieval
music, and that which had been known as Lydian was called Ionian.
This false nomenclature was generally adopted and remained as the basis
of musical theory for many centuries, the error being retained in order
to avoid still further confusion. Boethius and Cassiodorus were thor
oughly convinced of the validity of the Greek ideal of ethos in music, and
their writings contain complete enumerations of the moral powers of
music, its exhilarating and calming effects ideals which were adopted
to their needs by the Fathers of the Church.

The medieval theorists developed also a system of notation, at first
merely using neumes, small signs placed above the words, giving a visual
representation of the rise and fall of the melodies. Out of this came our

7 Boethius, a minister at the court of Theodoric the Great, wrote five books on
music, De musica, which remained the standard textbooks on music during the Middle
Ages in Europe. Cassiodorus, who also had a public career at Theodoric's court in
Ravenna, retired into a monastery where he had collected all that he could find
of the fast disappearing ancient culture, in order that he might preserve as much
of it as possible for posterity.

Names

Neumes

Notations

Single Notes
Virga jacens

Punctum
Vlrga recta

Gregorian

Modern

J
^

i P

1 r -

1 | .j

Groups of
two notes

Pes or Podatus
Clivis

*===

1 r J

-t-^.

$ J J

^ ri

5 J J

Groups of
three notes

Scandicus
Climacus

Torculus
Porrectus

S
/v

*=3=

. rn

c .

-& J ^ J

. 1 rj-i

8> ^ J ^
-Jt j j j

*-H*T-

-TO ^ j

1 -TJ]

< J

Group of more
than three notes

Scandicus flexus
Porrectus flexus

A
^

JC-afE

i i j j i

ft jJJJ
rf j i j i

> ^ j ^ j=

A TABLE SHOWING HOW THE NEUMES WERE NAMED, AND
THEIR EQUIVALENTS IN NOTATIONS

124

TECHNICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF PLAINSONG 125

modern notation, the greatest step forward being taken in the time of
Guido d'Arezzo, a noted Benedictine theoretician of the eleventh cen
tury, when there was adopted the simple device of placing the neumes
on lines representing fixed pitches.

As used by the medieval theorists, the Church scales made use of the
same notes that we employ in our major scale C ? D ? E, F, G, A, B, C
each mode commencing on successive notes of the scale and extending
over the compass of one octave. Thus :

Four Principal Modes

First (Dorian) : D 7 E, F, G, A, B, C, D
Third (Phrygian) : E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E
Fifth (Lydian) : F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F
Seventh (Mixolydian) : G, A, B, C ? D ? E, F, G

Four Secondary Modes

Second (Hypodorian) : A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A
Fourth (Hypophrygian) : B, C, D, E, F 7 G 7 A 7 B
Sixth (Hypolydian) : C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C
Eighth (Hypomixolydian) : D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D

First

Eighth

MH-1Q

126 MONODIC MUSIC OF A THOUSAND YEARS

Later Glareanus, a sixteenth-century theorist, added four more modes
the Aeolian, starting on A (with its derived Hypoaeolian), and the
Ionian, starting on C (with its derived Hypoionian).

Tenth

Eleventh

;y r. r r

Twelfth

NOTE. It may be added that, since the secondary modes (plagal, Gregory called
them) were borrowed from the principal modes, there was bound to be some over
lapping. For example, although the Dorian and the Hypomixolydian modes use the
same notes (see page 125), the latter is in reality the Mqcolydian mode extended in a
different compass. Therefore the melodies written in it have a different nature from
those in the Dorian mode.

EARLY HYMNS

In addition to the chants, the churchmen of the East wrote a number
of hymns after the models of those sung in Greece. Some of these non-
Biblical songs may have been used in the services; but they were designed
primarily for private uses, at least in the early times. By far the most
ancient piece of church music extant and among the earliest relics of the
Christian religion is one of these hymns from the late third century. It
was discovered in the ruins of Oxyrhynchus, in Egypt, and, although in
complete, it shows the strong influence of Greek music on the early
Church style.

A simpler form of hymn, which was later to become the standard for
all Western Christendom, was that originating in the East (derived
possibly from Semitic sources) and written in popular couplets. Appar
ently one melody was used for a number of different verses. The inter
esting thing about these popular hymns from the musician's point of
view is the fact that their versification was influenced not so much by the

EARLY HYMNS

quantity or length of the vowel sounds as by their being patterned ac
cording to regular rhythmic formulas made up of an alternation of ac
cented and unaccented syllables. Such a hymn as this of St. Ambrose,
Bishop of Milan, calls for a simple musical structure that is very much
like that of the later folk songs and is entirely different from that of the
freer chant melodies:

-*^ 5 1

i j j i

I*, n i

J r i

i p i

rl dui

i r r < * \

Ae - ter ne re - rum c<bn di - tor, Noc -

tern di - em . t que qui re - gis Et

y r r i r fir r ' r r ' r r

tem po - rum Das tern - po - ra, Ut al . le

m \ P^m J J I o H ^ rom Hymnary of Pairis
[ I f I ^ ' f " CBibl. Colmar 442)

ves fas - ti - di - um.

These hymns became extremely popular with the people when intro
duced into the services, for they represented something in which the
whole congregation could heartily join. Many of them were written in
the East. Their authors included men that are well known in ecclesiasti
cal history, and their vogue extended into the sixth century.

A modern writer, Dom Cabrol, has imaginatively described the use of
these hymns in the services of the Church of St. Sophia in Constanti
nople that magnificent structure, an everlasting monument to the
glory of Byzantine art, which was built by the emperor Justinian in the
sixth century in an attempt to create a single building' that should stand
as the largest and finest in Christendom:

" These poems, conceived in the quiet of the cloister, were sung amidst
surroundings and by congregations of great splendor: into the Church
of St. Sophia came the people of Constantinople, together with the em
peror and his brilliant cortege of officers, priests, dignitaries, and ladies

THE INTERIOR OF SANTA SOPHIA, CONSTANTINOPLE

128

EARLY HYMNS 129

of his palace. Here in the midst of a most astonishing profusion of pre
cious marbles, mosaics, gold and silver decorations, the liturgical office
commences. The priests defile in long processions, their ranks reaching
even to the throne of the patriarch, that second ruler of the land.

"The moment arrives for the singing of the poet friar's hymn: the
master of the choristers gathers his forces and prepares to direct their
singing; the reader mounts the tribune, holding in his hand a roll of
parchment on which the poem is written in clear, brilliant colors. The
people come to attention, for they love this part of the service. The li
turgical spectacle has renewed their ancient faith and made them ready
for the inspiration that comes from music. Their eagerness is real; the
song commences, line succeeds line, verse follows verse, the words out
lined and made more significant by the appealing melody. The opening
lines suggest with vividness the liturgical significance of the day; the suc
ceeding stanzas are more general in their meaning. The singers reply to
the reader, the scene being enlivened by the appearance in the dialogue of
varied characters: the angels, the prophets, the saints of both the Old and
New Testament, Adam, Noah, the good Joseph, even the devils them
selves, speak one to another. It is in reality a mystery, the form which the
later Latin Church was to develop centuries after/'

Translated from Dom Cabrol: Le cardinal Pifcra, Paris, 1893

It was Ambrose, 8 Bishop of Milan and defender of the faith against
the Arian heretics, who introduced these hymns into the Western usage.
He wrote a number of them which breathe a spirit of clarity and opti
mistic confidence. Many of the great Occidental Church Fathers followed
his example and made contributions to the liturgy of the Church in the
way of Latin hymns full of austere beauty, yet pulsating with warm re
ligious fervor. Gregory the Great (54o?-6o4), Venantius Fortunatus
(in the second part of the sixth century), Magnentius Arabanus Maurus
(776-856), and St. Thomas Aquinas (122 5?-! 274?) , " perhaps the most
perfect master of lyric thought which the Occident ever possessed"

8 The most comprehensive source of information regarding this early music of
the church is St. Augustine of Hippo, who, around 388, wrote a long treatise, De
musica, which shows how great was the difference between the, ancient and the mod
ern conceptions of music. The early musicians concentrated their attention largely
on the rhythm and meter of the Latin verses they set. Augustine states in detail
the differences between twenty-eight varieties of metrical feet; nevertheless he
admits that the melody has certain purely musical laws of its own which it should
obey. It is upon his authority (in his Confessions) that St. Ambrose is credited with
organizing the music of the western European church.

130

MONODIC MUSIC OF A THOUSAND YEARS

KING DAVID AND POPE GREGORY

A Byzantine ivory miniature

(Max Fischer: Mediaeval Hymns) , all wrote ardent, fervid poems which
were popular in their day, but only a few of which, unfortunately, have
found their way into Christian usage.

GROWING MAGNIFICENCE IN ART AND RITUAL

Music was not the only art to be strongly influenced by the opulent
splendor of the East. During the great golden age of Byzantium the
Roman Church split officially with the Eastern Church, but there came
out of the great producing centers, Constantinople, Salonika, Nicaea,
Ephesus, and the rest, such a flood of ivories, illuminations, textiles,
goldsmith's work, and colored enamels as to transform completely the
whole European conception of art. Prominent among these Byzantine
influences was that which affected the building of churches: through
all Christendom there arose magnificent buildings which combined the

LATER PHASES OF GREGORIAN HISTORY

131

THE BYZANTINE CHURCH OF S. VITALE IN RAVENNA (526 A.D.)
This shows the altar, choir, and presbytery. Notice the mosaic of Justinian's Procession.

plan of the basilicalike structures of the West with the love of glowing
colors and rhythmic patternings of the East. The result was what one
historian of art has described as the most " glorious manifestation of
colorfulness in the whole of world architecture" (Cheney: A World
History of Art) . We get some idea of the glories of this period from such
churches'as those which have survived in Ravenna, on the east coast of
Italy, or in Palermo, Sicily cities which borrowed their artists from
Byzantium with their enormous spaces, their glowing mosaics spread
over all the available walls, and their characteristic stiff formalism.

LATER PHASES OF GREGORIAN HISTORY

With the completion of these buildings, there arose the necessity of
providing a more colorful and elaborate liturgy for the services held in
them. We have already described in some detail the full collection of

132 MONODIC MUSIC OF A THOUSAND YEARS

music suitable for this purpose available at the beginning of the seventh
century. The crude and widely varied chants and songs of the earlier
days gave way at the time of Gregory to a homogeneous and coherent
body of music, which fitted the Latin text like a glove and was of extraor
dinary beauty. We know the names of some of the composers of the
chants of this great period, which lasted until the tenth century. It was
during this time that many of the chants in use today were written,
characteristic ones that have come down to us being those comprising the
two mass settings, Orbis factor and Lux et origo, to be found in The
Kyriale, the authorized Vatican collection of chants.

The eleventh century saw a veritable throng of new composers; but
none of them achieved the simplicity, the grandeur, and the originality
of the earlier epoch. Technique was developed at the expense of clarity
and direct appeal, the composers delighting in " difficult intonations and
eccentric melodies which mounted high and descended low/' During the
twelfth century, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the Church's great mystic,
issued an Antiphonaire and a Gradual, collections and anthologies of
chants which contained some new materials and certain modifications of
the older usages. The names of most of these composers have been lost;
we do know, however, the writer of the melody for such a hymn as the
Easter Victimae Paschali Wipo, chaplain of Conrad III.

It was during this period that there developed under the aegis of the
Western Church two forms which were frequently interpolated into
the Mass: the sequence, a text fitted to elaborate melismatic melodies
suitable for a solo voice, the words emphasizing some particular phase of
the liturgy or celebrating some special occasion; and the trope, additional
words supplied to the liturgical text, making a devotional comment on it,
set in such a way as to provide a syllable for each note of the chant used.
These forms are no longer largely used, since they are felt to be out of
character with the traditional style of the Mass. 9 But they are of great

9 It was the Council of Trent (1545-1563) which ruled against the abuse of
these liturgical additions: the use of tropes was forbidden, but four sequences were
allowed to remain the Dies Irae, tlie Veni Sancte Spirite, the Victimae PaschaJf,
and the Lauda Sion. Later another, the Stabat Mater dolorosa, was added.

Not being allowed in the Gregorian service books, the tropes were collected in
great books called Tropers. These show the advances made for centuries.

Archives Photographiqucs

HIGH MASS IN THE CHAPEL OF SAINTE CHAPELLE, PARIS
Fifteenth-century miniature from the Heures of the Due de Berry

133

134 MONODIC MUSIC OF A THOUSAND YEARS

historical interest, for out of them grew the liturgical drama, the begin r
nings of the modern theater. Certain of the Easter and Christmas se
quences and tropes were treated in the form of dramatic dialogues, with
questions put by one priest and answered by others or by the choir. These
in turn became the medieval Miracle and Mystery plays with which the
Church sought to dramatize her essential doctrines.

The decadence of the chant began in the fourteenth century and was
due largely to the influence of the new measured, contrapuntal style
which had by this time become popular. By the seventeenth century this
decadence was complete, each diocese adopting its own practices of chant
ing, thus insuring complete confusion throughout the Church. The
Council of Trent tried vainly to remedy matters, but things went from
bad to worse. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, fruitful enough
in so far as the production of measured music is concerned, saw the
nadir of plainchant. Its rhythm became heavy and measured; influenced,
of course, by the other music, sharps and flats were introduced so as to
make the traditional melodies conform to the major and minor modes
and free them entirely from the bonds of the ecclesiastical tones. It was
not until the comparatively recent careful study of such experts as Dom
Jumilhac, Dom Mocquereau, Dom Pothier, that anything like the honor
able traditions of the earlier centuries has been restored. Even after all the
study which these modern Benedictine monks have made of the ancient
sources, there remains a great deal of difference of opinion as to how
Gregorian chants are best interpreted.

GREGORIANS, A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL

For those who have the spiritual interests of the Church at heart, this
music stands as a means for an exalted type of religious expression, an
expression which, by providing liturgical beauty, helps the congregations
to love truth and practice goodness. For the historian, the vital simplicity
and melodic severity of this music is of interest because it instituted
strong foundations on which many of the later developments were
erected. Yet we need not go to the Gregorian chants for either religious
or historical reasons alone; for they possess beauty as pure music, even

THE UNIVERSALITY OF FOLK MUSIC 135

though it is a beauty, as Prunieres has rather plaintively remarked, that
demands a certain initiation on the part of the hearer. The very process
of listening without sharing the ecstasy of these chants or taking an inti
mate part in their essence is derogatory to appreciating their full beauty.
This art of the Christian Church in music, as is true of so many other
kinds of art, demands a certain quality of exhilaration that must be re
captured, if we are to understand it fully and really like it. And this is
particularly difficult in the case of an art so far removed from reality and
modern thought as this music of the first ten centuries of the Christian
era.

The Gregorian plainsong fulfills two great roles and represents two
well-defined moments in music. In its own right and in its many
varied forms, it stands as music of special beauty and great sincerity of
expression, the sung prayer of the Church in her intercourse with God.
One of the greatest modem exponents of the chant, Dom Mocquereau,
whose research as to the way in which it should be interpreted has gone
far toward restoring its pristine beauty, has said of this music: " It ap
peals to what is highest in the soul; its beauty and nobility come from the
fact that it borrows nothing, or as little as possible, from the world of
the senses." The Gregorian chant represents also the basis for all the
great changes that were wrought in the music of the period from the
eleventh to the sixteenth century. To know it in each of these capacities
is greatly to enrich our musical experience and heighten our sense of
musical perspective.

MONODJC MUSIC OUTSIDE THE CHURCH

THE UNIVERSALITY OF FOLK MUSIC

FRENCH writers on music assume that the history of secular music
begins with the troubadours and trouv&res. If we are to believe such
modern German historians as Moser and Mayer, the Nordic races were
largely responsible for the familiar principles underlying all popular
music. According to a present-day Italian, influenced no doubt by the
ideology of the time, his people have always been first in every phase of

136 MONODIC MUSIC OF A THOUSAND YEARS

musical development; therefore, without question, they must have pro
duced the first composers of what we have come to call folk music. And
the English, with their customary reticence, simply point to the account
of a medieval traveler, one Giraldus Cambrensis, who, while journeying
through Britain in the twelfth century, heard the people singing their
own part songs: so there must have been popular music in Britain long
before that!

As a matter of fact, no such chauvinistic claims need be made for the
origin of folk music; for human beings have always been fundamentally
the same everywhere and have had a common spontaneous desire to ex
press themselves in song and dance. They have composed tunes as they
worked and have danced while they played, the men roistering together
in taverns and inns and the women crooning their little ones to sleep
with lullabies in much the same fashion the world over. The character
istics which separate the music of the various countries became gradually
fixed, not because of any great differences in the nature of the peoples
but because of the social circumstances in which they lived. The songs
of the people of France are different from those of Germany and Eng
land, not because the genus homo is fundamentally different in France
from what it is in Germany or Great Britain, but because the people
we call French, through their inherited prejudices, traditions, beliefs,
and the history that is back of them, are so different from those we call
Germans or Italians.

No one knows, of course, when secular music actually began. There are
direct references in some of the Greek plays which show that certain
songs were then known and sung by everybody; but there must have
been popular songs long before this. We can reasonably assume that they
existed in the earliest days of music and were sung by the people of
civilizations which appeared at the very dawn of history. It is not un
reasonable to suppose that the laborers in the Egyptian and Babylonian
civilizations had their work and play songs; and we know for certain that
there was folk music among the Hebrews and Greeks work songs,
rhythmic chanteys for the oarsmen, and so forth. But it is not until
early medieval times that we have evidences of the important role which
music played in the lives of the common people.

THE CHURCH S OPPOSITION 137

THE CHURCH'S OPPOSITION

The activities of the Christian Church of the fourth, fifth, and sixth
centuries were largely concerned with the conversion of the various
peoples with whom it came into contact -^nrst the Romans themselves,
then the huge hordes of Celts, Teutons, and other pagan tribes of north
ern Europe. Hundreds of thousands of those who accepted Christianity
as a religion understood it hardly at all but accepted it merely as a means
for convenient or temporal advantage in their relationships with Rome.
These people, although adhering outwardly to the doctrines of the
Church, still kept many of their old beliefs beliefs in supernatural
spirits, household deities, the powers of magic, and so forth. It is in the
vigorous discourses which the Church dignitaries found it necessary to
make on the subject of these pagan survivals among the Gallo-Roman
Christians that we frequently come upon mention of the music and
dancing which went on outside the Church; aside from these pronounce
ments, Secular music was not recognized by the ecclesiastical authorities.

Evidently horrid and pagan practices were mingled with the bbs6rva-
tion of certain Christian feast days, especially those which the Church
found it wise to synchronize with former religious festivals, such as Mid
summer's Day, May Day, St. John's Day, and so on. From the time of
the fourth century down to the fifteenth, we hear a great deal about the
diabolical practices of dancing and singing at such times. What is more,
these cantica diabolica, amatoria, et turpia were sung and danced in the
churchyards the only common gathering places the people had and
sometimes even in the churches themselves. In these dances the people
joined hands and moved around in a ring, with one of the women acting
as leader. " As a cow which precedes the rest carries a bell on its neck/'
writes a medieval observer, " so the woman who sings and leads the dance
has the Devil's bell bound to her neck. For the dance is round, the Devil
is its center, and all fmn to the left, because all are going to eternal
death. When the Devil hears the sound, he is reassured, and says, * I have
not lost my cow yet/ " (TTie Chinch considered the Devil as the inventor
and ruler of dancing, and for this reason struggled so valiantly to keep
out of her music all suggestiveness of popular rhythms.)

138 MONODIC MUSIC OF A THOUSAND YEARS

The Church Fathers tried their best to stop such profane songs and
carols, as the ring dances were called, by making announcement that
disaster was sure to follow in the wake of those who participated in them.
Their warnings were sprinkle^ with accounts of people being struck
dead, consumed by fire, stricken with disease, and so on, but their efforts
were all in vain. The evil practices still went on. There are stories of
priests who, exasperated by the heathen conduct of their parishioners,
were brought to the extremity of cursing them, so that they were to dance
for a whole year. This the dancers had to do, sinking exhausted on the
ground and dying after their release from the curse. Giraldus Cainbrensis
tells of an English priest who became so obsessed with the rhythmic
refrain of one of the dance songs which he had heard the people singing
all night long, that at morning mass he involuntarily substituted for the
words Pax vobiscum the opening line of the song, Swete lemman dhin are
" Sweet love, thy lover needs thine aid." The consternation of his su
periors and the delight of his congregation can be imagined.

All the later medieval folk songs and dances were the survivals of these
pagan ritualistic performances. The earliest music we have of this kind,
dating from the thirteenth century, shows a strongly rhythmic character.
No wonder that it was beloved of the people and obnoxious to the
Fathers of the Church!

SACRED FOLK MUSIC

But not all this folk music was of such a diabolic tinge. The Venerable
Bede (673-735) tells in his famous Ecclesiastical History of the English
People of a lay brother in one of the English monasteries, Caedmon by
name, who received in tike year 680 the " free gift of song, for which
reason he never would compose any trivial or vain poem. [The same
Caedmon is looked upon by scholars as the father of English poetry.]
For having lived in the secular habit until he was well advanced in years,
he had never learned anything of versifying; and for this reason sometimes
at a banquet, when it was agreed to make merry by singing in turn, if
he saw the harp come towards him, he would rise up from the table and
go out and return home. Once having done so and gone out of the house

SACRED FOLK MUSIC 139

where the banquet was, to the stable where he had to take care of the
cattle for the night, he there composed himself to rest at the proper time.
Thereupon one stood by him in his sleep and saluting him and calling
him by name, said, ' Caedinon, sing me something/ But he answered,
' I cannot sing, and for this cause I left the banquet and retired hither,
because I could not sing/ Then he who talked to him replied, ' Neverthe
less thou must needs sing to me/ * What must I sing? ' he asked. ' Sing
the beginning of creation/ said the other. Having received this answer he
straightway began to sing verses to the praise of God the Creator/'

This song, out of the dream of Caedmon, may be said to be the first
known English poem; as translated by Kennedy, it runs:

" Praise we the Lord
Of the heavenly kingdom,
God's power and wisdom
The works of his hand;
As the Father of glory,
Eternal Lord,
Wrought the beginning
Of all his wonders!
Holy Creator!
Warden of men!
First, for a roof,
O'er the children of earth,
He stablished the heavens,
And founded the world,
And spread the dry land
For the living to dwell in.
Lord Everlasting!
Almighty God! "

These songs of a religious nature were popular in all the countries in
medieval times and were widely sung by the people. The gentle St.
Francis of Assisi was an important leader in developing the taste of the
ordinary people for such songs. He founded singing societies, the laudisti,
each of them under the direction of a capitain; and the mighty sweep of
the lines in his own song calling upon all things to praise the Lord Sun,
Moon, Earth, and even Death shows how effective these laudi (songs

140 MONODIC MUSIC OF A THOUSAND YEARS

of praise) could be. They were generally very simple in structure, with a
refrain at the beginning and at the end, and were sung in unison.

It was natural enough for the people themselves to imitate, in some of
the songs they made up, the style and language of the Church. We find
that many of the earliest folk songs we know, for example Christ ist
erstanden and Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ, end with the Greek expres
sion Kyrie eleison " Lord have mercy on us." From earliest times this
phrase was one that the Church encouraged its congregations to sing;
and so the people took it for their own, often setting new words to the
Kyrie melodies they knew and always ending them with this plea for
mercy. Later they translated Latin hymns in the vernacular (O filii et
filiae is an example), sometimes mixing Latin and vernacular phrases in
a most incongruous and quite amusing fashion.

But beyond this they did not go for some time. In the twelfth century,
even if the common people had been able to imagine a different world
of their own, one entirely outside the influence of the clergy and the no
bility, who would have thought of recording these imaginings? The
thoughts and feelings of gentlemen were, of course, another matter,
one worthy of record. And so we have handed down to us the songs of
the troubadoftrs and trouveres, the minnesingers and minstrels, songs that
still have a fascination after the lapse of many centuries. These will be
discussed in another chapter.

The Music of the Middle Ages

ROMANESQUE MUSIC

THE ART CALLED ROMANESQUE

<U''- "''

THE era between the sixth and the twelfth century is usually desig
nated by art historians as the period of the Romanesque, 1 in spite
of the fact that the characteristics of the life of the period had little re
lation to Rome. The Christian art that was produced during this epoch
was of mixed ancestry and was drawn more largely from the barbarian
north and the Asiatic East than from ancient Greece and imperial Rome.
Its history was inextricably intertwined with the important historical
changes of the time: the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the
consequent overrunning of Europe by the barbarians from the north, and
the shifting of political and social prestige from Rome to Constantinople,
which became, after the fifth century, the center of the civilized culture
of Europe.

For almost ten centuries, while most of Europe was struggling toward a
rebirth of power and wealth, during the time which has come to be
known as the Dark Ages, Constantinople was a bright spot in a general
picture of economic misery and political bankruptcy. It was for this rea
son that there came into the Western Church from the flourishing and
prosperous East a number of ideals which were to shape and mold all
the art which it produced. The round arches, sculptural moldings, and
heavy walls that characterize the Romanesque churches of Europe were
derived from the pre-Byzantine structures of Persia and Syria as well as
from the engineering constructions of the Romans. The formalized
* Historians generally interpret the term Romanesque as indicating a derivation
from the term Roman in the same sense that the development of the so-called Ro
mance languages, all of them based on Latin, arose from the various divisions of the
Roman Empire.

National*

CHRIST IN MAJESTY

This is a fine manuscript from the eighth-century evangelistary of Charlemagne,

142

THE CAROLINGIAN PEAK AND AFTER 143

designs of the Church's richly illuminated manuscripts, the beautifully
decorated and jeweled book covers, the enameled reliquaries glowing
with color all show the abstract, patterning instinct of Eastern art.

Combined with this Byzantine influence was still another infusion,
that of the primitive and virile traditions of the northern barbarians.
There is little doubt that the Lombards and the Franks brought with
them out of the depths of their northern forests certain art aptitudes,
marked by a love of design and vigorous adornment, which had a strong
effect on the tastes of the time. They may well have had a type of music
that was more rhythmic and melodic than that allowed in the Christian
Church, and so more appealing to the people at large. It has been too
generally assumed that our present-day music had a purely Greco-Roman-
Christian ancestry. Somewhere in its past there was likewise added a
strain of barbarian blood, which contributed considerably to its strength
and vigor.

THE CAROLINGIAN PEAK AND AFTER

It was under Charlemagne (742-814), King of the Franks, that these
various Roman, Eastern, and Teutonic influences were blended into a
kind of formal " style/' A mighty warrior and a clever statesman, Charle
magne was also a patron of the arts, learning, and music. He built a great
many churches and palaces after the Byzantine manner/decorating them
with mosaics and frescoes and filling them with music. Through conquest
of Italy he came into direct touch with the culture of that land, a con
tact which further intensified the blend of northern, southern, and east
ern characteristics in the art of the time. He saw to it that music schools
were established in the various Church centers of his empire, so that the
music of the Church might be sung according to the best traditions of
Rome; and he gathered together a collection of the popular songs and
hymns of the Franks, so that posterity might have a record of the music
of his time. Unfortunately this collection was ordered destroyed by his
son and successor, Louis the Pious, who thought it too " pagan/'

The feeble flickerings of light ^t the time of the Carolingian Empire
proved to be a false dawn: Charlemagne's sons were incapable of holding

144 THE MIISIC OF E MIDDLE AGES

together his enormous empire, and soon all was again confusion and tur
moil. It was not until the eleventh eentury " one of the greatest periods
in the unfolding of the human spirit " that the real Romanesque clay
came, Through the gradual re-establishment of something like law and
order in a Europe that had seen so much of the art and civilization of
the Roman world disappear in a barbarous welter, the repulsion of
further barbarian invasions, the discovery of silver in Germany, the
.growth of trade and commerce following the building of roads into the
wilderness, the re-education of men in mind, manners, and morals by
the Church, and the reclaiming of the land and the establishment of an
agricultural society through the devoted and tremendous labors of the
monks, a foundation for a new civilization was laid, a civilization that
again gave opportunities for the development of art,

History has shown again and again that the activity which gives birth
to the arts is possible only in a well-organized and fairly wealthy society.
In the eleventh century this society was largely centered in the monastic
establishments of the Church. And so the architecture, sculpture, illumi
nations, painted glass, literature, and music of the time were the prod
ucts of the cloister. Not only were the monasteries the conservcrs of the
remnants of antique culture and the recipients of whatever the riches of
Byzantium offered; they were also the ateliers where the blend of this
confusion of styles was achieved. Within their walls so many new
churches were planned that an eleventh-century observer was moved to
remark that it seemed as if God had snowed churches upon the land,
so many and so fair were they; " for without exaggeration the countryside
may be said to have clothed itself with a white garment of churches/*

THE SPIRIT OF THE ROMANESQUE

In order to provide fireproof buildings that were suitable for the safe
keeping of the various precious relics which the Church had by this
time accumulated, as well as to accommodate the huge congregations,,
often made up largely of pilgrims, the Romanesque architects and
builders, all of them monks and friars, adopted a stone arch of great
solidity and strength, capable of bearing tremendous weights. The heavy-

THE SPIRIT OF THE ROMANESQUE

Courtesy of The Pennsylvania Museum of Art, Philadelphia

THE CLOISTER OF THE ABBEY OF SAINT GENIS DES FONTAINES

The abbey was built in the Romanesque style of the twelfth century.

vaulted and thick-walled Romanesque church, with its small windows
and dark interior, its walls covered with stylized paintings in the Byzan
tine tradition, indicates the severe asceticism of its builders. Its impressive
distances and gloomy spaces suggest a spirit of quiet renunciation of the
world and an unquestioning faith in the life of the future. It is a place
devoted to the worship of Gocl. There is none of the cheerful brightness
of the later Gothic style in these Romanesque interiors; in the dim twi
light of their aisles one feels the very presence of the Most High and the
shadow of the Almighty.

The same spirit pervades the other arts of the period: that of the
monkish illuminators who sang God's praises through the copying of By
zantine manuscripts; of the sculptors and glass painters who pictured Bib
lical and religious scenes in the stone and glass of the churches; and of the
musicians, who, no longer satisfied with the principle of monodic melody
with which to worship God, began to experiment with new means.

146 THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

ROMANESQUE MUSIC

The twelfth century saw the music of the Church dividing into two
branches: the one, leading to polyphony, tentative and hesitating at
first, but giving promise of a great future; the other, the universal Gre
gorian chant, strong and steadfast, the mature result of over five-hundred
years of steady growth, an art whose monumental development at this
time represents one of man's most significant achievements. Except for
the magnificent Romanesque churches there was nothing in contem
porary art that could stand comparison with this music. It represents a
spirit of solemn and intense religiosity, its measured cadences and har
monious proportions reminding us strongly of the spatial rhythms and
solid dimensions of the buildings in which it was sung,

Most of us will agree with Professor Leichtentritt that structures such
as the Abbey Church at Beaulieu, France, one of the finest examples of
twelfth-century architecture left to us, represent Gregorian chant trans
lated into terms of architectural construction. In both cases a highly de
veloped and refined art is reduced to the simplest possible terms, which
are carefully calculated to give full expression of its spiritual justification
for existence. As both these types of art are a blend of Eastern and West
ern traditions, there is nothing of the extraordinary or fantastic about
them: while their elements glow warmly and are deeply felt, every
thing is held in balance and proportion, no one feature being allowed to
preponderate over another.

SPECULATIONS ON POLYPHONIC BEGINNINGS

Yet if we search carefully, we may find in these characteristics of Ro
manesque art the inherent ideals from which came the great develop
ments of polyphonic music. The best modern research seems to indicate
that the experiments which led toward this new type of music were be
gun somewhere around the eighth century, just at the time when the de
veloping Byzantine art was being most strongly influenced by the Oriental
love of patterned design. The Eastern illuminated manuscripts of this
period show a blend of classic Greek and Eastern Byzantine styles, but

Archives Photographiquea

THE ABBEY CHURCH AT BEAULIEU, FRANCE
One of the finest examples of twelfth-century Romanesque architecture

147

148

THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

Archiws

A MINIATURE OF THE EIGHTH CENTURY

The illumination, from a Greek lectionary in Leningrad, shows the blcncl of classic
Greek and Eastern Byzantine styles.

the Oriental interest in pattern and rhythmical design is always predomi
nant. Is it too much to assume that the monkish musicians who first
began experimenting with part music looked to their brother artists for
inspiration? We are certain at least that the earliest music of this kind
that we know, music to which the names organum and diaphony seem
to have been applied indiscriminately, was purely decorative harmony,
the musical counterpart of the Romanesque mosaics and illuminations
of the time.

SPECULATIONS ON POLYPHONIC BEGINNINGS 149

TTri^early polyphonic music consisted in a majestic paralleling of the
monodic liturgical chant by other melodies at certain fixed intervals
above and below it. The singing of the Gregorian chant had not been, in a
strict sense of the word, homophonic; for it was sung in octaves whenever
men and women or men and boys joined in singing the same melody,
and such singing had to be limited in range so that the lower voices
could sing the higher notes and vice versa. The first part singing in other
than this octave practice came when the second group of voices paral
leled the first at a distance of a fifth, that is, when some of the singers sang
the same tune beginning on the dominant 2 rather than on the tonic.
The result was similar to the patterned organization of decorative lines
in the mosaics that flash from the walls of the Byzantine and Romanesque
churches or in the stylized manuscript illuminations of the period.

The integrating principle of such a duplication of a melody at differ
ent pitches is exactly the same as that to be found in so much of the
visual art of the period; both consist of a succession of parallel features
and both result in a solemn, impersonal effect that is well suited to the

2 Doni Anselrn Hughes, a leading spirit of the English Plainsong and Medieval
Music Society, has an interesting explanation of the way this came about. Gregorian
music of the year 1000 was regarded as something sacred, to be handed down in
an authentic and received text from one generation to another, and was preserved
with scrupulous accuracy in identical form from Vienna to Scotland and from Italy
to Sweden. Since it was not lawful to tamper with the chants, the creative genius
of man was driven to seek new means of expression.

There is reason to suppose, Hughes argues, that part singing first evolved at a
point in the Mass where it was traditional for singers to expand the existing resources,
the Alleluia respond between the Epistle and the Gospel. Musicians began to add
wordless tunes here, consisting of a repetition of musical phrases by each side of the
choir (in the antiphonal manner adopted from the Hebraic services), with a final
phrase sung in chorus by both sides. This new type of melody, to which the name
sequela (sequence) was given, was a repetition of the theme of the Alleluia in various
ways, one of which consisted in raising the pitch of the melody by the interval of a
fifth. So one side of the choir would sing the sequela tune, followed by the other a
fifth higher, and then finally both would sing it simultaneously at their different
pitches.

At least this is exactly the process that is described by the theorists of the time
as recorded in the Musica Enchiriadis, a theoretical work that was probably written
sometime before the tenth century. If we gather up the manuscripts of the earliest
specimens of this new part style, we shall find, according to Hughes, that they are
in the majority of cases settings of the sequences or their close relatives, the tropes.
His article is in the April, 1938, Musical Quarterly.

150 THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

portrayal of the transcendent ideals of the Christian faith. Here are two
examples of this early organum taken from the Musica Enchiriadis.
With enough voices and instruments, their effect in the resonant Ro
manesque interiors must have been impressive indeed.

Melody II
j doubled an

f\f\4-^tr^ **%n\*ra

Tu pa-tris sem- pi-ter.nus es fi.li-us.

o octave above

ti it 11 ii o , m o [ Original melody

Tu pa-tris sem-pi~ter-nus es fi - li - us.

doubled
a fourth, below

q Melody

'"loj fnnrfl

Tu pa-tris sem. pi-ter.nus es fi-li-us.

Melody I

" " " " " o .1

Tu pa-tris' seiti- pi-ter-nus es f i li us .

doubled an
octave below

Melody II

doubled an

octave above

Sit glo - ri - a Do-mi-ni in sae-cu-Ia.

UL .. cQ . .B " o o . o .1 , [original melody

Sit glo - ri-a Do-mi-ni in sae-cu.la.

Melody doubled

1- ivAciuuy uuuuic
_ a fifth below

Sit glo- ri. a D.d-mi-ni in "sae-cu-la.

Sit glo- ri - a Do-mi-ni in sae-cu-la.

Melody I
doubled an-
octave below

The Musica Enchirfadis records a method of avoiding the interval of
an augmented fourth when it resulted from such a parallel duplication
of voices. This interval (from F natural to B natural) was regarded

LIVING EXAMPLES 151

with particular aversion by the medieval musicians: they did not seem
to object to its occurring in close proximity in a melody, but when
sounded simultaneously in the organum, it was thought to be a diabolus
in musica the very devil in music! This famous early musical treatise
suggests that a good way of avoiding this diabolus is to keep one part
stationary while moving the other. Thus was the first step taken toward
making the variou^jgajts independent. Canon Douglas compares the im
portance of this step in the annals of history with the momentous occasion
when the American, Wilbur Wright, made his first flight in a self-pro
pelled airplane. Both these experiments permanently transformed the
usages of man and opened up vistas that before had been undreamed of.

LIVING EXAMPLES

The late Sir Richard Terry of London made an interesting experiment
in imitating this early method of writing part music: taking a Gregorian
chant for Whitsuntide, Veni Sancte Spiritus, he supplied additional parts
to it in the manner described by the Musica Enchiriadis. In listening to
a rendition of such an arrangement, we should do so with the ears of the
eleventh-century faithful rather than with those of the twentieth-century
sophisticate. TTien the effect will not seem " hollow " or " horribly ca
cophonous/' as suggested by some writers, but strong, massive, valiant,
crying out, like the architecture and mosaics of the time, that God is nigh.
The difficulty for our ears lies, of course, in the fact that the intervals used,
fifths and fourths, are necessarily bare. If we were to sing the simplest and
most euphonious parallel accompaniment to a tune, we should do so in
thirds, in places varied with sixths; the addition of a fifth or a fourth occa
sionally would give strength, but a succession of nothing except these in
tervals can only seem unusual. It is not difficult to realize, however, how
well this befitted the severity of the great Romanesque churches.

This type of organum or diaphony, then, was the first attempt of
which we have record of sounding two voices together. Giraldus Cam-
brensis, 8 writing at the end of the twelfth century, describes a similar

Giraldus Cajnbrensis (Gerald of Wales) wrote his famous description in 1188;
the quotations are from an early nineteenth-century translation of this work.

152 THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

custom of singing popular music in parts of Wales and North England,
a custom which seems to have been long established, introduced perhaps
originally from Scandinavia. Speaking of the Northumberland method
of singing two-part songs, Cambrensis says that it consisted of not more
than " two varieties of pitch in the voices, one murmuring the lower, the
other the upper part, in a manner both soothing and delightful/* This
seems a fair enough description of the music which has come down to
us in the theoretical treatises of the time. The Welsh, however, did not
utter the tunes uniformly as was done elsewhere, but " manifoldly, and
in many manners and notes; so that in a multitude of singers, such as it
was the custom of this people to gather together, so many songs are to
be heard as there are singers to be seen, and a great diversity of parts,
which finally come together in one consonance. 7 ' This latter would seem
to indicate, even if we make the necessary allowance for reportorial ex
aggeration, a much freer practice than the methods of uniform progres
sion described in the theoretical writings of the churchmen.

These worthies seem to have been strangely silent in respect to the
developments of symphonious singing which took place toward the end
of the Romanesque period. Guido * wrote, as has often been recorded,
a detailed description of the methods of organum employed in his time
(the beginning of the eleventh century), which suggests that the two
voices had acquired some individual freedom, not always keeping at ex
actly the same intervalic distance from each other, with now and then a
suggestion of contrary movement. But from the time of his death ( 1050)
until the beginning of the twelfth century, no description of contem
porary methods has been found; however, several specimens of the work
of that period have been discovered by the musicologists. These indicate
that great progress toward a real art of composition was made during this
time and that the foundations for future developments were firmly laid.

Coussemaker, one of the leading authorities on the music of this pe
riod, has published in his Histoire de rharmonie au moyen %e a rendering

4 Guido, a Benedictine monk of the monastery of Pomposa near Ravenna, Italy,
is credited with a number of important " discoveries " in music, among them being
the system of teaching sight singing by means of hexachords, groups of notes with the
tones and semitones arranged exactly alike. He is also supposed to have developed
the two-line staff into our present one of five lines.

THE GOTHIC AWAKENING 153

into modern notation of one of these few surviving examples of eleventh-
century polyphony. If we examine this setting of the words Mira lege,
miro modo in any detail, we shall find that the two voices no longer move
in parallel motion, the added voice sounding at intervals of not only the
octave and fifth from the original melody but also of thirds, sixths, and
seconds. Thus there is a deliberate mixing of discord with concord. The
principle of contrary motion between the voices, one of the fundamentals
of later part music, is completely developed here; but although the notes
of the added voice do not always correspond exactly in metrical value
with those of the vox principalis, there is no feeling of measure in this
discant, as this form of polyphony is called. That is, essentially different
rhythmic patterns are not employed in the two voices at the same time.
And so, in spite of the new principles of freedom in contrary motion and
intentional discord which this music possessed, it was necessary to free
the parts from the bonds of rhythmic similarity before anything further
could develop in the way of polyphonic independence. This was the next
step.

THE EARLY GOTHIC MUSIC

Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries

How Jiigli the sea of human happiness rose during the Middle Ages we
know now only from the barriers built to restrain it.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

THE GOTHIC AWAKENING

THE Gothic era, in many respects one of the greatest ages in the his
tory of the world, grew naturally out of the Romanesque. Once re
ferred to by the enlightened intellects of the Renaissance as barbare, the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries stand for us today as a period of intel
lectual and spiritual awakening comparable to the time of Pericles in
Greece. Within a few generations they brought forth the Crusades, the
Gothic cathedral, and Thomas Aquinas. The great names of the Gothic

THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

Archives Photographigues

CARCASSONNE

The medieval town In southern France dates back to the twelfth century.

period are legion: Ab61ard, John of Salisbury, Bernard of Clairv^ux,
Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Dominic, Dante.
These were the centuries which produced the Chanson de Roland, the
Arthurian romances, and the Divine Comedy. Never before or since have
architects and builders been fired with such zeal or produced such results:
it has been carefully estimated that between the years 1170 and 1270
eighty great cathedrals and nearly five hundred churches of cathedral
dignity were built in France alone, among them some of the greatest
structures ever reared by man. Here is the paradox of a religion that was
concerned with otherworldliness being able to manifest itself in so much
beauty that was of this world: architecture, sculpture, music, joined in
a magnificent symphony of which the leading theme was Deus vult.

Those most familiar with this period, however, assure us that Gothic
art was not only mystic and otherworldly; it was also concerned with
expressing satisfaction and joy in the abundant life here below. Out of
a very limited population youths by the tens of thousands flocked to the
great teachers of that era; and out of the ensuing intellectual ferment
there came the universities, centers of learning in the various countries:

THE GOTHIC AWAKENING 155

Paris in France, Bologna in Italy, Salamanca in Spain, Oxford and Cam
bridge in England. No one who has read the history of the Crusades,
those exciting adventures in religion, art, love, and conquest, can main
tain that they were concerned only with holy aims! Even the cathedrals
were not entirely dissociated from worldly relations: they may have been
built to the glory of God, but they were also monuments of local pride
and gathering places for the processions, pilgrimages, and even secular
festivities of the people of the time.

It was a complex and paradoxical period; its leitmotiv was unquestion
ably religious in character, in spite of the fact that the nobility were
developing a conception of life and art independent of, and even contra
dictory to, that of the Church. This new freedom of thought, character
ized by the struggle between State and Church which runs through the
whole period, is but another manifestation of the Gothic spirit and had
a powerful and, indeed, irresistible influence on the striking development
of the individual which took place in the fourteenth and fifteenth cen
turies. There had arisen by this time a great body of secular songs and
ballads, the influence of which on later music is only beginning to be
realized and the importance of which is hardly suggested by the few
examples that have come down to us. The songs of the troubadours and
trouv&es have long been appreciated for the quality of their poetry;
their music is likewise worthy of our attention, combining as it does
both the religious and the popular characteristics of the time and so
reflecting the life and the spirit of medieval Europe.

No one who has ever heard or sung the old English round, Sumer is
icumen in, supposed to hav6 been written by a monk of the early thir
teenth century, can doubt that it represents a new spirit in music, one
which was trying wings for much finer flights than had so far been at
tempted. This marvel of the Middle Ages remains, alas, alone as some
thing extraordinary, beyond the range of time. It is a song about the fresh
ening season of the year that sounds quite modern in scale. Although
three parts had long been the limit, this is written in six parts, four of
which are in canon, each taking up the tune a little after the others; it
stands as an intricate and formal piece of construction that finds no
parallel until more than two centuries later. The two lowest parts repeat

156 THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

over and over a " ground bass," a short passage that does not vary and
that goes with the canoning of the four upper parts to make a gay, open-
air piece that is as delightful in spirit as it is clever in craftsmanship.

Although this piece seems to stand alone, the manuscript which con
tains it (now in the British Museum) has also a list of other music that
links it definitely with the work of composers writing at that time in
Paris. We can say truly enough that the freshened spirit and clever work
manship of this rondel is representative of the new Gothic feeling that
entered the world with the twelfth century. The Crusades of the pre
ceding years had brought stimulating contact with the East, and with the
gradual revival of general prosperity, commerce developed, merchants
became more important, and towns arose whose inhabitants, although
they were always united by their religion, nevertheless developed a new
sense of independence that had ho direct relation with the Church.

The visible world became a more pleasant place to live in, for life was
felt to be more enjoyable for its own sake. Religion warmed to the in
fluence of St. Francis of Assisi and his followers, who were more popular
for their humanism and love of man and nature than they were for their
asceticism. Learning was increasingly cherished, and it, too, realized the
grandeur and significance of nature and of man in all his activities. The
Romanesque world had been largely in the hands of the monks; that of
Gothic times centered in the communes, the large towns which sprang
up everywhere in France and England, their inhabitants friendly to both
bishop and king and yet not dependent on either.

THE CATHEDRAL, THE GREATEST EXPRESSION OF THE
GOTHIC ERA

We have already remarked on the strong sentiment for religion which
pervaded all classes of society at this time: its greatest expression was the
Gothic cathedral of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. One of fte first
complete expressions of this type of architecture may be seen at the very
gates of Paris, in the royal abbey church of St. Denis, where many of the
kings of France sleep their long, last sleep. Instead of the massive walls
and heavy pillars which the Romanesque builders found necessary for

THE CATHEDRAL

157

ABBEY CHURCH OF ST. DENIS
One of the earliest Gothic churches, this still stands outside Paris.

their huge structures, the Gothic architects, by developing the Roman
esque system of construction, were able to turn their fanes into armatures
of stone, with slender piers soaring aloft and merging into pointed
arches that seem to reach up into boundless space. In place of the small
windows in the thick-walled Romanesque structures, these builder? of

MH-12

i 5 8

THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

ANALYSIS OF GOTHIC CONSTRUCTION
Rheims Cathedral (from Gailhabaud)

the north filled every interstice of their buildings with glowing glass,
whose gorgeous colors were expressive of their warm faith-. There re
mained nothing of the heavy gloom of the monastic churches, every
thing about these communally built structures being light and animated.

THE GOTHIC SPIRIT IN ART 159

From the He de France, Gothic architecture spread over most of Eu
rope. Such buildings as Notre Dame in Paris, the cathedrals of Chartres
and Amiens, and York Minster in England express this new, freer spirit
of the times in their design and in the decorative glass, carving, and
tapestry. The people could not read, but they had spread before them a
marvelous fabric, which expressed their love of God and their joy in hu
manity; the Gospel story was narrated for them in thousands of sculp
tured images. No such symbolization of faith has ever been achieved as
in these Gothic buildings; a contemporary writer expressed it thus:

" My beloved son, thou hast approached God's house in all faith, and
adorned it with such abundant comeliness; and having illuminated the
vaults of the walls with divers works and colors, thou hast in a manner
shown forth to the beholders a vision of God's paradise, bright as spring
tide, with flowers of every hue, and fresh with green grass and leaves, re
freshing the souls of the saints with crowns proportioned to their divers
merits, whereby thou makest them to preach his wonders in his works.
For man's eyes knoweth not whereon first to gaze: if he looks up at the
vaults, they are as mantles embroidered with spring flowers; if he regard
the walls, there is a manner of paradise; if he consider the light streaming
through the windows, he marvelleth at the priceless beauty of the glass
and the variety of this most precious work. Work, therefore, now good
man kindle thyself to a still ampler art, and set thyself with all the
might of thy soul to complete that which is yet lacking in the gear of the
Lord's house, without which the divine mysteries and the ministries of
God's service may not stand."

Quoted in Burlington Magazine, September, 1912

THE GOTHIC SPIRIT IN ART

It is this spirit of achievement in creation, of trying to acquire a unity of
expression through using an infinite variety of means, that is most charac
teristic of these Gothic times: it pervaded every form of artistic activity.
To the thirteenth-century artist the thousands of details in a Gothic
cathedral were simply means for expressing the essential unity of his
faith. So with the illuminators who spent their lives in decorating the
manuscripts of the period; they loved to work into their designs all sorts
of seemingly eccentric and unrelated details, representations of beasts

c iion ton
cDuilctrf ODI wunio Juntas mis: # in

foluin mis nun aftutfrttpwrtta

r; i^- ; .i^ i

" ftJ'jl'AaL*/^

Courtmy of the British Museum

GOTHIC ART

The Beatus Page from the Psalter of the St. Omer Family is a fine example of Gothic
illuminated manuscript showing a multitude of seemingly unrelated details.

160

THE GOTHIC SPIRIT IN ART l6l

and birds and flowers that had no connection with the text they were
illustrating. Yet to these artists nothing was unimportant; they saw sig
nificance and beauty in all things and were able to " sense the infinite in

A THIRTEENTH-CENTURY ROSE WINDOW

the particular/' The sculptor loved to crowd every possible space with
his figures, feeling them all to be component parts in a unified design.
The glassmaker wrought out of gorgeous bits of color intricate patterns
that were expressive of the universality of his beliefs.

162 THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

EARLY GOTHIC MUSIC

The makers of music followed exactly the same ideals. If we examine
some of the music of the thirteenth century a large amount of which
has been preserved in a manuscript, the Antiphonarium Mediceum, now
in the Laurentian Library, Florence we shall find the same attempt at
elaborate construction and infinite detail that appears in the visual arts
of the time. The unknown composers of this music were really craftsmen
working at their melodic ornamentation in precisely the same way as the
illuminator did on his manuscript or the goldsmith on his monstrance.
For the first time we find in this music a strong contrast in rhythm be
tween the parts: above a rigid, unmeasured tenor (the original melody)
there has been constructed a decorative melismatic series of notes we
can hardly call it a melody which completely throws the original into
the background.

This organum purum, one of the most important forms of music at
this time, with its unmeasured tenor notes (probably often given to in
struments) and its completely free upper voice, was largely cultivated at
the abbey of St. Martial in Limoges, at Chartres, as well as in Paris, which
later became the principal center for polyphonic music during the Gothic
era, as it had long been of architecture.

Here we first learn of definite composers: the two earliest mentioned
are Leonin and Perotin, both of whom lived and worked in Paris about
1200, a little before its intellectual center, the famous Sorbonne, was
founded. Leonin was the choirmaster at Notre Dame and wrote a whole
cycle of organa pura for the various occasions of the church year,
calling it Magnus liber organi de Gradali et Antiphonario. This ,was
somewhat remodeled by his follower, P^rotin, who likewise wrote some
three-part and four-part organa. The most famous of these are the four-
part Viderunt and Sederunt organa: of colossal dimensions, they are full
of tremendous rhythmic energy. Their powerful massed tones and chords,
sung by both men's and boys' voices and played on various sorts of in
struments, must have had a tremendous effect in the wide, resonant
spaces of the Gothic cathedrals. As Dr. Picker has described it: " Above
a syllabic chant of mystic profundity there flows a far-flung stream of

By Burton Holmes from Ewing Galloway

THE GOTHIC INTERIOR

Chartres has "armatures of stone, with slender piers soaring aloft and merging into
pointed arches that seem to reach up into boundless space."

163

;'^JJ^^ H^JjfcUJJ

S^w^r/jtf^x- >-. y- >4/>^^>v /*/* 7- v> t ; 2!3ci5

Mh^ 1 ;^^ 1 *.-' ^C*W4^^i**w *wtwwtti g* *^^jtf*j^lnj^dw
&$W^Y, ., ; 4;.^ |i * /- / - . f / / f ;v* 1 ^i h . ^ ^>*^ *A?* t/ ** / '^f . t'JsKlL

.. .,. ,. .... { ....,, .. --'- I, - --- T- --J

i X 4* > // yr^^^JU-j^tvi I

?i M^4^#^p^wwirllp ; *MIH|

*s / . ,^ '/ >, :, , _f

Neurnes without staff (tenth century)

z:3H^^ :

l '

|m ^iRcntl'T-ire??

t:S3C!||g

Gothic choral notation on a three-line to four-line staff (eleventh century)

^^^-^r^^r^^-^^:^^^

JimftraTHt^'v

Photographs courtesy of The lAbrary of Congress

Gothic choral notation on five-line staff (fourteenth century)

DIFFERENT TYPES OF NOTATION

164

EARLY GOTHIC MUSIC 165

interwoven tones, now like shadowy, fugitive apparitions, now swelling
to an orgiastic rout." Again the Gothic love of elaborated construction
and infinite detail is felt expressing the might of a religious idea; and
we can well credit an ancient report concerning the effect of this music
on the common people, who "listened in awe-stricken and trembling
admiration to the strident creaking of the organ bellows and the shrill
clangor of the cymbals, the harmony of the flutes."

There arose the necessity for finding some means of more exactly writ
ing down what the composer wanted to be sung and played; for up to
this time the manuscripts were able to serve only as a sort of sketch and
were not by any manner of means a precise indication for the performers
as to numbers and kinds of singers and instrumentalists, tempi, dynamics,
tonalities, accidentals, and so on. The performers really improvised on the
bare outline left by the composer, and the effect they achieved depended
largely on their own artistic abilities. Leonin is credited with being one
of the first composers who actually marked down the different time value
of notes, thus establishing " mensural music," sound lengths accurately
measured. This was worked out in more detail by the theorists and taken
up gladly by the composers, who then could demand from the performers
a more exact rendering of what they had conceived than had been pos
sible under the improvisatory method.

One of the outstanding features of all this music was the use of a
liturgical melody for a cantus firmus, that is, the melody around which
the composer wove his other parts. There was a good psychological
reason for this, for these liturgical melodies possessed for the devout
congregations an ideal significance, one far removed from things of the
world; hence any music built on them was lifted beyond the realm of
mundane expression into an atmosphere of spiritual significance. But in
the early part of the thirteenth century composers began to use original
melodies for their cantus firmus, so that the whole piece was pure compo
sition. This resulted in what was called the conductus. P&otin has left us
many of these compositions, in which the cantus is freely invented and
no longer consists of long-held notes but possesses plenty of rhythmic
variety, with the added voices keeping the same fundamental rhythm
that underlies the cantus.

l66 THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

THE MOTET

Perotin was evidently a man of many parts; for not only did he write
voluminously and effectively in the Gothic forms already mentioned, but
he is credited with being the initiator of the chief form by which Gothic
music of this period became famous, the motet, a term not to be con
fused with its use by later composers. The difficulty of providing struc
tural unity between the various parts of the organa led to the adoption
of this motet form as described by a writer of the thirteenth century
(Johannes de Grocheo, quoted in Leichtentritt's Gescliichte der Mo-
tette) :

" The motet is made up of several interwoven voices which have either
their own texts or kind of syllable division, and which sound together in
consonances. There may be three or four of these interweaving voices,
each of them having its syllables, with the exception of the tenor, which
in some motets has a text, in many others does not.

"The various parts have different names: tenor, motetus, triplum,
quadruplum. . . . The part upon which the others are built, as a house
is built upon its foundation, is the tenor; it determines the character and
the size of the motet, just as foundation does the building.

" The voice immediately above the tenor is called the motetus; it usu
ally begins on the fifth above the tenor and keeps about that relationship
to it, although it may go to the octave.

" The voice which begins at the octave above the tenor and keeps
about that same relationship to it is named the triplum: whenever neces
sary, however, the triplum may go either above or below this range,

" The quadruplum is a voice sometimes added to make the harmony
perfect, although there are some motets having only three voices in
which the harmony may be said to be perfect."

Thus we have a real architectural structure made up of a number of
seemingly incongruous members, unified according to Gothic ideals,
in somewhat the following manner: (To us it may seem anything but
unified to have the tenor an instrumental part based on a Gregorian
motif, Veritatem . . . , the motetus singing a melody to the words
Verbum caro factum est; and the triplum one to Salve virgo nobflis. But
to the Gothic artist it was evidently the height of reasonableness.)

THE MOTET

Triplum

Motetus
Tenor

i6 7

iil'j r r ^ i *'

4 pn =n

iff \

ft 4 ' '

Sal - ve vir -

H t "

go no-bi -

lis

j ,j

Ma- ri -

** Ver-b

J n 4

ca - ro

fa - ctum-

r r r) .

est

ft 4 * * " 4

Veritatem

v ' -

g j ^ ^

.-p_r

- [ t

vir - go ve.

j _ p

ne-ra-bi -

p . j j j

r LT

lis et pi-

j _.

rf- 5 r f r

et ha--bi-

rj< r u

ta - vit in

j .

no -

j. j

J,,,,i _J
bis

1 1 1

.cu - ius

j j 1

H?ft F f

..._jU.,i

^ _,_

Thetrue characteristic of these Gothic motets was this placing together
of the most incongruous elements, each voice often having a different
text, sometimes in a different language. Just as the illuminator called into
being a peculiar set of fantastic creatures, half real and half unreal, which
had no direct connection with the text of the manuscript he was illus
trating, and the architect his fantastic race of gargoyle demons, so the
musician did not hesitate to intermingle the most startlingly varied ele
ments in his motets. Dr. Ficker describes one which has a tenor part
based on a fragment of a Gregorian chant, set to the word regnat (he
reigns), thus providing a sort of constant underlying reminder of God ; s
sovereignty. The motetus sings a text suggestive of a moral lecture ad
dressed to a roistering drunkard, exhorting him to change his ways, the
implication being that otherwise he cannot expect to escape the chasten
ing hand of him who reigneth over all; and the triplum has a melody
similar to the motetus without any text at all; it may have used the same
words.

EveiHhis fragmentary connection is often lacking. Secular words and
melodies were added to the most solemn tones of a Gregorian-chant

l68 THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

tenor; there was thought to be nothing incongruous in the combination
of a Latin hymn in praise of the Virgin with a drinking song in a second
part and an erotic love song in a third, and in the placing of all this above
a tenor based on a slow-moving Gregorian melody. There is a famous
thirteenth-century motet with its tenor a Kyrie from a Gregorian Mass,
its motetus having reference to the birds that sing in the spring, tra-la,
and its triplum descriptive of the perils of bigamy! Later motets written
in the so-called Burgundian style often had the melody in the upper
voice, this being the only one with words, the other parts being accom-
panimental, often played on instruments in reality, a monody accom
panied by two subordinate voice parts.

To try to comprehend all this we must again recall the peculiar mental
attitude of this age and all the incongruities of the other arts. Typical
also were the scenes of ribaldry and frivolity that were often enacted iu
the churches on great feast days, which it is difficult to reconcile with the
spirit that created the beautiful interiors. The congregation clicl not hesi
tate to burlesque the sacred mysteries to such an extent that, during the
twelfth century when celebrating the " Feast of the Ass/' they would in
procession bring an animal into the church. Then, with much drinking
and reveling, they would proceed to represent the flight into Egypt. After
a rollicking hymn, set to one of the Church's melodies, in praise of the
ass, a Mass would be celebrated, with imitations of the animal's braying
interpolated at suitable places. In the same spirit of na'ive realism, the
sculptors and wood carvers working in the cathedrals did not hesitate to
use all sorts of peculiar and amusing animal and human monstrosities in
their designs. So we should not wonder too much at the Church's at
tempt to draw within her circle all phases of human activity, trying thus
to make them subserve her own purposes and unifying them in so far as
the attitude of the time was concerned.

USE OF INSTRUMENTS

Those who live in one age can never fully understand the music of
another: for example, we who are accustomed to instrumental music that
has reached an advanced stage of development find it almost impossible

USE OF INSTRUMENTS 169

to realize how primitive its earliest stages must have been. These begin
nings are to be found in the period under discussion; it must be remem
bered that, although the scores did not always lay forth the parts for
instruments as well as voices, instrumental accompaniments were freely
used during this period. (This subject is treated in more detail in another
place.) But there is plenty of evidence in the sculptures and pictures
of the period that instruments often played along with the voices in these
polyphonic compositions, and we have examples of some of them that
have both prelude and postlude for instruments alone. Qrgans i(i were
certainly used in the churches, together with such bowed instruments
as fiedels and viols, and, in addition, lutes, harps, reed instruments,
and trumpets. All these added their not overdelicate tones to the
harmony, sometimes to the critical disapproval of the more sensitive-
eared listeners. If a voice part had not its singer or a sufficient number
of singers, instruments were used to fill in; there seemed to be no hesi
tancy in spoiling the effect of the vocal lines. But we can hardly say that
the instrumental parts as yet assumed any real independence.

It is extremely difficult for us, with our present-day conceptions of
tone color and harmonic relationships, to realize what this music must
have sounded like to the Gothic ear. If, as Ficker has suggested, we can,
in looking at some of these scores, let our minds conceive how the " me
tallic boy voices were mingled with all the gentle tintinnabulation of the
glockenspiel, cymbals, triangle, etc. then in use, together with the dulcet
tones of the viols, while the long-sustained notes of the lower parts were
sung by smooth tenor voices supported by manifold wind instruments,"
we can perhaps get an idea of the dazzling effect of these Gothic motets
and organa. " Fancy yourself/' he bids us, " attending one of the great
assemblies of the estates honored by the regent's presence and accom
panied by the most lavish display, for which the courts of France and
Burgundy were then conspicuous. All the bewildering splendor radiated
by the cerefaral action finds an echo in the scintillant rhythms and inter
linked tones of this music/' 5

5 For those who would pursue further the spirit of this fascinating time, we
recommend two books: Mont-Samt-Michel and Chartres.by Henry Adams and
Cathedral; A Gothic Pilgrimage by Helen H. Parkhurst

THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE ACES

THE ML/SIC OF CHIVALRY
The Troubadours and Their Fellows

I can play the lute, the violin, the pipe, the bagpipe, the syrinx, cthe-
harp, the gigue, the gittern, the symphony, the psaltery, the organistrum,
the regals, the tabor, and the rote. I can sing a song well and make tales
to please young ladies and can play the gallant for them if necessary. I
can throw knives into the air and catch them without cutting my fingers.
I can do dodges with string, most extraordinary and amusing. J can bal
ance chairs and make tables dance. I can throw a somersault and walk
on my head.

Lcs deux M en&triers, Bodleian Library, Oxford

A ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN MEDIEVAL TIMES

THE songs of the troubadours were the direct result of a wave of emo
tionalism which swept over Europe during the twelfth century, an
emotionalism that was engendered by the new contacts that the Euro
peans made with the East and its highly developed civilization. The
Moorish conquest of Spain and the seven crusading journeys 6 that were
made in Border to rescue the Holy Land from the profane hands of the
infidel occasioned a new interest on the part of the aristocratic European
world in the more delicate and refined things of life: poetry and music
began to be cultivated for themselves, and a new code of chivalry, with
ideals of fealty to God, King, and Lady, was adopted:

" A Dieu mon me, My soul to God,

Mon coeur aux dames, My heart to the ladies,

Ma vie au roi, My life to the king,

L'honneur pour moi." Honor for myself.

6 Even a casual reading of history shows how confused were these centuries of the
Crusades. " The most distant islands and savage countries," writes a historian of the
time, " were inspired with the same ardent passion. The Welshman left his hunting,
the Scotchman his fellowship with vermin, the Dane his drinking party, the Norwegian
his raw fish " in order to help rescue the Holy Places of the East. Perhaps the most
monstrous folly of all the seven crusades was that of the Children, in 1212, when scores
of thousands of youths were persuaded to embark on this " holy mission/' only to find
themselves in the end sold into slavery, their goal still unrealized.

A ROMANTIC MOVEMENT

Wide World Photos, Inc.

A GRIM REMINDER OF THE POPULARITY OF THE CRUSADES

Crac-des-Chevaliers 7 a vast fortress that was built in the twelfth century on a thousand-
foot eminence near Horns in Syria, was for over a hundred years one of the outposts of
the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, who built it with the help of artisan pilgrims

from France.

The center of this Romantic influence was France; but it had no pe
culiarly nationalistic background and spread rapidly through all Europe,
producing some great literature and poetry in France, England, and
Germany. Its chief spokesmen were the troubadours (as they were called
in the language of the south), the trouvres (the term used in the north
both troubadour and tro.uvdre have the same significance, that of in
venting or making poetry ) 7 and the minnesingers (as they were called in
Germany). These were men sometimes born in high estate, sometimes
in low, who gave their lives to the production of poetry and music in
celebration of the beauty and loveliness of women, for the purpose of
reciting deeds of chivalry and relating epic tales, both of men and of gods.
The medieval biographer of William, Count of Poitiers, the earliest
troubadour mentioned in history, said of him that he was " one of the
most courteous men in the world and one of the greatest deceivers of
ladies a valiant knight in warfare and bounteous in love and gallantry.

TWO JONGLEURS, FROM A TWELFTH-CENTURY MANUSCRIPT

At the left is a shawm player and at the right a juggler. According to tradition each
jongleur had to be able to play at least nine instruments.

172

A ROMANTIC MOVEMENT

And he knew well to sing and make poetry, and long time went through
the world beguiling ladies " a description which could be made to
serve for most of his successors! The names of some four hundred trouba
dours and two hundred trouveres have come down to us, as well as a
great deal of their poetry, consisting of ordered sequences of couplets and
refrains, together with a number of the melodies they used.

The fact that these musician poets treated subjects that were quite
outside the Church and upon which the clergy frowned, and which there
fore found no place in the process of education that was entirely monopo
lized by the Church, was a tremendously important influence in the
secularization of music. The nobles, increasingly reacting against the
dominance of the Church, began to look elsewhere for artistic materials
and found them in the common songs and dances of the people.

While the troubadours were essentially poets, they usually composed
the melodies of their songs; but it was obviously important to the dignity
of a nobleman that he should have an attendant trained to perform his
master's works. These accompanists and musical scribes (the more skill
ful of whom acted as " ghosts " for their masters) were called m&nestrels
or jongleurs; being of the common people, they would naturally be in
fluenced by popular melodies. Someone has called them the beloved
vagabonds of the thirteenth century, for they passed constantly from one
world to another, from noble castle to rustic inn. 7

7 The minstrels " wandered at will from castle to castle, and in time from borough
to borough, sure of their ready welcome alike in the village tavern, the guildhall and
the baron's keep. They sang and jested in the market places, stopping cunningly at a
critical moment in the performance to gather their harvest of small coins from the by
standers. In the great castles, while lords and ladies supped or sat around the fire, it
was theirs to while away many a long bookless evening with courtly gests or witty sally.
At wedding or betrothal, baptism or knight dubbing, treaty or tournament, their pres
ence was indispensable. The greater festivities saw them literally in the hundreds, and
rich was their reward in jewels, in costly garments, and in broad acres.

" They were licensed vagabonds, with free right of entry into the presence cham
bers of the land. You might know them from afar by their cbats of many colors,
gaudier than any knight might respectably wear, by the instruments on their backs and
those of their servants, and by the shaven faces, close-clipped hair, and flat shoes of
their profession. This hen-speckle appearance, together with the privilege of easy
access, made the minstrel's dress a favorite disguise in ages when disguise was impera
tive."

E. K. Chambers: The Mediaeval Stage

MH-13

THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

Such songs as these, taken from the manuscript of an unknown
jongleur of the thirteenth century, and now in the National Library,
Paris, show this folk influence clearly enough. They were probably
dance songs of the time, popular with commoner and noble alike.

^F^

===

=E|^

t=M

>M=

=*=

r~ *

Je me che- val - choi - e Par - mi un pra - el,

De josie une ar - broi - e Lez un or -mis -gel.

La tro-vai grant joi-e: Pas-lore en l ? ar-broi-e,

En sa main fres-tel chante un son no - Vel.

L'au - trier
Ne sui

m'ie - re
gaire es

le - vaz,

loi

gnaz,

Sor mon che- val mon-taz Sui por de- duire a - laz
Can me sui ar - res--taz, Et des-sen - di en praz

Lez u - ne prai - e - ri
Sor une en - te flo -

- ri

Sometimes the minstrels used in the midst of the song a phrase in
tended to be sung as a sort of response by a group of singers or dancers,
Notice, for instance, this ballade:

TYPES OF TROUBADOUR ART

1 75

A 1'eji-tra - da del tens clar, JS - y - a,

r f f f

Per joi - a re - co - men-^ar,

- y - a,

per je - los ir . ri-tar,

ft r r r

=*=

ir r -

j j .

=*=

Vol la re - gi - na mos.trat Qu'el 'es si a - mo -

sa A la vi\

A la vi

a, Je - las, Lais^saz nos, Lais- s&z nos,

Sal -

en - ire nos, En . tre nos*

TYPES OF TROUBADOUR ART

The gallant music of the troubadours, written for use in court and
castle, was something quite different. Springing out of the current chiv-
alric Romanticism, the same spirit that produced the Arthurian ro
mances, these troubadour songs fall naturally into two groups: chansons
a personnages, general in manner and written according to strict conven
tions; and poesie courtoise, addressed by the troubadour directly to his
lady. Included in the chansons a personnages were various conventional
types : chansons de toile, work songs; chansons de malmariee, a most fruit
ful subject; pastoureHes; chansons de danse, like those already mentioned;

176 THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

reverdies, or spring songs; and chansons d'aube, morning songs. The more
personal utterances of the poet were marked by passionate, often extrava
gant, devotion to the service of love; the troubadour, anxious to establish
himself in favor with the lady of his choice, spent a great deal of his time
imploring her favor in carefully designed stanzaic schemes:

" Lady, if Mercy help me not, I ween
That I to be thy slave am all too mean,

For thy great worth small hope to me has given
Aught to accomplish meet for dame so rare
Yet this I would, and nowise will despair;

For I have heard, the brave, when backward driven,
Strive ever till the conquering blow they deal,
So strive I for thy love by service leal.

" Though to such excellence I come not near,
Nor eke of one so noble am the peer,

I sing my best, bear meekly Love's hard burden,
Serve thee and love thee more than all beside,
Shun ill, seek after good whatever betide;

Wherefore, methinks, fair dame should liefer guerdon
With her dear self a valiant knight and true,
Than the first lord that haughtily may woo . . ."

Raymond of Miraval

And more to the same purport. If the fair lady decided to " guerdon
with her dear self " the valiant knight, a ceremony was arranged, modeled
on that of a vassal pledging himself to his lord. " The lover, kneeling
down with clasped hands before his lady, vowed fidelity to her; she then
lifted him up, gave him a ring, and kissed him, as a token that she * re
tained ' him." Such a union, strange as it may seem in the light of today's
monogamous ideals in marriage for the troubadour's lady was almost
sure to be the wife of someone else was considered so solemn a matter
as to call for blessing by a priest.

Indeed the whole period is difficult of modern comprehension; if we
are to realize the beauty of some of these troubadour songs, we must
detach ourselves from present-day connotations and immerse ourselves
in the atmosphere evoked by die accounts of the lives of these gallants,

TYPES OF TROUBADOUR ART

1 77

REINMAR, THE FIDDLER

He plays for dancing (from the Manesse Manuscript, Heidelberg University Library).

( It was the custom of medieval times to head the collection pf a trouba
dour's poems with the story of his life; and so we have plenty of con
temporary evidence available.) Take, for example, such a biography as
that of Raimbaut de Vagueiras (d. 1207), one of the most distinguished
of the Provencal poets, whose likely Estampie is quoted later on:

" Raimbaut de Vagueiras was the son of a poor knight of Provence, of
the Castle of Vagueiras, one named PeiroK, who passed for mad. And
Raimbaut became a jongleur, and abode full long with the Prince of
Orange, William of Baux. Well did he know how to sing and to make
coblas and sirventes; and the Prince of Orange did him great good, and

178 THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

great honor, and advanced him, and made him to be known and prized
of all good folk. And afterwards, Raimbaut departed from him, and gat
him to Montferrat to the court of my Lord the Marquis Boniface, and
therein dwelt full long, growing in wisdom, in knowledge, and in prowess.
And he became enamored of the sister of the Marquis, the which hight
my Lady Beatrice, wife of Lord Henry of Garret and he made many fair
songs, calling her therein, ' Fair Knight/ and men weened she loved him
well. Now well have ye heard who was Raimbaut de Vagueiras, and how
he came to honor, and by whom; but now I will tell you how that when
the Marquis had dubbed him knight, Raimbaut became enamored of my
Lady Beatrice, sister of the Marquis and my Lady Azalais of Salutz.

" Greatly did he love her and desire her, having care that none should
know of it, and much did he spread abroad her fame, and many a friend
did he win for her. And she was wont to bear herself full graciously to
wards him, yet the while he was dying for desire and fearfulness, for he
durst neither beseech her for her love nor show that he strove therefor,
until as one sore pressed, he told her that he loved a lady of great excel
lence, yet durst not make known the goodwill and love he bore her, nor
seek for hers in exchange, in such fear was he of her great excellence; and
he besought her for God's sake to tell him whether she held it meet that
he should speak his mind, or he should die loving the lacly privly. Then
that noble lady my Lady Beatrice when she heard this, and knew
the goodwill he bore her, having also ere now full well perceived that he
was, from great yearning for her, nigh unto death, was moved by love and
pity, and spake, and said:

" ' Raimbaut, full meet it is that the true love of a gentle lady should
fear to show his love, but or ever he die, I read him to tell it to her, and
pray her to take him for servant and lover; and I will warrant, that if
she be wise and courteous she will in nowise hold it for an ill and shame
ful thing of him; rather will she prize him the more, and hold him the
better man for it. Likewise I read you to speak your mind and will to her
you love, and to bid her take you for her knight, since you are such as no
lady in the world should scorn for knight and servant; for my Lady Azalais,
Countess of Saluza, suffered Peire Vidal, and the Countess of Burlatz,
Arnaut de Marvoil, and my Lady Maria, Gaucelm Faidit, and the Lady of
Marseilles, Folquet; wherefore I give you counsel and license that you,
by my word and surety, may beseech her for her love/

" Then Raimbaut, hearing the counsel and assurance she gave, and the
license, that she promised him, told her she was verily the lady that he so
much loved, even she of whom he had sought counsel; whereat my Lady

TYPES OF TROUBADOUR ART 179

Beatrice told him that he was come in a happy hour, and that if he strove
after worth, and after the doing and speaking of good things, she would
indeed choose him for knight and servant. So Raimbaut strove to the
uttermost to increase her fame, and it was then that he made the canzona
which says:

' Now demand of me her bearing and demeanor/
" And after this it befell that the Marquis, with his host, passed over
into Romania, and with great help from the Church conquered the king
dom of Salonica, and then it was that Raimbaut, for his valorous deeds,
was made knight; and there the Marquis gave him rich lands and reve
nues, and there also did he die/ 7

Unlike Raimbaut, most of these poet musicians were of knightly ori
gin; but whether of humble or noble birth, they all conformed strictly to
the aristocratic style of their period; in addition to those already men
tioned the most famous of them were Bertran de Born, who lived around
1 180; Peire Vidal (1175-1215), perhaps the most celebrated of the whole
lot, known everywhere as the " terror of husbands "; Bernard de Venta-
dour (1201-1253), and Gaucelm Faidit (d. 1220). The trouveres were
able to include kings in their number, notably Richard Coeur de Lion s
(1157-1199) and Thibaut, King of Navarre (1201-1253); but the most

s Richard's interest in minstrelsy is one of the pleasantly accepted legends of his
tory. Just how many songs he did write is open to question; but there seems no reason
to doubt the authenticity of the one which still survives in the Laurentian Library, in
a manuscript volume of Provencal poetry. This was probably composed in 1193 when
the king was a captive in an Austrian castle on the Danube, and seems to have been
written with some definite tune in mind:

" Never can captive make a song so fair
As he can make that has no cause for care,
Yet may he strive by song his grief to cheer.
I lack not friends, but sadly lack their gold!
Shamed are they, if unransomed I lie here,

A second Yule in hold.
" My men and barons all, full well they know,
Poitevins, English, Normans, Gascons, too,
That I have not one friend, however poor,
Whom I would leave in chains to save my gold,
I tell them this, but blame them not therefor;

Though I lie yet in hold . . .
" Sister and Countess, God give you good cheer!
And keep my Lady, whom I love dear;
For whom I lie in hold."

iSo

THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

'' " ' '^

RICHARD THE LIONHEARTED AND HEINRICH VI

While Richard was the prisoner of the Emperor (1193-1194) he wrote his

Reis Rizard.

famous of all the northern singers was the hunchbacked minstrel, Adam
de la Halle (i238?-i288), whose little pastoral play Le Jeu de Robin et
Marion is one of the landmarks of French dramatic history. The centers
of this musical culture of the Middle Ages were the courts of Provence,
Toulouse, and Poitou, and of the dukes of Flanders and Brabant, as well
as of the kings of England, France, and Spain.

jHow much of the art of the troubadours was of their own invention
and how much came from their paid assistants, the jongleurs, we cannot
tell. 9 Probably the latter, who wrote down the music, made a far greater

9 A contemporary account describes a troubadour's voice as being " so supple that
the nightingale was amazed to hear it." But there is plenty of evidence that such vocal
gifts were by no means usual, the troubadours leaving to their jongleurs the singing
of the songs they had composed. Wolfram von Eschenbach confessed that he could
neither read nor write perhaps a statement somewhat exaggerated for effect but
we do know that the troubadour Ulrich von Liechtenstein dictated his songs to a
scribe. There are conflicting reports concerning the ability of the jongleurs. An early

TYPES OF TROUBADOUR ART l8l

contribution to the history of music than did their masters; but it was the
masters who were the glamorous figures, the men who received all the
honor and glory, and so it is their names that have become attached to
the whole movement./The jongleurs accompanied these songs by some
instrument, usually the vielle (a bowed instrument, the direct ancestor
of the violin) or the harp. In writing down these songs after they had
perfected them, these scribes used a notation of the plainsong type; but
this was defective, for while the rise and fall of the notes was shown, their
length was a matter of rough rule, regulated by the syllables to which
they were set. And so there has resulted a great deal of confusion in the
modern transcription of these early songs and dances, most authorities
letting the melody change occasionally to two and four pulses to the
measure, instead of keeping it always in three, as suggested by the regular
alternation of long and short syllables in the texts used.

Set to words according to modern principles of accent, and using
melodies that are strongly suggestive of our present-day major and minor
scales, 10 these troubadour songs make a more definite appeal to most

ecclesiastic said that many of Ms own brethren that were charged with uttering the
noble words of God took less care and were far less keen about their work than were
these players of the cithara and the flute. Petrarch, writing to Boccaccio in 1366, says:
" they [that is, the jongleurs] are men of spirit, far from mediocre, gifted with good
memory very lavorious sort of persons with plenty of cheek/ 7 a description which
might well be used of some of their modern descendants! Guiraut de Cabreiar was
probably more concerned with rhetorical effect than with stating the truth, when he
said to his jongleur: " You play the viol vilely; you sing even worse; you can't make a
beautiful final cadence to save your life; even less can you contrive embellishments/'
But these complaints are rather common, especially against bad singers, so the tech
nical efficiency of the musicians was probably none too good.

10 Julidn Ribera, a Spanish scholar with a vast knowledge of Arabic literature as
well as of Spanish history, has an interesting explanation for this. He states, in his book
La musica de las cantigas, that music followed the general course of the other arts
which, as we are just beginning to realize, after their origin in Egypt and the Sumerian
civilizations and their development in Greece and Rome, went back to western Asia
and reached a new high point of development in Persia during the eighth and ninth
centuries A.D. The fundamental characteristics of this music, according to Ribera,
based on the classic Greek models, were the use of the diatonic scale, of simple har
monies in the modern sense of the term, the possession of definite rhythmic patterns
suited to the metrics of the verses to which they were set, and emphasis on " expres
sion " all of them characteristics likewise of the music of the troubadours.

Jean Beck and other workers in the field of troubadour music and poetry have never
been able to explain satisfactorily the sources of the instruction and technique of these

182 THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

of us than do the mystic chants of the Church. Contrast this Estarnpie
of Raimbaut de Vagueiras, based on a courtly dance rhyflim, with the
music of the Church which we have already heard:

Kalenda maya

Ni fuelhs de faya

Ni chanz cTauzelh ni flors de glaya

Non es quern playa,

Pros domna guaya,

Tro qu'un ysnelh messatgier aya

Del vostre bel cors, quern retraya,

Plazer novelh qu* Amors m'atraya,

E jaya

Emtraya

Vas vos, domna veraya;

E chaya

De playa

Ugelos, ans quem n'estraya.

It is the age-old, yet ever-new complaint:

" The joys of May 7 the new leaves on the trees, the songs of the birds,
the blossoming of the flowers all these can mean nothing to me ? my
noble and lovely one, until I see your messenger come with some token
of your love for me, till I see my jealous foe struck by the lightning of
your wrath."

poet composers. The words troubadour and rrouv&re mean literally " finder " or " in
ventor," but it is hardly safe to assume that such a description is to be taken literally.
This new style of music came from somewhere; Ribera says the matter is simple
enough, and explains it in this fashion:

The classic music of the Arabic countries was brought to Spain during the Moorish
occupation (which lasted roughly from the eighth to fifteenth centuries), became
established there, and was brought to a high state of perfection througn the work of
a number of important Spanish composers; so that by the twelfth century it was known
throughout Europe. The Iberian Peninsula was, as everyone who has studied the
troubadours knows, a sort of chosen country for them from the earliest beginnings of
the Provengal school. This predilection, Ribera says, explains the sources of the trouba
dour melodies and verses. They went to Spain because of this new " popular " art they
found there and because they wanted to perfect themselves in it. Thus Spain became
one of the great highways for the diffusion of a world culture and played an important
role in the introduction of the popular features of music into Europe.

Senor Ribera's work is thoroughly scholarly and carefully documented; it lias been
recently published in an English translation by Eleanor Hague and Marion Leffingwell
(Stanford University Press).

TYPES OF TROUBADOUR ART 183

A suggestion of modern tonality and rhythm is present in the two
well-known little lyrics from Adam de la Halle's Robin et Marion, J'ai
encore un tel pate and Robin m'aime. These were undoubtedly popular
melodies of the day, preserved for posterity by the charm of the art of this
trouvre. That these fragrant reminders of this gallant period can still
please is evidenced by the fact that they often are placed on modern
programs. Perrin d'Angicourt's charming Quand voi an la fin cf estey and
Blondel de Nesle's A Fentrant cf este (both available in the Anthologie
Sonore) are perhaps more of their period; they show clearly enough the
influence of Eastern ideals and have a decidedly courtly atmosphere.

The texts of many of these lovely songs of the Provencal poets and
musicians have luckily been preserved. Some of them have great sim
plicity, such as this, fresh as the breath of spring itself:

Quand le rossignol chante qui nous charme par son chant
Pour ma belle, douce amie Je vois mon cceur rossignolant
Jointes mains je la supplie Car jamais je n'aimai tant;
Je sais bien, que, si elle m'oublie C'en est fini de mon bonheur.

Translated into modern French by J. Beck

Others are stormy and turbulent like Peire VidaFs

Atressi col perilans

Que sus nn' laiga balansa . . .

As a mariner, sea-tossed, Beneath her beauty's mask

Capsized in desperate plight, If I could know her mind

Gives himself up for lost, Fd have no need to ask,

Yielding to craven fright, Is she no more than kind,

Then sees a sudden light And am I somewhat blind,

And feels a rescuing hand To steer my passion's bark

Drawing him safe to land; Through the uncharted dark,

So I, distraught, downcast Trusting to her regard

By heavy doubt, and long Without assurance? Dear

Love-hungry, find at last Lady, be not so hard,

A splendid theme for song, But make the sailing clear!

Translated by George Cronyn

Unfortunately many of the tunes to which these songs were sung have
been lost. In the case of the trouveres we are more fortunate, for often
times several of their melodies are found set to the same words.

184 THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

THE GERMAN COUNTERPART

We have spoken of the minnesinger as the German counterpart of the
troubadour and trouvre. In reality the minnesinger, literally a love
singer, was a somewhat later development in point of time, and his art
lasted almost a whole century longer than that of his French brothers in
song. The whole of this German art was tinctured with a religious ele
ment, for the delicacy of the love sentiment allowed it to be, in part,
sublimated into a worship of the Virgin Mary; and this element is ac
centuated in the songs of the minnesingers by their melodic derivation
from Church sources. Thus we have another link between secular and
sacred song, the modes of the Church exercising their restraining in
fluence on the music, which in the troubadour minstrelsy had shown a
well-developed tendency to step into the path of what we know as the
major keys.

The most famous minnesinger was without doubt Walter von cler
Vogelweide (c. 1 170-1230) . Many of his poems are known today, none of
them more personal or characteristic than the one beginning:

Unter den Linden, Under the lindens on the heather,

An der Heide, There was our double resting place,

Wo ich mit meiner Trauten sass, Side by side and close together

Da mogt ihr finden, Garnered blossoms, crashed, and

Wie wir beide grass

Die Blumen brachen und das Gras. Nigh a shaw in such a vale:

Vor dem Wald rnit siissem Schall Tandaradei!

Tandaradei! Sweetly sang the nightingale.

Sang im Tal die Nachtigall.

Translated by Ford Madox Ford

One of the few authentic melodies of Walter's is that of a Crusader's
Song, written during his journey to the Holy Land in 1228, only two
years before his death. The music is suggestive of Gregorian influence,
and the words express the lyric joy of the poet on at last reaching the goal
of his desire the Holy Land. 11

11 Wagner brings the medieval spirit of chivalry and the culture of this period
strikingly before us in his operas TannMuser (in which is staged a contest of song and
poetry for the hand of a lady) and Lohengrin.

THE MINNESINGER HEINRICH FRAUENLOB (d. 1318)
(From the Manesse Manuscript, Heidelberg University Library)

185

l86 THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

A SINGING TRIAL OF THE MASTERSINGERS

In this scene from a seventeenth-century miniature we see the markers sitting at the
left on the podium; in the pulpit at the right, the candidate is singing, and the master-
singers are sitting in the foreground.

The Meistersinger (mastersingers) carried on the art of the minne
singers, though with less brilliance, from about the middle of the fifteenth
century to the early part of the seventeenth. They were local musicians
of the bourgeois class, organized into guilds according to strict rides arid
regulations, and they allowed the artificiality and stiffness of these aca
demic bonds to hamper their music. There were definite gradations of
rank in this order apprentice, pupil, singer, poet, and master each
of them subject to careful examination as to the ability of the candidate.
Although Hans Sachs of Nuremberg, the best known of the mastersingers,
wrote some beautiful melodies that are strangely suggestive of the
later chorales, most of the work of these bourgeois musicians was
uncouth and prosaic, the satisfaction of rules being more important to
them than the expression of poetic or musical thought. Wagner's glori
ous opera, Die Meistersinger, draws a genial portrait of their weaknesses.

DANCE SONGS OF THE TIME

i8 7

HANS SACHS (1494-1576)
He was the most famous of the mastersingers " Schumacher und Poet dazu."

DANCE SONGS OF THE TIME

The period of the troubadours produced also a definite art of instru
mental music in the aristocratic and courtly dances that were so popular.
As Dr. Sachs has asked, what more significant expression of this peculiar
world of love and intrigue could be found than these fetes galantes, when
during the dances the barriers between knights and the ladies they loved
were temporarily dropped? Modern research has made available some
of this music and has shown how strong was its pull toward a regular
rhythmic pulse.

Among the most interesting of these medieval dances described by
Johannes de Grocheo, in his contemporary treatise on popular music, 12 is
the ductia a light, rapid tune that falls and rises gracefully and thus is

12 Johannes de Grocheo was a music scholar and writer of. the thirteenth century
living in Paris. His Theoria is a rich source of the forms of medieval music.

1 88

THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

A RENAISSANCE COURT DANCE: "THE DANCE WITH

FLAMBEAUX"
(From a wood engraving by Diirer)

well suited for both singing and dancing. A good example of this has been
preserved in a manuscript now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. It is of
the thirteenth century and consists of a number of short vers (verses)
with the melody ending in a half close; the same tune is then repeated,
ending in a full close on the tonic. During each repetition the dancers
evidently returned in their steps to where they had begun each vers.

Another dance described by this author, who seems to have been a
professor in the Sorbonne, is the stantipes, 13 which he says was so diffi
cult of execution that it " served to restrain the youths from wicked

18 The Latin term for a medieval dance piece played before courtly listeners; it was
called esrairzpida in the Provencal dialect, and Boccaccio calls it srampita. It was played
stehenden Fusses in contrast to the ductfa, where the players led in a round dance.

A PERIOD OF TRANSITION log

thoughts." An amusing example of this, with a primitive contrapuntal
second part, is preserved in the British Museum. The saltarello and La-
rnento di Tristano came from Italy. The latter had a changing rhythm
and was the sort of compound dance that is still found in country dis
tricts. The vers was in triple time, according to Sachs, and probably
marked a step in which the whole company participated. The rotta, which
followed, was in lively double time, and suggests an interlude for indi
vidual steps and interpolated pantomime.

There are a few other medieval dance tunes known today, but these
we have mentioned are representative. It does not require a great deal of
imagination when listening to their music to re-create the colorful back
ground of courtly chivalry and graceful intrigue; and in their peculiar in
strumentation we hear again the voice of a fascinating age long forgotten.

A TRANSITIONAL PERIOD
The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

The period which carried Europe from scholasticism to humanism,
once regarded as arid and sterile, is now looked upon as one of the great
turning points in intellectual history. It marked the actual transition from
medievalism to the modern age. , . . The older conception of a sudden
classical ' renaissance ' in the fifteenth century, and of an almost precipi
tate development of natural science between 1550 and 1700 has been
supplanted by a more truly historical perspective which stresses the con
tinuity of cultural development between the late twelfth and the fif
teenth centuries.

Barnes: An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World

A PERIOD Or TRANSITION

ONE of the consistent phenomena of history is the appearance be
tween eras of exceptional physical, mental, and spiritual activity
(such as the one we have just been considering) of what may be called
fluctuational periods zones of a comparatively undetermined quality,
sharing^he characteristics of both the preceding and the followmg^ochs,

MH-14

THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

without having any decided ones of their own. Feeling the stirrings of
the new times ahead, and yet unable to throw off the trappings of the old
ones behind, these fluctuational periods are likely to be marked by at
tention to law rather than to spirit. In an attempt to hide the lack of real
motivating forces, they are concerned with the development of technical
perfection, of learning for its own sake, of oversophistication. Some his
torians consider the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, lying between the
apex of the Middle Ages and the High Renaissance, as such a period.

The medieval concept of the world was that of its being" a God-inspired
mystery that was capable of being expressed in terms of great beauty;
that of the Renaissance was that it was rather a man-made rationality,
worthy of cultivation for its own sake. In between there came these two
centuries. Because both the old and the new were present in them, the old
slowly perishing, the new slowly struggling for life, they were troubled
enough. Symbolic is the fact that they produced both Dante's Divine
Comedy, designed, as someone has said, largely for preparing the reader
for the life to come, and Boccaccio's Decameron, which had as its purpose
the preparation for life on this earth.

Gone was the sustaining faith of the eleventh and twelfth centuries;
in its place arose a type of intellectuality which has made the term scho
lasticism one of contempt. The soaring Gothic beauty of the medieval
churches degenerated into an overdeveloped, flamboyant style, which
suggested a technical art of decoration rather than a spiritual means of
expression. There developed a fashion for strict, artificial lyric forms in
poetry, which, although possessing a certain charm, were not very sig
nificant in content. The Church seemed to have lost its hold on heaven
as well as its grip on earth. The clergy were often corrupt beyond belief,
some of them actively practicing piracy when not engaged in reading
their services; ecclesiastical preferment was openly obtained by a process
of barter and trade; the papacy had lost its moral and political power, not
to speak of its spiritual significance, and at one time three popes were en
gaged in the edifying spectacle of trying to excommunicate one another.

Moreover, in these centuries occurred the Black Death and the Hun
dred Years' War between France and England. It is difficult to say which
was cause and which effect; but to these two major catastrophes in man's

A PERIOD OF TRANSITION

191

Archives PhotograpMques

FLAMBOYANT GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE La Trinity Vendome, France

What an overinsistence on technique did to the Gothic style: this twisted, crackling
facade is far removed from the quiet, exalted beauty of Chartres.

history can be laid a great deal of the sad gloom, the sin, and the suffering
of this period. Between them these two cataclysms cost Europe un
counted thousands of its inhabitants, drained it of a great deal of its
wealth, and deprived it of manners and morals, faith and reason. No
wonder that a favorite theme of the time was the brevity of life and the
consequent need for immediate pleasure. The Danse macabre became a
sort of universal symbol: in verse and wall paintings and actual dance
ceremonial, every type of society was portrayed pope, emperor, car
dinal, prince, archbishop, baron, lady, squire, abbot, prior, lawyer, scholar,

THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

DANSE MACABRE IN THE CHURCH OF LA CHAISE DIEU,

deacon, merchant, monk, thief, physician, minstrel, and common work-
ingman marching forward in a sort of inevitable parade, each in his
place according to his rank, with Death dancing grotesquely among all,
questioning them and demonstrating the certainty of his final triumph.

But we must not overemphasize the dark side of the picture; if the old
was dying, the new was being born. For out of the confusion and disillu
sionment of these years there came new ideals. New political units, the
states, emerged, shaped by the common national sentiment of the
various peoples and governed by central rulers. The medieval unifying
forces which had held sway for so long the Holy Roman Empire, the
Catholic Church, the feudal system gradually lost power and influence
in the face of these new concepts. There was another factor in the decline
of medieval ideals during this time, the development of commerce and
the consequent growth of a prosperous bourgeois class with its particular
ideology. The commercial relationships of these trading merchants led
" straight to the discovery of America and the origins of the modern age."

Nowhere is the dual nature of the period better shown than in the art
it produced. On the one hand, there was the interest in virtuosity and a
tendency to be content with a sort of sensuous enjoyment mixed with a
touch of humorous and ironical philosophy, a let-us-eat-drink-and-be-
merry-for-tomorrow-we-die attitude. We have mentioned some of the
characteristic results of this the flamboyance of the northern architec
ture, the technical perfection and artificiality of fourteenth-century
poetry. A symptomatic portrait is that given by the gilded youths of
Boccaccio's Decameron, who while away their time in the pleasant coun
tryside near plague-stricken Florence telling stories and singing ballads.

A PERIOD OF TRANSITION 193

Archives Photographiguea

Haute-Loire, France (by an unknown artist of the fifteenth century)

On the other hand, these centuries mark the rise of a new interest or,
better, a renewed interest in man as an individual and a curiosity re
garding the world in which he lives. The religious concepts of the Middle
Ages are no longer completely satisfying; artists begin to portray man as
a natural, human being and not merely as an abstract religious symbol.
This is the period of the great sculptors Ghiberti, Verrocchio, and Dona
ted, the latter one of the great realists of Italian art; of the painters
Giotto, Masaccio, Uccello, and Fra Filippo Lippi, a distinguished line
which brought the art out of its medieval limitations and, by concen
trating on such matters as draughtsmanship, color, and perspective, laid
the foundations for its modern development. In Italy Brunelleschi and
his follower, Michelozzo, designed buildings which show a definite at
tempt to return to older, more humanistic ideals. In literature, Chaucer
and Boccaccio introduced a new secular spirit derived from a wide knowl
edge of the world and its inhabitants. The poets Petrarch and Villon in
fused new feeling into old forms and represent the humanistic tendencies
of the time, as does Dante its more medievalistic aspects. In music we
find .a strong consciousness of the traditions of the past, as well as a great
enthusiasm for the new expressive powers which suddenly opened up.
Philippe de Vitry's treatise, Ars nova, was much more than a mere procla
mation of a new art; it provided a fresh outlook by emphasizing new
rhythmic schemes and secured thereby a significant advance in emotional
expressiveness and humanistic interest. 14 His ideals were carried on by the

14 It is in De Vitry and other theorists of the Ars nova that we first find the
rule which so strongly affected all music written after their time - that of forbidding
consecutive fifths or octaves in two parallel contrapuntal parts. This was in direct con
trast to the general practice of the time.

THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

TOMB OF THE " GRAND SENECHAL " PHILIPPE POT
The new spirit in the Gothic is shown in this fifteenth-century work.

Florentine organist, Francesco Landino ? and the intricate developments
of the Netherlandish polyphonic composers.

There were a number of reasons for the exhaustion of the burning,
driving intensity of the Gothic spirit of creative enthusiasm which came
toward the end of the thirteenth century. First of all was the feeling of
doubt and often complete agnosticism engendered in the minds of many
churchmen by the teachings of the Greek scholastic philosophy which
preceded the Renaissance. Then the frightful ignorance and open cor
ruptness of the clergy made the Christian religion an object of scorn and
derision over the whole of Europe. The long years of struggle between
France and England caused most of the wealth which these countries had
formerly lavished on the building and decoration of churches to be levied
for the purposes of war. And, as a tragic climax, came the paralyzing hor
rors of the Black Death, the terrible pestilence which originated in China,
spread over India, Asia Minor, and Egypt, and reached Europe in 1347.

These physical events in the history of Europe had a marked effect on
man's spiritual development; for with the weakening of the authority and

PERIOD OF TRANSITION

CHOIR GALLERY IN THE CATHEDRAL, FLORENCE, 1433-1438

(By Donatello)

196 THE; MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

THE RISE OF ARTISTIC PERSONALITIES

It was not until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, then, that
definite personalities began to emerge in Christian art among others,
the painters Giotto, the Van Eyck brothers, with their curiously wrought
Gothic multiplicity of detail, the gentle Memling, the sculptors Dona-
tello and Ghiberti, and the musicians Guillaume de Machaut in the north
and Francesco Landino in the south. But before tracing the achievements
of these earliest individual composers, it will be interesting to note
briefly an attempt made by the Church to reassert something of its old
authority and to reinstate something of its old austere beauty into its
ritual. From Avignon, the French city to which the papacy had been
temporarily withdrawn, Pope John XXII issued in 1324 his famous de
cree on the misuse of music in the churches. In this he attempted to
take the art back to where it had been four hundred years before; for the
only intervals he would allow in the church were the octave, the fifth,
and the fourth. The language of this document, which in purpose was
much like that of the later Motu proprio issued by Pius X, is clear:

" Certain disciples of the new school, much occupying themselves
with the measured dividing of the tempora, display their prolation in
notes which are new to us, preferring to devise methods of their own
rather than to continue singing in the old way; the music therefore of
the divine offices is now performed with semibreves and minims, and
with these notes of small value every composition is pestered. Moreover,
they truncate the melodies with hockets, 15 they deprave them with dis-
cants, sometimes even they stuff them with upper parts made out of
secular songs. So that often they must be losing sight of the fundamental
sources of our melodies in the Antiphonal and Gradual, and may thus
forget what that is upon which their superstructure is raised. They may
become entirely ignorant concerning the ecclesiastical tones, which they
already no longer distinguish, and the limits of which they even con-

15 It may be added in passing that the hocket was a musical embellishment popu
lar at the time, consisting of a quick alternating of the same melody between two parts.
It was thus satirically described by a contemporary writer: " Sometimes thou mayest see
a man with an open mouth, not to sing, but as it were breathe out his last gasp, by
shutting in his breath, and by a certain ridiculous interception of his voice to threaten
silence, and now again to imitate the agonies of a dying man, or the ecstasies of such
as suffer."

THE CASUISTRY OF THE FALSE BASS 197

found, since, in the multitude of their notes, the moderate risings and
temperate descents of the plainsong, by which the scales themselves are
to be known one from another, must be entirely obscured. Their voices
are incessantly running to and fro, intoxicating the ear, not soothing it,
while the men themselves endeavor to convey by their gestures the senti
ment of the music which they utter. As a consequence of all this, devo
tion, the true end of worship, is little thought of, and wantonness, which
ought to be eschewed, increases.

" This state of things, hitherto the common one, we and our brethren
have regarded as standing in need of correction; and we now hasten
therefore to banish those methods, nay, rather to cast them entirely away,
and to put them to flight more effectual than heretofore, far from the
house of God. Wherefore, having taken counsel with our brethren, we
straitly command that no one henceforward shall think himself at liberty
to attempt those methods, or methods like them, in the aforesaid Offices,
and especially in the canonical Hours, or in the solemn celebration of
the Mass.

" And if any be disobedient, let him, on the authority of this canon,
be punished by a suspension from office of eight days; either by the Ordi
nary of the diocese in which the forbidden things are done or by his depu
ties in places not exempt from episcopal authority, or, in places which are
exempt, by such of their offices as are usually considered responsible for
the correction of irregularities and excesses, and such like matters.

" Yet, for all this, it is not our intention to forbid, occasionally and
especially upon feast days or in the solemn celebrations of the Mass and
in the aforesaid divine offices the use of some consonances, for ex
ample the eighth, fifth, and fourth, which heighten the beauty of the
melody; such intervals therefore may be sung above the plain cantus
ecclesiasticus, yet so that the integrity of the cantus itself may remain
intact, and that nothing in the authoritative music be changed. Used in
such sort the consonances would much more than by any other method
both soothe the hearer and arouse his devotion, and also would not de
stroy religious feeling in the minds of the singers/'

The Oxford History of Music, Volume I

THE CASUISTRY OF THE FALSE BASS

Professor Wooldridge, one of the authors of The Oxford History of
Music, thinks that this attempt of the Church to simplify its music at
this time was the origin of what was known as faulx bourdon (false

THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

bass). 16 In an attempt to circumvent this decree of Pope John's, the
Church musicians developed a method of organizing which consisted in
inserting a third voice between a simple two-part organum at the fifth.
This was written at an equal distance from the outer voices and thus
resulted in the interval of a third with each:

But and this is where the ingenuity of frustrated man shows itself
in singing such an arrangement, the lowest part was given to a high
voice, which would transpose it up an octave, and it would sound thus:

This resulted in an agreeable series of consecutive thirds and sixths,
which were not in accord with John's decree, as well as a fourth, which
was; but officialdom evidently closed its ears and was satisfied with what
its eyes suggested was obedience to the letter of the law, since the highest
part was always written as a false bass below the others. This use of paral
lel thirds and sixths spread over the whole of Europe by the end of the
fourteenth century and was especially cultivated in England.

The development of faulx bourdon was not the only sign that music
was beginning to strain at the leashes that had so long been imposed upon
it by the Church. In 1325 Philippe de Vitry, bishop, poet, and composer,
issued a work to which he gave the proud title Ars nova (The New Art) ;
and this gave the name to the whole century, which was a period of steady
development and humanizing of the art. During this time there took
place a remarkable change in rhythmic procedure, for the theoreticians
awakened to the possibilities of duple time, and the composers began to
use it as well as triple, which had up to this time reigned supreme. The
contrast between long and short notes became more clearly established;
there was a further development of music forms and a tendency to use
more and more instrumental music. This whole movement was, in fact,
really a continuation of the ideals of the troubadours and trouv&res.

i Often spelled faux bourdon or faburden. Other authorities give different versions
of its origin.

MACHAUT

Courtesy of The National Library, Paris

THE INSPIRATION OF GUILLAUME DE MACHAUT

Attributed to an unknown painter of the court of Charles V, this scene from a
contemporary miniature represents Love bringing Sweet- thoughts, Pleasure, and Hope

to Machaut.

MACHAUT., A TYPICAL GOTHIC COMPOSER

The life of Machaut, who lived from 1 305 (?) to 1 377, was an extremely
brilliant one. Born in Champagne, he became a courtier in the service
of the warrior king, John of Luxembourg and Bohemia, and later entered
the service of the French court. An important figure in the development
of the technique of the writing of French verse, Machaut, in addition
to his musical activities, became a canon of the Church and when he died
was considered the most influential spiritual leader of his time. In music
he expressed himself most freely in the form of the ballade, the important
secular form of the period, consisting of a vocal song or duet set to several
verses of rather elaborate and stilted type and supported by one or two

200 THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

purely ornamental parts. One of his best essays in this form, Ma chere
dame, shows clearly enough, even to our modern sophisticated ears, that
he attempted to practice what he preached, namely, that " he who writes
and composes without feeling spoils both his words and his music/' the
first desire for a humanized ideal that we conie across in music. His great
work was the writing of a musical setting of the Mass, probably the first
one ever to include the entire Ordinary. 17 For years this has been an
almost legendary work, unknown even to the musicologists. Now it has
been gathered together from various fragments and different sources, and
part of it has been recorded in Dr. Sachs's collection Anthologie Sonore.
In form it is a gigantic motet in the medieval sense, its four voices weav
ing a constructional unity out of a confusing number of tangled architec
tural elements in true Gothic fashion. Because of its length and the fact
that the various parts are connected by means of a melodic nucleus, it
represents better than any other single work the Gothic conception of
collective expression and so should be heard by everyone who would
know what this music was like. But in it are present, too, an impassioned
melodic movement and a rhythmic liberty characteristic of the ars nova.

A CONTEMPORARY COLLECTION

The so-called Roman de Fauvel, one of the outstanding works both in
early French literature and in music, contains a number of motets, bal
lads, and other examples of contemporary Gothic musical forms written

17 The Mass deserves special attention as an " art form/' for it was the first of the
larger forms to develop and has been of great importance in the history of music. Up
to the time- of Machaut the Ordinary of the Mass that portion which is invariable
whatever the seasons of the' Church's year had been sung to plainsong melodies but
not combined in any fixed work. (The fact that modern editions group these Gregorian
chants in fixed Masses should not confuse the issue; they do so purely for convenience.
Such groupings are arbitrary and vary in different editions.)

Machaut's was the first entirely composed Mass; its settings of the Kyrie, Gloria,
Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei constitute a new fivefold art form comparable in im
portance, as Douglas says, to the great parallel form which evolved from instrumental
dance music the symphony. A large number of composers followed Machaut's ex
ample, among them some of the greatest in music. Bach's noble B Minor Mass, one
of the world's masterpieces of choral art, is a direct descendant of this Gothic work
of the fourteenth century.

THE ARS NOVA IN THE SOUTH 2O1

in a style that is suggestive of Machaut's. This work, which dates from
the beginning of the fourteenth century, is perhaps the most important
manuscript of the time which has come down to us and contains an un
usual combination of literature, music, and painting.

THE ARS NOVA IN THE SOUTH

We have already suggested the special importance of Italy and Italian
artists in this new humanizing movement of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. We must always remember that this was the time when Dante,
Petrarch, and Boccaccio did so much there to free mankind from the
stultifying and often hypocritical interpretations of the medieval theo
logians and to awaken in him a new delight in the things of this earth.
It was natural that the ars nova should thrive in this southern clime:
a new style of writing developed in which fifths, unisons, and octaves
were evidently forbidden and which was strongly influenced by the
popular music of the day. A large number of forms were used, the con*
posers contriving settings to fit such contemporary poetic forms as the
madrigal (derived from troubadour poetry and representing the art song
of the period) and the ballata (a composition for combined singing,
playing, and dancing) . The Italian love of elaborate fioriture (embellish
ments) in melody is everywhere evident in these works, and frequent use
was often made of instrumental preludes, interludes, and postiudes. One
of the most popular forms was the caccia, a canon for two voices over an
instrumental bass, its text descriptive of some animated scene, such as
a hunt or the cries of a street.

The records of the time show an amazing prolificness on the part of
at least thirty composers in northern Italy, there being still extant hun
dreds of specimens of the work of this period. Among the names that
have survived are those of Vincenzo da Rimini, Giovanni da Cascia,
Jacopo da Bologna; but at the head of all is Francesco Landino, the organ
ist of San Lorenzo in Florence (c. 1325-1397), " blind of body but
enlightened in spirit, one who understood both the theory and practice of
his art, the best singer of his time, a player of every instrument and
especially the organ, by means of which he was wont to delight his many

2O2

THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

ADORATION OF THE MAGI by Stephan Loclmcr

listeners/' to use the words of a contemporary writer. Over a hundred and
fifty of his works have come down to us, written in all the forms used at
the time and showing the characteristics which made them so popular
during the composer's life. A contemporary writer already quoted,
Giovanni da Prato, has, like Boccaccio, left behind him a clear picture
of Florentine life in his romanza, II paradise degJi Albert/; included in
this are stories of Francesco and a description of an occasion when the
blind musician played his love verses so sweetly that the listeners' hearts
" almost burst from their bosoms/ 7 But Francesco's chief glory like
that of many another composer who followed after him came from his
skill as a virtuoso organist and his powers of improvisation. A number of
the works of this composer, as well as others of the Italian ars nova, have
been preserved in the so-called " Squarcialupi Manuscript " now in the
Laurentian Library at Florence,

A BURGUNDIAN MASTER 203

The fifteenth century saw a further intensification of this late Gothic
spirit of humanism. The love of grace and susceptibility to form, which
is natural to the Italians, produced new loveliness in the art and music
of the south, and these ideals were retransferred to the artists of the north.
If we look at the fifteenth-century pictures of such Italian painters as
Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi we shall see in them the same love
of harmonious color, attention to exquisite detail, refined grace, sweep of
rhythmic line, and spirit of lyric happiness* that are found in the works of
the Flemish Van der Goes and Memling and the German Stephan Loch-
ner. This is natural enough, for during the century in which they worked,
communication between the flourishing trade centers of Italy and Flan
ders was frequent, and the artists of one country mingled freely with
those of another. This explains the cosmopolitan influences so strongly
present in the music of Guillaume Dufay, a composer born in the Low
Countries, who traveled and studied as a youth in Italy and who spent
most of his life as composer to the rich and art-loving dukes of Burgundy.

A BURGUNDIAN MASTER

The duchy of Burgundy, a territorial organization which comprised
parts of modern France, the Netherlands, and Belgium, was a country
dominated by French influence and civilization. Its court at Dijon was
French in nature; its intellectual language and predilections were French;
its duke was the first peer of the realm and exerted a great deal of influ
ence on the internal policies of France. The great artistic centers of the
country, however, were its rich and populous cities in the Low Counties
Brabant, Flanders, and Hainault; and it was here that the celebrated
Burgundian School (often called the School of the Netherlands) origi
nated. For many years the music in these wealthy cities of Philip the
Good and Charles the Bold, the two outstanding members of the Bur
gundian ducal family, was considered by contemporary critics to be the
best in the world, quite the equal of the famous painting and sculpture
fostered by these art-loving dukes. The centers for this music were the
churches and chapels maintained by the princes. The chapel service of
Philip the Good, modeled on that of the Papal Chapel, was for nearly

204 THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

a century the most important influence in the cultivation of the music
of the time. These rich ducal patrons made it possible for Dufay to settle
in the city of Cambrai from 1450 to the end of his life, devoting his time
to composition and travel. His existence there has been described as that
of a great personage, honored and respected by all intellectual and artistic
Europe. He must have been particularly happy; for Cambrai had a special
reputation as a music center, one of Dufay's contemporaries describing
its cathedral as having the best singing in Europe.

It was for such surroundings that Dufay composed. He is supposed to
have been influenced by the Englishman, John Dunstable, whose music
reflected the English love of thirds and sixths in parallel movement. Such
motets of Dufay's as Conditor alme siderum show plainly enough his
ability to make the rather awkward parallelism of the faulx bourdon suit
his own needs; for this music, although it still retains the general effect
of parallel motion, has real emotional feeling. Like all musicians of his
generation, Dufay composed a number of settings for various parts of the
Mass; and like all the others he did not hesitate to use as as a cantus
firmus for these settings such popular ballads of the time as Se la face ay
pile or I/homme arm& But to his Gothic imagination there was nothing
incongruous in this, and he was able to conceal these melodies in such a
musical framework of decorative workmanship that we are hardly aware
of their presence. In such a lovely motet as his Alma redemptoris mater
he shows his preference for the upper voice, giving it the most important
melodic burden in the Italian manner and treating the other parts as
purely accompanying voices, to be either sung or played. In his effective
setting of the Mass fragment Gloria ad modum tubae, he is both daring
and vivid. While two vocal parts pursue their singing of the words Gloria
in excelsis, one strictly copying the other a little way behind it, there
is an accompaniment of two trumpets under the whole, quickening to
wards the end as if to urge on the voices in their melodic flight. This
effective bit is an excellent example of the manner in which instruments
were used with vocal music at the time.

Although he was connected with a religious establishment, Dufay by no
means confined himself to the writing of sacred music. Indeed, his use of
the secular forms of the period, particularly the chanson franfaise, the

Bibliothbgue Arsenal

MINIATURE FROM A FIFTEENTH-CENTURY PSALTER

A concert of contemporary instrumental music at one of the courts is suggested "by

this miniature.

MH-15 20S

206 THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

most favored form of aristocratic music, shows some of his most charac
teristic attributes. These chanson? were the northern counterparts of the
Italian secular forms and, like them, were governed in their structure by
literary formulas. Dufay cultivated all the styles of these, writing ballades,
rondeaux, and virelafs with equal success. Characteristic ?re the melan
choly Le /our s'endort, in which the top part cleverly reproduces in short
ened note values the melody of the cantus, and his Pourrai-fe.

The achievements of Dufay were all characteristic of music's general
trends; in one of them he took the art a long way forward on the road
leading to the modern devices of the sonata and the symphony. He was
the first to use the unifying scheme of basing the different sections of his
Mass settings on one melody, a cantus firmus that was sometimes secular,
sometimes sacred in origin; by building all his sections around this one
theme, he gave his work as a whole a musical unity that was comparable
to the liturgical unity provided by the words.

The more one hears of the music of this Burgundian master, strange
as it may seem at first to modern ears, the more one realizes that it was
but part and parcel of the vivid life of its time. In writing of Dufay, a
modern Dutch critic has said that it is necessary, if we are to appreciate
his music to the full, to picture ourselves in the setting of the luxurious
court of Philip the Good in Dijon, with its Gothic rooms covered with
multicolored tapestries and filled with elaborate and infinitely varied
costumes, the hats and headdresses original almost to the point of ex-
tmvagce. Obly &n can we realize that Dufay's music, with its deli
cate ngdtodic p^rts and ^gfe% <Bss0mBt counterpoint, was just the type
to please an aristocracy wKich pridefi ifcsdf on being '&% ateast of the
times, aesthetically eager to take up the rtew^%it^

DES PRES, CREATOR OF A UNIVERSAL EXPRESSION

df Dufay's enthusiastic contemporaries speaks of him as having
written fie ^first music worthy of being heard." Most modern listeners
W^4 pptel%:,||gse^e th$ h#nor, in $Q far as it implies emotional ex-

who lived from 1450 to 1521.

JOSQUIN DES PRES 2OJ

Midway between these masters stands Johannes Ockeghem, Dufay's
principal pupil, who until recently has been regarded chiefly as a com
poser largely given over to the working out of ingenious technical prob
lems to the " cultivation of crabbed canons/' as one writer has put it.
Recent research and the publication of a great deal of his music, however,
tend to absolve Ockeghem from such a stigma. He and his contempo
raries did write some music that reminds us of tonal puzzles to be solved
by the application of intricate rules; but they also wrote much that is
beautiful and worthy to be classed with the best music of their time.

Ockeghem has been overshadowed by the figure of his great pupil,
Josquin des Pr6s, who was, like Dufay, a man of international importance,
having been born in the north but active for much of his life in Italy
and France. He employed all the constructive skill and craftsmanship de
veloped by his predecessors; but he was able to impart much more ex
pressiveness to his music.

Like Beethoven, Josquin lived and [jwrote in two epochs: injhim was
united , the Gothig^ of creating a universal expres

sion out of a multiplicity of individual elements, with that of the Renais
sance, the idea of creating art for its own sak t He may be said to have
been the first composer to express in music the ideals of the Renaissance.
His imagination was able to seize on the spirit of a text, whether solemn
or majestic, passionate or serious^secular or sacred, and to express it with
something like'definite exactnessAJLuther's remark on Josquin, who was
his favorite composer, sums it up well: " He is the master of his notes:
they have to do as he bids them; otter composers have to do as the notes

Several of Josquin's best-known shorter works illustrate this. The fa*
miliar Ave verum is full of an expressive beauty wonderfully suited to the
mystic quality of its text. A setting which he made of the fifteenth century
hymn, Ave coelorum Domina ''Hail, thou Queen of Heaven, who
fillest all earth and space with joy and givest us salvation " is, on the
other hand, light and lilting in character, with a charm that is quite capti-
vatii^g and e^captly fits the words. Aijd certainly there is nothing more
moving in all music th^u the Incarnate from the Credo of the Mass
Ave regina coeJoriim. filled with a deep brooding and a sense of mystery,

208

THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

Courtesy of Communal Museum, Bruges

ADORATION OF THE MAGI by Hans Memling, Des Pr& contemporary

it perfectly interprets the spirit of the wqrds: " He was conceived . . .
of the Virgin Mary and made nian." This little gem has been well called
the most moving thing in early musicjjike all the best works of Des Prs,
it is suggestive of the peculiar beauty to be foujid in the paintings of his
contemporary countryman, MenJingJn the work of both these artists
there is a simple charm of style and a decided intensity of expression that
makes them stand out far above the general level of the period. Both
happened to serve the Church, for the influence of that powerful factor
in the development of art was still very potent; yet we can but feel that
both men were essentially interested in making their art beautiful as art,
developing its technical resource not merely for the joy of craftsmanship,
but so that with it they could better increase its human expressiveness.
Thus were they true forerunners of the Renaissance.

Altogether Des Pres wrote more than thirty Masses, besides many
motets and secular chansons. In his own day his work was regarded as

THE GOTHIC PERIOD IN GENERAL 2O()

unique, and eveiy composer of the period was affected by it. 18 There
were a number of other men in both the Netherlands and German
schools of this time who showed that they were likewise able to combine
constructive skill and craftsmanship with profound expression. Among
them were Pierre de la Rue, Fevin, Mouton, and Compare in France and
the Netherlands; Finck, Isaak, and Senfl in Germany.

A great dealofthe influence which these late Gothic composers exerted
on one another came about through the invention of musical printing
about this time: the work and style of one man was thus made immedi
ately available to the others. Ottavianp del Petrucci perfected a process of
printing music from movable types in Venice in 1498, about fifty years
after GutenBergV first work;" and three years later this printer issued a
comprehensive coltecfibrTof motets by Josquin and his contemporaries.
Although Venice long remained the center for the printing of music, the
invention rapidly spread over all Europe and had an incalculable effect
on the development of the art.

THE GOTHIC PERIOD IN GENERAL

Thus the Gothic period, which began within the cloistered walls of
the church, ended in a burst of rich and joyfully exuberant humanistic
invention that was a fitting precursor of the Renaissance. Through it all
is manifest the same'spirit^a conscious joy in the seeking of elaboration
and complexity, a richness and vitality, a love of brilliance that was mani
fested in the use of colors in the illuminating of manuscripts, in the glitter
of gold and jewelry, in the richness of architectural ornament, in the
sweep of melismatic melodies. For most of these medieval artists art was
that which could be applied to those practices which contributed toward

18 " Through all the restraint of Church ritual and the art methods of that early
time, there speaks in the music of Josquin a warm sensitiveness, a capacity for urgent
emotion, a mystic awe of worship. His Masses are noble with the nobility of the heart's
depth. In his other works, the abstract, elevated style of earlier composers is broken up
by his prism into a glowing play of many colors. Here is sadness, pain, and bitter re
volt; and here is intimate love, tender, sympathetic, and playful jest. It is an unprece
dented stride forward which occurs in Josquin's music; in him there is lived through
an art development such as is found in no artist previously and very few since."

Ambros; translated and quoted in Sollitt: Dufay to Sweelinck

21O THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

and produced the necessities of life, to use the expression of St. Thomas
Aquinas; and for most of the period, the greatest necessity in life was
man's religion. The usefulness of architecture was therefore that of pro
viding a beautiful setting for the worship of God; the object of the
figurative arts was to illustrate suitable religious teachings and history;
and music, as it gradually took on sensuous charm and rich complexity
as well as a touch of humanistic feeling, did so the better to exemplify the
truth and beauty of religious experience. 19

19 A contemporary glimpse of the artistic outlook of this whole period may be had
through the eyes of one of its greatest musical theorists, the Fleming Johannes de
Verwere (Latinized, Tinctoris), who lived from 1446 to 1511 and was active at the
Court of Ferdinand I in Naples. He says: " Before I began to write, I strove to equip
myself with the necessary knowledge of the various things pertaining to music, partly
through listening to others and partly through my own incessant work. However, I do
not write to bring honor to myself, but for the benefit of others who wish to study
music, and further in order not to bury the talent which God has bestowed upon me.
And therefore I have now undertaken to write briefly about counterpoint which is
made up of well-sounding consonances in God's honor and for the use of those
who are striving for skill in this excellent art. Before I proceed now with the work, I
will not hide the fact that I have studied what the ancient philosophers, such as Plato
and Pythagoras, as well as their successors, Cicero, Macrobius, Boethius, and Isidore,
believe concerning the harmony of the spheres. Since, however, I have found that they
differ very much from each other in their teachings, I have turned from -them to Aris
totle and the more modern philosophers, and no one shall make me believe that
musical consonances arise through movements of the heavenly bodies, for they can
only be produced by means of terrestrial instruments. The ancient musicians, Plato,
Pythagoras, Nicomachus, Aristoxenus, Archytas, Ptolemaeus, and many others, indeed
including Boethius himself, dealt exclusively with the consonances, and yet we do not
know at all how they arranged and classified them. And if I must now refer to that
which I have seen and learned, I must confess that some old compositions of unknown
composers have come into my hands, pieces that sound quite simple and tasteless, so
that they rather disturb than please the ear. However, what surprises me especially is
that only in the last forty years are there compositions which, in the judgment of the
specialist, are worth listening to. Today, however, we have blossoming forth, quite
apart from the large number of famous singers whether it be on account of heavenly
influences or particularly zealous studies an almost unlimited number of composers,
for example Johannes Ockeghem, Johannes Regis, Antonius Busnois, Firminus Caron,
Guilelmus Faugues, and all can boast of having had as teachers the musicians who died
recently, Johannes Dunstable, Egidius Binchois, and Guilelmus Dufay. Nearly all the
works of these masters excel in pleasant sound; I never hear or look at their com
positions without rejoicing in them or being instructed by them, and therefore I, too,
in my own compositions, adhere entirely to the approved style."

Translated by Coussemaker

OBSCURE ORIGINS 211

THE INSTRUMENTS OF THE MIDDLE AGES
AND THEIR MUSIC

TO the modern mind, the term music means sounds produced on in
struments. How often we hear the distinction made, in describing the
forces employed in some concert, between musicians and singers! Our
present-day musical practices are so predominantly instrumental that
popular opinion is inclined to designate musicians as those who are able
to play some instrument or other, while vocalists are assigned to a sort
of intermediate twilight zone of benevolent toleration, as being occasional
necessary accessories to a well-established fact. Yet we have seen that the
early developments in Western European music were almost entirely
vocal in character; the modern predominance of instrumental style is a
comparatively recent thing, dating from about the beginning of the
eighteenth century.

Up to the sixteenth century instruments were used only as accompani
ments for vocal music or interchangeably with it. Such an idea as letting
instruments express their individuality or voice their independence was
never even thought of. We shall see how the lute music of Spain and
France was the first purely instrumental music ever written, in the sense
that it showed the real possibilities of instruments as means for expressing
musical ideas. A little later the organists succeeded in working out a style
well suited to their instruments, and they in turn were followed by the
writers for the clavichord and the harpsichord. During the seventeenth
century a genuine type of orchestral music developed out of the court
and popular dances of the time, and then followed the deluge of music
for instruments, both solo and ensemble, that has continued up to the
present.

OBSCURE ORIGINS

But what happened before this era of instrumental precedence set in?
It is obvious enough that instruments have existed from the earliest
periods of history, and there is plenty of evidence that man has always

212 THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

enjoyed himself playing them. Why was instrumental music, then, so
slow in developing in comparison with that used by singers?

We have already speculated a bit as to the ways in which the various
types of instruments may have been introduced to man; beyond this it
is hardly necessary to go, aside from mentioning the fact that the his
torical records of all the early civilizations are full of references as to the
ways by which man learned to use these instruments of music. The Greek
account of the invention of their national instrument, the lyre, is char
acteristic: Mercury found one day a tortoise of which he took the shell,
made holes in the opposite sides of it and passed cords through them.
His instrument was thus complete, with one cord for each of the Muses.

We have also referred to the fact that when music first appeared in
known history, among the Sumerians, it was produced by a wide variety
of instruments: the harp, the lyre, the flute, the reed pipe, the drum,
and even the trumpet. As we have seen, instrumental music played an in>
portant part in the great civilizations that grew up along the banks of the
Nile and on the Assyrian plains of western Asia. We know a great deal
about the instruments used by both the Greeks and the Romans; but
there is little definite information as to just how and when the ancestors
of the various instruments we use today were introduced. It is quite cer
tain that at the beginning of the Christian era musical instruments of
every kind were excluded from the services of the Church; yet one of the
miniatures in the manuscript of an illustrated ninth-century Psalter, now
in the library of the University of Utrecht, provides a lively picture of
singers and players against a decorative background suggestive of a church
mural, these figures being evidently engaged in providing music for
Christian worship. Sometime between the third and the ninth century
stringed, wind, and percussion instruments came into general use in the
Church. The organ, which the early Christians had associated with their
Roman persecutors, must early have been introduced into the Christian
service, for it was in special favor with the Church during the ninth
century if we are to judge by the important place given to it in this
famous medieval miniature. It forms the central feature of the illustra
tion from the Utrecht Psalter, with its two players greatly concerned over
the wind supply that is being furnished by four hard-working blowers.

INSTRUMENTS IN MEDIEVAL PAINTING

21 3

^w*^,
Bibhoth&que Arsenal

MINIATURE FROM THE UTRECHT PSALTER (860 A.D.)
This miniature illustrates the One Hundred Fiftieth Psalm.

INSTRUMENTS IN MEDIEVAL PAINTING

Our most reliable source of information regarding the use of instru
ments during the Middle Ages is that left behind by many of the artists
of this period. They show stringed instruments, such as lutes, guitars,
mandolins, psalteries, harps, and fiedels, in amazing and confusing pro
fusion; wind instruments, such as flutes, schalmeis, trumpets, and horns;
percussive triangles, xylophones, and drums; and, in addition, organs and
organistrums. These were played, if we are to trust the artists' power of
observation, in any sort of combination, being used sometimes with and
sometimes without singers.

When we find in a twelfth-century manuscript in the British Museum
a depiction of Christ surrounded by twenty-four elders playing various
instruments organs, psalteries, oliphants (carved horns), fiedels, harps,
and so on it may mean nothing more than that these particular instru
ments happened to please the artist's fancy; but we are certain of the
fact that they must have been used at the time.

,,,Hans JVIemling, a Flemish painter who was the contemporary of
Josquin des Pres, just at the beginning of the great choral era, has left
us two pictures that he painted for the decoration of an organ case in a
Spanish church. These contain depictions of the instruments that we
may safely conclude to have been; in common use at that time (1480) .

THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

DECORATION FOR AN ORGAN CASE BY MEMLING (1430-1495)
123 45

(1) Psaltery (Zither). Introduced into European music somewhere
around the eleventh or twelfth century and much used as an accompany
ing instrument. When a keyboard was added, the psaltery became the
harpsichord of Renaissance music.

(2) Tromba marina (Nun's fiddle). A peculiar, one-stringed instru
ment, whose thick, heavy string was played in its " harmonics " only, by
touching its nodes rather than by stopping it in the ordinary way. Rather
mercifully, now obsolete, for its tone was loud and brassy. Used up until
the time of Mozart.

(3) Lute. Probably of Oriental origin, introduced into Europe around
300 A.D. With pear-shaped body and from 6 to 13 strings, this became
one of the favorite Renaissance instruments and was made in many sizes,
the foui;-stringed chitarra being the smallest and the chitarrone (often
with 24 strings), the largest.

(4) Trumpet. A relic of the Roman military instruments, its clear
piercing tone being of great effectiveness for outdoor use. Gradually it
increased in length and folded on itself.

(5) Bomhart. The ancestor of our modern reed instruments, descended
in turn from the Asiatic schdmeL This double-reed instrument was used

INSTRUMENTS IN MEDIEVAL PAINTING

The fifteenth-century painter depicted contemporary instruments.
6 7 8 9

by both Greeks and Romans and came into new significance at the be
ginning of the second century AJX, when it developed into a complete
family called shawms or pommers. This was the nucleus of the ensemble
groups before the strings assumed their modern pre-eminence.

(6) Busine. The ancestor of our trombone and an instrument of great
length. A " slide " was added about the end of the fourteenth century,
and the altered instrument was called a sacfebut

(7) Trumpet.

(8) Portative organ. We first hear of the organ in the third century
before Christ. It is the only instrument that shows a continuous develop
ment from very early times. These small organs, with one or two sets
of reed pipes and capable of being carried about, were very popular for
home use.

(9) Harp. One of the most widely diffused types of instruments, in use
(as we have seen) from the earliest days of man's history.

(10) Fiedel, A representative of the generic bowed string family from
which have descended our modern violin, viola, cello, and bass. Called by
various names, this type of instrument was in wide use during medieval
and Renaissance times.

2l6 THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

SECULAR USES

There is likewise much iconographical evidence that the instru
mental style was popular in the secular music of the Middle Ages, both
for furnishing the accompaniments for such songs as the troubadours
used and for the dances of the people. The great Heidelberg Songscript,
for instance, by far the most valuable of the minnesinger manuscripts,
shows that various forms of the fiedel family, psalteries, harps, shawms,
drums, and even glockenspiels were in common use in Germany during
the fourteenth century. And the charming miniatures of the thirteenth-
century Codex of the time of Alfonso X in Spain in the library of the
Escorial show that the same instruments were used there.

The music for the medieval dances was probably played on combina
tions of instruments that would sound to modern ears, to paraphrase
Rabelais, " above the pitch, out of tune, and off the hinges/' Strings and
wind and brass instruments were all mixed together in a sort of neutral
style of rendition. Later, in the sixteenth century, after Italian violinists
had established the primacy of their instruments, a mixed orchestra of
bowed instruments became the popular medium for the interpretation
of dance music.

THE ORGAN

A word is necessary regarding the most popular instrument of the
medieval period the organ, the instrument that shares with the six
teenth-century lute and the viol the distinction of beginning what may
be called the reign of free, independent instrumental music. The Romans
used the organ in their theatrical spectacles, building it of considerable
power and blowing it with compressed air. The Christians, once their
antipathy was overcome, made the organ serve as an accompanimental
instrument in their services from the fourth century on. In the great
Gothic age of cathedral building, the organ played its part in the mag
nificent ritual of the Church, being at that time an instrument of several
keyboards and pedals, with twenty or more sets of pipes. Amiens
Cathedral, for example, had in 1429 an organ of three keyboards, with

THE NATURE OF THE MUSIC - 21 J

forty stops and a pedal keyboard. There were also small instruments, the
portatives and positives, capable of being carried about, some of them
being played and blown by the same person. The instrument was ready
for its literature before composers had fully developed any idea of what
we know as instrumental style. One would have thought that the variety
of color to be obtained from even a few sets of pipes might have suggested
more diversity in writing for the keyboard than it actually did. Except
for differences in mechanical perfection, the instrument has remained
practically unchanged from medieval to modern times.

The Germans, the French, and the English have been, until recent
times, the most passionate lovers of the organ, and these nations have
done a great deal toward achieving its perfection. Their organ lofts
brought forth many of their finest musicians, both practical and theoreti
cal, and from the sixteenth century on there gathered round the parish
church and cathedral a busy, fruitful activity. This tradition of the
organist as the center of music making dates back to the time of Henry
de Saxonia, organist of the Chapter of Notre Dame, in the early fif
teenth century. It has been for long one of the strongest and most bene
ficial influences in the musical life of the various nations an influence
now broken, alas, as individual music making is everywhere being weak
ened by the supplying of music from central founts, much in the manner
of such everyday commodities as water and electricity. Neither organ
nor organist is of great importance in the musical life of the present.

THE NATURE OF THE MUSIC

Wooldridge has remarked that the history of instrumental music
during the Middle Ages is one of the most tantalizing problems before
the student of musicology. There is, as we have just seen, sufficient
evidence in the other arts that music at this time was a very lively busi
ness; the hosts of lutes, organs, flutes, and brass instruments displayed
in the pictures and referred to in the literature Chaucer alone has a
long list of such references must have had something played on them.
But what? How fascinating it would be to know, for instance, what sort
of music was used by that lively group depicted in the Utrecht Psalter

2l8

THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

Photo Houvet

MUSIC (from Chartres Cathedral)

In these figures we see represented the two popular medieval traditions regarding
the origin of music. There are countless examples in medieval art of representations
of King David as the incarnation of music, striking bells which are suspended above
him: thus the medieval artist follows the tradition of his time that Tubal, the
descendant of Cain, invented music by striking resonant bodies with hammers of
different weights. At Chartres, beneath each of the figures representing the arts, is
seen the seated figure of a man engaged in writing or meditation; the sculptor has
followed the other popular tradition of the time as to the origin of music. The
figure is probably Pythagoras, to whom the "Greeks attributed this invention,"
in the words of a writer of the period.

and whether the evident anxiety of the pair of organists and the tremen
dous labor of the quartet of blowers was due to the faulty mechanisms of
their instrument or to the heavy demands of the music used!

Undoubtedly most of the music employed by the players of this time
was never written down but was transmitted from master to pupil, be
coming somewhat modified and changed in the process. For there was
not the same incentive or necessity for writing down the music played

THE NATURE OF THE MUSIC 219

by a single instrument that there was for vocal music needed for a
number of performers; and the processes of printing did not come into
general use until somewhat later.

It was this unknown and unwritten music that formed the basis of the
first complete compositions that enable us to see something tangible
amidst the mists of the medieval instrumental music the well-
developed, completely independent instrumental works found in the
fifteenth-century German organ books and the Italian and Spanish lute
collections of the early sixteenth century. So the few fragments of the
earlier time that have survived and have found their way to the various
libraries of Europe are worth special attention.

The chief sources of information so far discovered are a fourteenth-
century chansonmer now in the National Library in Paris, which contains
a number of the estampies dance tunes; the so-called Robertsbridge
Fragment in the British Museum, containing six pieces for the organ,
three of them purely instrumental, three transcriptions of motets, with
the upper voices " colored " or varied in a simple way; and a few miscel'
laneous transcriptions of vocal works and dances. It may be said in general
that these lamentably few survivors of what must have been a con
siderable literature show:

First, that the organ was used more during the Middle Ages than has
been generally thought it was Guillaume de Machaut who first called it
the King of Instruments and that much of the music played on it
must have been vocal music taken bodily from the various settings of
the Church's service. An early fifteenth-century Liber organisatoris de
fining the duties of the organist of Notre Dame, Paris, states specifically
that part of such duty shall consist in playing on certain occasions the
Kyrie, the Gloria, the Sequences, the Sanctus, and the Agnus Dei.

Second, that when the organists did play in what might be called in
strumental style, there was very little difference between that music and
what was written for the voices perhaps the upper melodic voice might
occasionally be given a little different treatment suggestive of what came
to be known later as variation .

Third, that in the case of music played on the other instruments, either
singly or in combination, no general distinction can be made. All the

22O

THE MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

The British Museum

A GOTHIC MANUSCRIPT SHOWING INSTRUMENTS OF THE PERIOD
Done by a French illuminator of the early fifteenth century, this shows a Tree of Jesse
bearing various instruments in use at the time. In order from left to right these are:

Schalmei (ancestor of the oboe) Mandolin

Trumpet ' Flute

Busine (ancestor of the trumpet) Fiedel (viol)

Har P Pair of drums

Rebec (ancestor of the violin) Lute

Psaltery

instruments used could seemingly be combined without regard to
qualities of timbre or of sonority; and they were given the same sort of
music the vocalists used. Any voice part was played by any instrument
that had the requisite compass.

The Renaissance

CAUSES AND EFFECTS

By the grace of God light and dignity have been in my time restored
to letters, and now I see therein such improvement that at present I
would hardly be admitted to the first class of primary pupils, I who in my
prime was not unjustly regarded as the wisest man of the age. . . . The
whole world is full of savants, learned teachers, ample libraries, so that
it seems to me that not even in the time of Plato, Cicero, or Papinian was
there such faculty for study as one sees now. Now all studies are restored,
the languages installed: Greek, without which it is shameful for man to
call himself a scholar, Hebrew, Chaldean, Latin. These exist in elegant
and exact printed books invented in my time by divine inspiration, just
as, on the other hand, artillery was by diabolical suggestion.

Francois Rabelais, 1532

VARIED INTERPRETATIONS

IF any proof is needed that history, like life itself, cannot be made to fit
exactly into the separate periods into which we so carefully divide it
in order to bring its events into something resembling order, it will be
found in this epoch, the Renaissance. For this important period, stretch
ing over an indefinite era some historians include both the late four
teenth as well as the whole of the seventeenth century within its borders
presents a new aspect each time a different interpretation of it shifts
our angle of approach. To Rabelais it was obviously important as a period
devoted to the resurrection of classic learning, the development of
scientific invention being a secondary and retroactive- influence. To
others the Renaissance has meant the period of man's renewal of interest
in himself and the world he lives in, enabling him to look on life as a

MHl6 221

222 THE RENAISSANCE

thing of joy in itself and not merely as a preparation for an existence to
come. Many look on this epoch as one in which there took place a tre
mendous process of social, economic, national, and spiritual upheaval
which found its most powerful outlet in the field of religious con
troversies. The pragmatist sees the Renaissance as the time when man
began to become interested in the mechanical conception of life and in
making his knowledge of natural forces conform to physical laws.
Man established the fact that the earth is round and moves about the
sun and so had the courage to sail in search of adventurous proof into
regions before unknown. The historian of art thinks of this time as one
in which man awoke to the fact that beauty was worth cultivating for its
own sake and not merely as a means for serving other objects.

We have already tried to show all this, as well as the fact that the
forces which reached their culminating peak of influence during the six
teenth century the height of the Renaissance movement had been
gradually at work centuries before. So that while we speak of Renaissance
ideals as having developed during the sixteenth century, in reality they
were formed away back in the Middle Ages; and likewise they stretched
far ahead into the future, giving promise of what was to come in the
modern world in the way of literature, science, and political freedom.
In the words of its most eloquent interpreter, thtfRenaissance was a
process of transition, fusion, preparation, and fresh endeavor, which
affected all phases of man's activities and which laid the foundation of
much of our spiritual and mental existence today.

Among the many material explanations which are generally given
for the Renaissance are such things as the fall of Constantinople to the
Ottomans in 1453 and the consequent flight of her scholars to the West,
bringing with them the knowledge and art of Greece and the ancient
East; the voyages of discovery of Columbus, Da Gaina, and Magellan; the
inventions of the printing press and gunpowder. There is little question
that all these were factors contributory to this great intellectual upheaval
which came to a head in the sixteenth century; but, again, it is extremely
difficult to distinguish between causes and effects. Did the invention by
Gutenberg, for instance, or whoever it was that first used movable type
for printing, come about through the increased curiosity of the Renais-

VARIED INTERPRETATIONS 223

STATUE OF BARTOLOMMEO COLLEONI
General of the Venetian Republic (modeled by Verrocchio)

sance man and his desire to acquire more learning, or was it one of the
reasons for his achieving individualism and liberation from the ideals of
a past age? There is a simpler explanation than those usually advanced for
this volte-face in man's thinking which, perhaps without adequate reason,
and certainly without exact definiteness, we have learned to call the
Renaissance.

As Sir Charles Oman has said in his interpretation of this much-
discussed period (The Sixteenth Century), once wonder, mystery, and
spiritual values are removed from the life of man, it is inevitable that
he becomes a materialist. If he can no longer look on the teachings of
established authority as implicitly valid and begins to realize that his own
ideas and thoughts are of value and worthy of his attention, he becomes
an individualist. And this is exactly what transpired in the fifteenth
century. The preceding periods had created new mental outlooks for
man; instead .of having an essentially spiritual concept of life, a concept

224 THE RENAISSANCE

which demanded imaginative rather than intellectual thinking, there
arose new incentives for living, such as the acquiring of worldly wisdom,
material gains, and temporal power. The Renaissance tended to heap
scorn on the rags of the medieval " romancer "; new dreamers arose, but
their world was one of business and politics rather than of the spirit.
Italy, through her fortunate geographical situation, became the center
for all this tremendous activity and for the financier who made it pos-v
sible. Various city-states, such as Florence and Venice, emerged and be
came rich and powerful; their condottferi of government and politics
were the strong men of the time. It was a period of great vitality, strong
forcefulness, hard business, and extreme cruelty; and in it arose many
strange contradictions.

Freed from the leading strings of the Church, man began to look

about him, peering into every corner of the universe and demanding an

answer to all its riddles. In the process he spared neither prince nor

pontiff and did not hesitate to question the authority of both State and

Church. Learning, which in the Middle Ages had been considered as

important only for churchmen, began to be cultivated for its own sake.

The old classic writers had, of course, not been unknown to the school

and church men of medieval Europe; but these dignitaries had read

such authors as Aristotle, Pliny, Virgil, and the rest for what they could

teach in the way of manners and morals. It was the discovery of the

Renaissance, as Chambers has so well pointed out in The History of

Taste, that these classics were beautiful as literature and not merely

useful as moral teachings. To the medieval scholar, Cicero was a writer

of essays having a moral leaning, and Virgil was famous because he was

thought to have foretold the coming of Christ; to the men of the

Renaissance, Cicero was again one of the great orators of all time, and

Virgil was " crowned anew with the laurels of the poet/' Thus was the

pagan humanism of the classic civilizations revived and cultivated for

its significance as a factor in human life and happiness. Beauty was worth

cultivating for its own sake and not merely for what it could teach. And

all the fine arts architecture, painting, sculpture, literature, and music

were assiduously cultivated and fostered by the rich and enthusiastic

patrons of the period.

A PLASTIC ILLUSTRATION

225

Courtesy of the Btirenreiter Publishing Co.

GOTHIC FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PIETA
(From the Elisabethkirche in Marburg)

A PLASTIC ILLUSTRATION

No better examplfe of this difference in spirit could possibly be found
than that shown by the three pieces of sculpture illustrated here the
first from the fourteenth century, Gothic in every line and feature; the
second from the transitional fifteenth century; the third from the six
teenth century, typically Renaissance in line and proportion. All have the
same subject, even the same pose: Mary, the mother of Christ, holds in
her lap the dead body of her Son, after its removal from the cross.

The unknown artist of the Gothic period has made his figures dis
tressingly gaunt and angular the body of Christ is elongated out of
all proportion to the conception as a whole. But he has emphasized the
religious significance of his work: the dead Christ is the Saviour of the
world, who has suffered an agonizing death for its sins; and Mary is a
mother sorrowing for her beloved Son and also for man in general.

226

THE RENAISSANCE

Courtesy of the Johnson Art Collection, Philadelphia

FIFTEENTH-CENTURY PIETA by Benedetto da Majano

In Benedetto da Majano's treatment there is not so great a concern
with religious ideas: the figures have more human grace and interest;
they are not so symbolically powerful but for that reason are perhaps
more "artistic." There can be felt here an interest in the individual, a
concentration on the expression of the sculptor's conception that was
riot found in the earlier work. This is not to say, of course, that these had
reached the state in which we find them in Michelangelo's rendering of
the same subject a century later.

What an entirely different conception is Michelangelo's! The whole
effect is one of graceful balance and lovely proportion, the representa
tional significance being quite secondary. The dead body resting in the
flowing luxuriance of the robe is that of a young Greek Adonis, beautiful
in its lines and perfect in its modeling; the proportion of the figure of
Mary is carefully arranged and nobly executed, but there is no intensity of
suffering or shadow of agony in her beautiful classic countenance. Even
her outstretched hand suggests the need of the sculptor for compositional

GAINS AND LOSSES 2 27

RENAISSANCE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PIETA
By Michelangelo in Rome

balance the idea of art for art's sake rather than any sense of emo
tional expressiveness. Here, modeled so that anyone who runs may
read, is the real difference between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance:
these sculptured figures are more eloquent than any words.

GAINS AND LOSSES

The sixteenth century frankly recognized art and learning as the out
standing symbols of its spirit of progress and expansion, of its joy in
living and its faith in doing. Artists were cultivated, their worth recog
nized, and their talents encouraged as in no other period of the world's
history. Simply to mention the names of some of the Renaissance
painters, sculptors, and writers is sufficient to indicate their quality:
Giotto, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Raphael, Michelangelo, Ghiberti, Dona-
tello > Desiderio, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare.

228 THE RENAISSANCE

The great fault of the Renaissance conception of art was the sharp
distinction it drew between art and life, beauty and truth. In the Middle
Ages there had been no difference between artisan and artist: painting
and sculpture were not thought of as nobler than wood carving or
cobbling, and the designers of some of the great cathedrals and churches
built at the time were the artisans in actual charge of the work. During
the Renaissance the artist began to be considered an individual apart:
he had little connection with life itself and was principally interested in
producing art, without much concern for its connection with the world
outside himself. Poetry and painting, architecture and sculpture became
subjects to be discussed and studied and academically argued about.
Quarrels between artists and scholars and humanists were common;
the minutest details in form and grammar, technique and construction
were discussed. In a word, learning and art became disassociated from
life, something produced for the select and the elect. As Albert Guerard
has said, the motto of the Renaissance scholar might well have been:
" I am a Humanist, and therefore everything broadly human is dis
tasteful to me."

Professor C. R. Morey, in his book on Christian Ait, speaks of this
point of view as one of the most important Renaissance influences and
one which was not invented until the sixteenth century. Out of the ardent
study of the antique past and the consideration of Greek and Roman
ideals, we see arise a complete revolution in artistic thinking and practice
the emergence of the idea that there is such a thing as an absolute
standard of perfection, capable of being intellectually achieved, and with
out any necessary relationship to practical experience. The discussion of
what constitutes balance, unity, the relationship of the parts to the
whole in short an artistic ideal occupied a great deal of the attention
of the artists in the sixteenth-century Florentine Academy. And these
problems were solved, not as we of today would expect, by a reference to
nature, but by the interpretation of the philosophy and art of antiquity.

Literally speaking, art was largely a matter of mathematical correct
ness, for mathematics played an essential part in the selective principles
of such great artists as Leonardo, Brunelleschi, Dlirer, and Michelangelo.
Alberti's comment is characteristic:

GAINS AND LOSSES

The British Museum

TWO PLATES FROM DURER'S " DE SYMMETRIA PARTIUM/' 1532

" The several kinds of artists, though they go several ways to work,
shall resemble nature and be as like the life as may be; for the bringing
of which to effect, it is most evident, that by how much the more ex
quisitely they follow some determined rule or method, so much the fewer
defects will they be guilty of, so much the fewer errors commit, and in
all manner of accounts their works will succeed and come off with the
greater advantage/ 7

The systematic building up of the various features of the architectural
style of the Renaissance, all of them borrowed from classic sources; the
production of a great deal of statuary resembling antique models; the
planning of the composition of a painting so as to use such a mathe
matical scheme as the so-called Hellenic triangle all these are clear
evidences of the predominance at that time of the academic point of
view. Law and order, balance and proportion were all matters of talcing
thought; and such ideals, as Professor Morey points out, came to affect
even political events, causing such things as the arbitrary partition of
Italy by Charles V in 1530 and the centralization of France under the
Bourbons, when, for the sake of unity and uniformity, city charters,
feudal rights, and guild privileges were all abandoned.

230

THE RENAISSANCE

MADONNA DEL ARPIE by A. del Sarto (1486-1531)

This is one of the most famous examples of the careful planning of a Renaissance
painting according to the so-called " Hellenic triangle."

WHAT THE RENAISSANCE DID FOR MUSIC

Certain very definite achievements in music may be credited to the
sixteenth century, each of them representative in a different way of these
multifarious ideals of the Renaissance:

First. The continued development of the woven, contrapuntal style
which had had its beginnings in the Gothic centuries to a point where
it was capable of completely expressing both the humanized religious
emotion of such composers as Palestrina and Victoria and the secularized
^sophistication of such pagan humanists as Monteverdi and Gesualdo.

AN ARTIST OF THE RENAISSANCE

Second. The cultivation of music for varied instruments and the de
velopment of styles well suited to their individual requirements. This
change came about through the gradual secularization of art that occurred
during the Renaissance, the mechanical conceptions which began to
prevail at this time, and the passion for law and order then general. For
the musical instrument is nothing but a mechanical tool, and its use
necessarily imposes definite limitations and patterns according to which
music can be put together.

Third. The complete breaking away from the traditions of the past in
the development of harmony as we know it today, notably exemplified
in the opera, a form which resulted from the desire of its originators
to imitate the classic Greek drama and which led to the modem
harmonic sense. By this we mean the conception of music as being the
result of vertically grouped tones instead of the product of horizontally
interwoven melodies. This harmonic way of thinking is based on natutal
physical laws, for the notes which go to make up a simple chord are the
mechanically selected natural overtones of the note on which the chord
is built. This was but another manifestation of the awakening Renais
sance interest in the physical laws of nature.

THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY

The Italy of the Renaissance, with its magnificent palaces, its classically
ornamented buildings, its terraces and gorgeously decorated galleries, this
enchanted the nobles of France, the lords of England, and the rich men
of Spain and Germany.

Albert Malet; Nouvelle Histoire de France

AN ARTIST OF THE RENAISSANCE

THE traveler tp modern Italy is likely to look on Florence as \ the
one city which njo$t fully represents tfre life ai*d spirit of the IVenais-
sance. He is usually taken to the great building in the center of this lovely
city, the Medici Pakos, Infllt by t^#^f^cms of all Florentine families,
and is $hwa there, Sfafe^i iou^t ^f&,^s the colorful depictions of

THE RENAISSANCE

Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

LORENZO DE' MEDICI

" The representative man of his nation at a moment when political institutions were

everywhere inclining to despotism, and when the spiritual life of the Italians found its

noblest expression in art and literature."

Attributed to Verrocchio

Renaissance life as painted by Gozzoli. There are three pictures sup
posed to represent the journey of the three kings to Bethlehem; in
reality these are gorgeous depictions of life in Florence at the time of
the Renaissance. They contain all the local celebrities of the period,
decked out in their gay clothes, placed against a background studied from
the natural surroundings of Florence, the figures being chosen from the
Medicean circles. If Florence, as has so often been remarked, is the
heart of the Renaissance, these Gozzoli pictures represent the heart of
Florence and should be seen by all those who would understand this
period in Italian history.

We have already described the changes in spirit brought about by the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Italy at that time was made up of a

AN ARTIST OF THE RENAISSANCE

JOURNEY OF THE THREE KINGS (First Episode) by Benozzo Gozzoli

The picture is founded on the historical meeting in Florence in 1439 of an Episcopal

council for the uniting of the Eastern and Western churches. The figure of the third

Magi is that of Lorenzo de' Medici.

number of small, entirely independent states, each of them maintaining
a separate existence. In the north were the domains of Savoy, Milan, and
Modena, all of them under the sovereignty of dukes. The rich and power
ful republics of Genoa, Venice, and Florence were under the power of
merchant princes of the Medici type bankers and businessmen who
had been powerful enough to seize the government of their cities and
dictate their policies. In central Italy were the Papal States with their
center at Rome; and in the south the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily
struggled to hold their own against the more powerful republics to the
north. It was the demand for splendor on the part of these various
rulers, together with the attempt of each prince and tyrant to outdo the
others in the magnificence of his local surroundings, that so markedly
advanced the arts of architecture, painting, and sculpture at this time.

234

THE RENAISSANCE

HI Kingdom of Sicily vM& Duchy of Milan
#| Duchtj of Modena Republic of Venice

Kingdom of Naples Republic of Genoa

Papal Sfafres SSI Duchy of Savoy

iiii Republic of Florence!^! Switzerland

C. C. Stover

RENAISSANCE ITALY

The result was the production in enormous profusion of some of the
most glowing pictures, monumental architecture, outstanding pieces of
sculpture, and exciting literary works the world has ever seen in any one
country or during a comparable period.

THE RESULTS IN MUSIC

In the art of music the effects were not so happy. After the striking
works produced in Italy under the inspiration of the Ars nova the
ballate, madrigals, and eaccias of which we have spoken there came
during the first part of the fifteenth century a decided slump in musical
production and invention. Taught and stimulated by the Florentine
writers of the Ars nova, the composers of England and the Netherlands
took the leadership in music from Italy. When the Popes temporarily
abandoned Rome in 1305 as the official residence of the Holy See and

FOLENGO ON RENAISSANCE MUSIC 235

moved to Avignon in southern France, a number of local French and
Netherlandish musicians were attracted there. When the primacy of
Rome was later re-established, these artists came back with the Pope to
Italy, with the result that during the fifteenth century the musical life
of the country fell largely into the hands of foreigners. The educated and
cultured classes in Italy preferred foreign music and musicians and left
the cultivation of native music to the less educated, just as they did in
Germany in the eighteenth century, in England during the nineteenth,
and in America during the twentieth.

There is plenty of evidence, moreover, that this court and aristocratic
music of fifteenth-century Italy was a vital force in the life of the time.
A tour of any art gallery possessing a good collection of Italian pictures
of this period will show this clearly, for the artists depicted again and
again the use of musical instruments in all circles of Renaissance society.
And we have the poems, together with some of the music used, from the
carnivals and fetes produced by Lorenzo de' Medici: these seem to have
been sung by all sorts of characters devils, beggars, nuns, Jews, and so
on and give us a clear picture of the musical side of these elaborate
entertainments. Most informing of all these sources of evidence are the
records left behind by a number of contemporary writers, especially those
of Teofilo Folengo, a nobleman of the period, one-time student at
Bologna University and a brother of the Benedictine order; and Baldassare
Castiglione, who in his famous II cortegiano (The Courtier) depicted the
ideal qualities of the gentlemen of the Renaissance.

FOLENGO ON RENAISSANCE MUSIC

In his Maccheronei Folengo describes many of the popular uses of
music in sixteenth-century Italy; he tells of the instruments in general
use, among them the shawm (oboe), the bagpipe, the rebec (the
medieval ancestor of the violin), the harpsichord, and the lute. He
describes the dancing in the country villages and gives the names of the
dances used; he relates how his friends, while journeying about the
country at night, used to sing songs in four parts, and describes in some
detail the nature of the harmonies they used. The soprano or upper

236 THE RENAISSANCE

voice, he says, was the one to which most attention was paid, the tenor
being the guide and ruler, with the alto supplying an ornamental counter
point and the bass supporting and augmenting the whole a description
which would aptly fit a Bach chorale or a modern hymn tune. But these
plain four-part harmonies used by the native Italians were in striking
contrast to those used in medieval times, when the tenor was the voice
which dominated the whole and the others were made to move about it.
In a long panegyric on the beauties of music, Folengo names the principal
composers then writing in Italy: most of them were from the north, the
Netherlands or France; there was but one Italian, Costanza Festa.

MUSIC IN "iL CORTEGIANO"

Castiglione's description, written largely between 1514 and 1518, gives
the attributes of the ideal courtier: he was to be a connoisseur of paint
ing, an accomplished musician and scholar, something of a wit and a
gallant, a soldier, and a statesman. Castighone describes in detail the
famous palace of the Duke of Urbmo, one of the great art patrons of the
era, and mentions especially the pictures and books and the collections
of musical instruments. Music and dancing, according to his account,
were the pastimes of every Italian court, and he is at great pains to show
what may be expected of the gentleman musician; he must possess a good
voice, sing well at sight, and be able to accompany himself on various
solo instruments.

There is an amusing description of a lady tradition says it was
Beatrice Sforza who, upon inviting one of her soldier friends to an
evening of singing and dancing, received the reply that such frivolities
were beneath his dignity; whereupon she told him in no uncertain terms
that when he was not at war and the country had no need for his services,
he had better oil himself and put himself away with his armor, for he
could hardly become more rusty than he already was!

Later on, Castiglione employs some technical illustrations from the
practices of dancing and music, showing that such allusions were readily
understood by his readers. He speaks of the moving effect produced by
the different styles of singing in his day and insists that there is no more

AN ITALIAN DEVELOPMENT 237

" honorable or praiseworthy leisure than music as a rest from toil and
a medicine for sick souls/' This is especially true of the courts, he says,
where, " apart from the refreshment that music brings to all, many
things are done to give pleasure to the ladies, whose tender and gentle
souls are easily penetrated by harmony and filled with sweetness. There
fore it is not surprising that both in ancient times and in those present,
they should be inclined towards musicians and regard music as the most
grateful food for the mind."

In this book of Castiglione's a reference of special interest to the his
torian is that in which he speaks of a solo performance which consisted
of reciting poetry to the accompaniment of an instrument so as to
heighten the beauty and increase the significance of the words. It has
long been thought that this sort of recitative, which later influenced the
writers of opera, had been devised by Vincenzo Galilei, the father of the
famous astronomer, in an attempt to imitate what he considered to have
been the musical practices of the Greeks. But here is a reference showing
that this usage was common long before Galilei's employment of it.

THE RENAISSANCE MADRIGAL AN ITALIAN DEVELOPMENT

The development of the sixteenth-century madrigal occurred in these
musical circles described in such detail by Castiglione. In protest against
the involved contrapuntal style of the foreigners from the Netherlands
and France, the native musicians in Venice, Florence, and Rome had
developed types of their own: the frottola (little fruit) and the villanella,
forms which better suited their natural feeling and spirit. Although
they were written for and sung by Venetian, Mantuan, and other
prominent nobles of the period, they were strongly influenced by
the popular dance music of the people. Little songs of graceful, amorous
character, they were set for four parts (three of which were usually
played on instruments) and had a prominent melody, which was placed
in the soprano and followed closely the rhythm of the words to which
it was set, the other parts forming a pseudo-polyphonic accompaniment.
Bartolomeo Tromboncino, official musician at the important ducal court
of Mantua, was the principal composer in these styles.

MH-IJ

THE RENAISSANCE

Courtesy of The National Gallery, London

FROTTOLE SINGERS by Robert!

It was the obviousness of these frottole and villanelle and their repeti
tion of the same music for many verses that irked the taste of the cultured
literary and musical circles of the time. In an attempt to develop these
simple forms, the prominent composers of Italy, many of them church
musicians from Flanders and the Netherlands, may be said to have
founded the madrigal style. The new works which they developed may
be looked upon as the logical elaborations of the madrigali of the four
teenth century (of which Landino's madrigal has been cited as an
example), carried out in the manner of a period two centuries later.

AN ITALIAN DEVELOPMENT 239

Naturally these later works were richer in technical achievement be
cause of the additional experiments which had taken place in the mean
time. Using the free-flowing, melodious frottole as bases, composers like
Willaert and Arcadelt brought to bear on them the full force of their
invention and technical facility. The result was what we have come to
know as the madrigal, a form that was originally cultivated by musicians
alone and intended for an intimate circle of connoisseurs and amateurs
such as gathered at the courts of the princes and in the academies of the
time. It was not in any sense a popular form of expression: this must
always be kept in mind when appraising it as an art form.

The new idea spread like wildfire in the aristocratic circles. Arcadelt's
first madrigals appeared in 1539, and from that time onward for a number
of years there poured out of Italy a steady stream of these works. That
the same spirit animated the composers in the other countries may be
seen from the table on page 305, which lists the names and dates of the
principal madrigal composers in the various countries.

No better description of the characteristics of this form could be found
than that given by the composer of some of the best English madrigals,
Thomas Morley, in his book A PJaine and Easie Introduction to Prac
tical! Musiclce, written in 1 597 :

" The best kind of light musicke is termed Madrigal ... a kind of
musicke made upon songs and sonnets such as Petrarcha and manie
Poets of our time have excelled in. . . . As for the musicke it is next unto
the Motet the most artificial and to men of understanding the most de
lightful. If therefore you will compose in this kind you must possess your
self with an amorous humor ... so that you must in your musicke be
wavering like the wind, sometime wanton, sometime drooping, sometime
grave and staide, otherwhile effeminat, you may maintaine points and
revert them, use triplaes and shew the verie uttermost of your varietie,
and the more varietie you shew, the better shal you please/'

The sensuous delight experienced by those who wrote and sang these
madrigals came through the clever manipulation of means rather than
from any deep expression of feeling. From its very beginning, the form
of the music was free enough as regards structure: the composer would
take verses of any meter that appealed to him, usually a stanza of some

240 THE RENAISSANCE

five or six lines chosen from a lyric, pastoral, or amorous poem, although
he sometimes set words of a grave character. Here are two examples:

" Cor mio, montre vi mire
Visibflmente mi transform' in voi;
E transformato poi
In solo sospir' Tanima spiro.

" O bellezza mortale!
O bellezza vitale!
Poi che si teste un core
Per ter inasce e per te nato morte."

" In pride of May " Then, Lady dear,

The fields are gay Do not appear

The birds do sweetly sing; In beauty like the spring;

So Nature would I will dare say

That all things should The birds that day

With joy begin the spring. More cheerfully will sing."

The composers dealt with such words line by line, even breaking them
into phrases, thus dividing their work into definite sections. The parts
were usually written for four or five voices, in both harmonic and con
trapuntal style, the latter often of very involved and curious workmanship.
The chief distinguishing mark of the madrigal was its marvelous rhythmic
freedom, no matter how complicated the weaving of the various parts.
Each voice followed the meter of the verse with absolute accuracy, some
times in slow, sometimes in quick tempo, according to the dictates of the
words. The prevailing atmosphere of the poem was caught in a sort of
stylized musical paraphrase, and there were often curious attempts at
what may be called word painting: " long festoons of thirds were woven
about such expressions as ' chains of love '; sighs were translated by pauses
and breaks in the melody; the idea of duration, of immobility, was ex
pressed by the holding of a single voice, the others carrying their parts
relentlessly. The voices rose on such words as ' heaven/ * heights '; they
fell on the words 'earth/ 'abyss/ 'hell/ The notes scattered in silvery
groups round the words ' laughter/ ' joyous/ ' gay/ etc.; tears are expressed
by audacious discords and unexpected modulations" (Pruni&res:

AN ITALIAN DEVELOPMENT 241

Monteverdi). There was a good deal of imitation between the various
parts, but it was hardly ever strict in the sense of the mechanical canons
and devices of the earlier church music. Everything was free, yet strongly
conventional; expressive, yet severely intellectual; imaginative, yet purely
artificial. The madrigals were indeed a happy compromise between pure,
spontaneous utterance and calculated ingenuity. Considering their re
stricted field, no more perfect art form has been devised. 1

Having invented the madrigal, the Italians achieved great distinction
in writing it. All the outstanding composers, including even Palestrina,
wrote in this style. As we might expect, there is a vocal flow, a directness
of expression, and a dramatic intensity in these Italian madrigals that
was never quite equaled by the composers of the other nations. The
leading man was Luca Marenzio, who was attached to the papal chapel.
Other names of the same period were Gastoldi and Donati. In the latter
part of the sixteenth and the beginning years of the seventeenth century
an increased dramatic force began to make itself felt in the Italian
madrigals, using the harmonies and effects that were being developed in
the contemporary new form of the opera. A number of composers arose
whose works stand in strong contrast to the self-contained forms used
earlier: Orazio Vecchi, principally known for his " madrigal comedy "
Amfiparnasso, a full-fledged dramatic piece written in madrigal form,
with all the speeches of the various characters given to single voices with
contrapuntal accompaniment; Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, who boldly
introduced a chromaticism in his madrigals that is strangely prophetic of
Wagner's dramatic use of the same device almost three hundred years
later; and, above all the others, Claudio Monteverdi, one of the greatest
geniuses in music.

In their audacious chromaticisms, their unexampled realization of
moods, and their versatility of expression, Monteverdi's madrigals repre
sent, to those who know them, the high-water mark of the whole move
ment. Almost all of them are beautiful (he wrote five books altogether),

1 The composers of the earlier madrigals did not take a particularly subjective
attitude toward emotional expression in music. Later on, the increasing humanistic
tendencies of the period brought about an outlook described in the contemporary
phrase as Dare spirito vito alle parole, " giving words living spirit by means of tone."

THE RENAISSANCE

with a wonderfully sure feeling for effect. Especially noteworthy as repre
senting in almost perfect form the ideals of the Renaissance is his
madrigal sestina Le lagrime d'amante al sepolcro dell' amata (Tears of
a Lover at the Tomb of His Loved One) , a cycle of six madrigals set to a
carefully constructed lot of texts based on arbitrarily designed rhyme
schemes the whole thing designed for the same sophisticated audiences
as were the Orlando Furioso and the paintings of Botticelli.

SACRED MUSIC OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

But the interest of this period was by no means confined to secular
music. Perhaps in no other field did the flame of genius burn so brightly
in this era of creative activity as it did in the field of sacred music. The
three great names Palestrina, Di Lasso, and Victoria represent figures of
pronounced individuality, their works being definitely the expression
of their own personalities as well as the culmination of all the brilliant
experiments of the Netherland composers; they may be said to be the
real symbols of the Renaissance spirit in music. Palestrina (1525-1594)
will always stand as the composer of an ideal type of church .music,
humanely harmonious and yet purged of all unnecessary objectiveness.
Having completely mastered the technique of his predecessors in this
field, he had a perfect means for the expression of those mystic, exalted
ideals that are so unlike anything else in all music. While the other
composers of the time were equally proficient in sacred and secular
styles and wrote for both instruments and voices, Palestrina confined
himsdf almost entirely to choral music. His manner of writing a cappella
(that is, for voices, unaccompanied) is so pure and so completely adapted
to the beauties of the human voice as a musical instrument, that it is
impossible to think of his music as being rendered by any other medium.
There is a peculiarly unearthly quality about it. Palestrina was not char
acteristic of the time in this aspect of his genius, atid in listening to the
melting transcience of his harmonies, we seem lifted completely beyond
the confines of time and space.

It was Hegel who said that the one quality which art must possess if it
is to endure is a certain vital energy in which there is present a quality of

SACRED MUSIC

243

Convent, PP. de VOratoire, Rome

PALESTRINA

Painting by an unknown sixteenth-century artist

universality not merely as law and maxim but operative in unison with
the soul and emotions. It is just this that characterizes Palestrina's music.
He seems close to us of the present, not merely because he did not
hesitate to use freely that chordal, harmonic style to which our ears are
accustomed, but largely because of his ability to express with unearthly
beauty the universal longing for things beyond this earth that is one of
the most compelling of human experiences. The environment in which
he was reared and the peculiar circumstances of his life made it inevitable

244 THE RENAISSANCE

that most of his music should be written for the Church; and his great
genius, coupled with the peculiar spiritual and expressive qualities of his
music, make his works the perfect embodiment of that mystic adoration
which is so essential a part of Catholic worship.

With Palestrina, as with his great Spanish contemporary, Victoria, the
considerations of the Church had precedence over everything else.
Embarrassed by schism and beset by heresies, the Catholic Church at this
time was struggling to get her house in order and reform some of her
most evident faults. In the historic series of gatherings which goes by
the name of the Council of Trent (1545-1563), one of the topics for
discussion was the reform of church music, which, the Church Fathers
felt, had become far too elaborate and secular in style. The use of un
suitable and secular tunes as the basis for settings of the Mass scandalized
the more serious-minded, and the general subordination of the text made
for loss of religious significance. Palestrina's Masses notably his Missa
Papae Marcelli were considered by the commission of cardinals as ideal
models for illustrating the proper treatment of the liturgic text. He wrote
ninety-three four-to-eight-part settings of this greatest of Christian rites,
as well as over three hundred fifty motets. Most of these could well be
used as choice examples of an effective, exalted church-music style, per
fectly suited for giving voice to all the emotions of the faithful.
* What, for instance, could be more expressive of the reproachful
sorrow inherent in the words than Palestrina's setting of the Improperia..
that part of the Church's liturgy which has been used in the Good
Friday services of the Sistine Chapel for over three hundred years?
Simple as this music is, uttering the bitter remonstrances of Christ to
his people for having treated all his kindness with ingratitude, nothing
which this composer ever did better illustrates his ability to feel keenly
and express himself vividly. In direct antithesis to such brokenhearted
sorrow is the spirit of exalted joy and rapt transports of the Christmas
motet, Hodie Chiistus natus est. It is in such brief moments of revela
tion that Palestrina will best please the average listener, rather than in
his longer and more involved compositions.

Yet if we would understand the intricate perfection of his music, a
perfection which serves to heighten its ultimate effect, it is necessary that

MUSIC IN VENICE 245

we study in detail such a work as his Mass Assumpta est Maria, one of the
loveliest of all his settings. For only then can the magic of his manner of
weaving themes throughout the whole fabric of the composition be fully
realized. The comparison of this music with the tapestries of the period is
one which cannot be resisted; for Palestrina's art is indeed the art of
" some marvelous piece of needlework, of weblike pattern, gleaming with
gold, silver, and soft colors, obeying the hidden law of design, but present
ing an indefinite yet gorgeous whole. The ear, like the eye, endeavors to
distinguish the course of one thread, only to be deflected by another. It re
ceives no exact impression, but the vague perception it conveys to the
brain is of an agreeable, harmonious whole, rising to sensations of acute
pleasure. This simile, however, fails in one important aspect: no general
perception of color could affect the mind so powerfully as sound or pro
duce the same moral effect. Palestrina's music penetrates the depth of the
soul, and its selflessness widens the conception of things appertaining to
the spirit. More, far more than a new formula of art, it was founded on
antiquity and built up on international inspiration " (Pyne: Palestrina,
His Life and Times) .

MUSIC IN VENICE

In addition to Florence and Rome, which after the restoration of the
papal power became the center of the school which culminated in
Palestrina, there were other Italian cities that were active in this great
cultural revolution. Important among these was Venice, isolated among
her salt marshes in splendid grandeur at the head of the Adriatic, her
people thriving on their profitable trade with the East, her artists full of a
colorful zest for life, the extravagance and love of display of her rulers
household words throughout the world then known. The painting,
architecture, and music that were produced in Venice during the Renais
sance were a result of the love of color which so strongly predominated
in Eastern art, a joy of life and love of display engendered by the luxuri
ous gaiety and extravagance of her existence, combined with the in
tellectual and spiritual ideals characteristic of the Florentine and Sienese
artists. Important painters who reflected this Venetian, way of thinking

THE RENAISSANCE

A RENAISSANCE FESTIVAL PROCESSION IN THE PIAZZA OF ST. MARK
The scene was painted by Giovanni Bellini (1426?-! 516).

and living were Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, and Titian. The rich
colors, marvelous texture, strong contrasts, warm emotion, and gorgeous
splendor of the works of these men may be said to be characteristically
Venetian. So is the church of Santa Maria della Salute, with its sumptu
ous design and richly varied ornament, its superb location on the Grand
Canal adding to its impressive effect. The two great names in Venetian
music of this time are Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, uncle and nephew,
both of them organists of the Church of St. Mark's, which is one of
the most characteristically Venetian of all the churches of the city, a
colorful symbol of the close bond between her religious and civil life.
The music of Giovanni Gabrieli mirrors the luxuriance of the Venice of
the doges as completely as do the paintings of Giorgione or Titian: it is
rich and brilliant, yet deep and profound. Although most of it was written
for use in the services of the churdi, it is nevertheless full of glowing hues
and ardent warmth.

MUSIC IN VENICE

GIORGIONE'S "CONCERT" (c. 1510)
Here is shown one of the most famous Venetian Renaissance paintings.

In St. Mark's there happened to be two organ lofts, one in each of the
side transepts, and this circumstance was of great importance in the music
of the Gabrielis, for it allowed the use of two groups of musicians facing
each other across a large, resonant church; and it led to the writing of
music, both vocal and instrumental, that was based on combinations of
differently constituted choirs of vocalists and instrumentalists. There
is a great deal of an tiphonal questioning and answering in this Venetian
music, with opportunities for achieving that peculiar timbre which
comes from music reverberating in the wide spaces of a cathedral. The
Venetians are among the earliest composers to write specifically for in
struments. While their general style was that of the vocal contrapuntal
music of the time, and while it was the custom to play such things on
instruments long before Giovanni Gabrieli's time, he was the first to
indicate definitely the instruments he wished to be used in playing his
compositions and to give specific directions for their interpretation.

248 THE RENAISSANCE

Representative of this powerful Venetian style is the younger Gabrieli's
Sonata pz'an e forte from his Sacrae symphoniae of 1597. This work for
the first time in the history of music indicates in its score the control of
tonal intensities; it is written for two " choirs/' one of brass and the other
of strings and brass. Dr. Sachs remarks on its lack of design, there being
in it no definite melodies or carefully planned tonal web. Rather there
is contrast of tone color, the balanced and contrasted ensemble of strings
and brasses giving sharp and brilliant effects alternating with those that
are heavy and more somber. Even in such compositions as his organ
ricercari (a form which Gabrieli transmuted into that which we know
as the fugue), the insistence is always on color rather than on design. A
small number of pure and contrasting qualities of organ tone is used,
instead of making any attempt to indulge in the overwhelming power
and dazzling brilliance which later came to be definitely associated with
this instrument.

We are here present at another of those progressive liberations of style
that make the study of musical history interesting, if we grasp what
these liberations meant to the men of their generation, and do not try to
judge them by the standards of the present. We should not form the
habit of judging the music of the past by the standards of today; for if
we do this, much of this early music is bound to sound dull to us. We
should try to use imagination and put ourselves back into the time when
such music was new and exciting; we should forget all about modern
music when we listen to such things as these ricercari of Gabrieli; rather
we should try to recapture some sense of the amazement that the flying
fingers and thundering pipes must have caused in those days, an amaze
ment which probably gave utterance to the familiar words: " Well, well,
whatever is the world coming to; I wonder what we shall be hearing
next? "

But it is Monteverdi who stands as the greatest man of this epoch, an
important link between the old and new styles of the sixteenth and seven
teenth centuries; for not only did he carry the polyphonic vocal style to
great heights, but he also proved himself to be the father of modern
dramatic and orchestral music. He is the first composer to whom those
whose experience with music has been limited to the works of the eight-

THE RISE OF FRANCE 249

eenth and nineteenth centuries can listen with real pleasure and under
standing. His music, in whatever style it was written, was essentially
dramatic, romantic, and adventurous. Realizing that no one could go
further than he had in the madrigalian style, he made, as Prunieres has
said, a complete volte-face and laid hands on the aristocratic spectacle
that had been invented and laboriously carried out by his Florentine
contemporaries, turning this humanistic plaything into the modern music
drama. Of this, more in another chapter.

THE RENAISSANCE IN FRANCE AND
THE NETHERLANDS

THE RISE OF FRANCE AS A WORLD POWER

A FTER long years of impoverishment brought on by wars with Eng-
L Y land and anarchy within her own borders, France began in the
fifteenth century to try to establish herself as the dominant power of
Europe. Louis XI, a royal despot if there ever was one, ruled from 1461 to
1483. In what had formerly been a decrepit monarchy he dealt a final
blow to the system of medieval feudalism and, by stringent administra
tive reforms and an active policy of territorial acquisition, was able to put
his country in condition for foreign conquests. His son, Charles VIII, by
marrying Anne of Brittany and thus adding this duchy to the French
Empire, continued this policy. He was the first to invade Italy,, making
a temporary conquest of Naples at just about the time Columbus set
forth on his memorable voyage of discovery.

Charles died without leaving any male heirs and was succeeded by a
distant relative of another branch of the House of Valois Louis XII,
known as le pre du peuple. In alliance with the Spaniards, who in the
sixteenth century were the great people of Europe, Louis conquered
Milan and Naples, and then, in league with other powers, tried to deprive
the Venetians of their holdings on the mainland of Italy. The final result
of all this war and intrigue was the expulsion of the French from the
Italian peninsula in 1512. This, however, did not end Italy's troubles.

250 THE RENAISSANCE

Louis was succeeded by his brilliant cousin, Francis I. Reigning from
1515 to 1547, this gentleman king held the throne during the great years
of the Renaissance and proved himself an ideal man for the time. He
patronized all the arts, and it is pleasant to record that literature, music,
sculpture, and architecture flourished mightily during his reign. The
long series of Italian campaigns of his predecessors, together with his
own attempts to recover and hold parts of Italy, brought France into
direct and vital contact with the ideals of the Renaissance. It was Francis
who made attempts to transport bodily some of the most famous of the
Italian artists, bringing home with him Leonardo da Vinci, who died soon
afterwards, Andrea del Sarto, who did not stay long, and others.

THE INFLUENCE OF ITALY

Long before this, however, as early as the reign of Louis VIII, Italian
sculptors had come to France and had made a deep impression there.
The Gothic figures of the French imagfers gradually forsook their
peculiarities of style and Christian feeling and took on more of that ideal
cast of beauty that was fostered by the Florentine study of the antique.
Nowhere can this be seen so clearly as in the Church of St. Denis, Paris,
already mentioned as one of the earliest Gothic structures in France
and a sort of French Westminster Abbey, containing, as it does, the
tombs of French kings and notables until almost the time of the
Bourbons. In walking through the array of tombs in this old abbey
church, we pass gradually from the Gothic world to that of the Renais
sance; and this change in form corresponds to the change in thought
between these two periods. The sculptors of the Middle Ages have fixed
the royal figures in humble, recumbent positions, showing them pitiable
in death, and surrounding them with figures of sinister pleurants,
mourners over the royal decease. In the tombs of the sixteenth-century
kings, Louis XII and Francis I, the figures are not in the least suggestive
of death, but of glory and power; these beautiful sculptured figures,
modeled after classic sources and placed against a background recording
the exploits of the king, are not Christian but pagan. Theirs is no
temporary tomb, where man awaits his final resurrection in faith and

THE INFLUENCE OF ITALY

251

Archives Photographigues

THE RENAISSANCE TOMB OF FRANCIS I IN THE CHURCH OF

ST. DENIS, PARIS

Compare this tomb with the Gothic tomb of Philippe Pot, page 194.

hope; rather is it a triumphant monument assuring him of worldly im
mortality after his brief and brilliant career on earth .

So, too, with architecture and painting/The traveling artists who were
so numerous in the early days of the Renaissance, the Italians invited to
France by private individuals, the French/artists who returned home
from Italy with their luggage full of copies of Italian art all these
gradually effected such a penetration of Italian methods into northern
art as to revolutionize European tastes completely. This, of course,
could not have been done had not the Renaissance mind outgrown the
conceptions of the Gothic era. Architects had invented the Gothic

THE RENAISSANCE

Archives Photographiques

A FRENCH RENAISSANCE CHATEAU OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

cathedral to suit the religious requirements of that time; the feudal castles
and fortresses were built to fit the necessities of a warlike period; and
the artists of the thirteenth century had a definite system of iconography
by which they expressed concurrent religious beliefs. But when Christian
faith had diminished so that no longer huge communal churches were
necessary; when monarchical France made feudal fortresses no longer
compulsory, men turned their architectonic energies into building great
houses in the Italian Renaissance style, their chief aim being the creation
of beauty. And the sixteenth-century painter responded to the collective
taste of his time by using humanistic and classic subjects rather than
religious ones, and by painting in a way that showed that beauty was
worthy of cultivation in itself rather than merely as a universal language
for the propagation of the faith.

Thus two styles, one the result of long tradition, the other introduced
through the charm of a foreign novelty that happened to fit well the

MUSIC FOLLOWS THE OTHER ARTS 253

natural aptitude of the country, both benefiting by a return of national
energy, flourished in France from the time of Charles VIII to that of
Henry II roughly from the latter fifteenth to the middle sixteenth
century. But the new style, founded on a wider and more humane base,
permeated by a spirit of law and order, gradually triumphed: rejecting all
ideas of compromise, it completely eliminated the other style some
times with unfortunate results severing forever the ties which had
so long bound a united Christian people and its universal religious art.

MUSIC FOLLOWS THE OTHER ARTS

During this period of transition, music followed the same tendencies.
We have considered the outstanding characteristics of Gothic music
the elaborate craftsmanship, the perfection of a style consisting of an
ingenious and skillful weaving together of various voices, resulting in a
sort of universal expression of personal concepts, and the definitely re
ligious quality which closely associated it with the services of the Church.

Gradually there came out of Italy other ideals which led eventually
to the complete secularization of the art: the substitution of instruments
for voices in one or more of the woven parts; the compression into an
accompaniment, capable of being played on a single lute, of the poly
phonic parts of the older style (Italian lutemsts had published such
arrangements as early as 1508), the consequent shifting of the relation
ship between the parts, with the constant development of the idea of a
chief melody and accompanying voices; and the gradual tendency to
use more and more a chordal rather than a purely contrapuntal type of
writing. This penetration of Renaissance ideals can be seen very clearly
in the music of France, but it affected that of other countries as well.

During the later Middle Ages m France there developed a peculiarly
nationalistic type of expression, the chanson, which may be said in gen
eral to correspond with the Italian madrigal. The earliest examples we
have of the chanson, by Busnois and De la Rue, are as simple in structure
as the Italian frottola, and even clearer and more concise in expression.
Gradually, as the Italian influence made itself more and more felt, these
compositions became more elaborate, with involved counterpoint, and

MH-l8

254 THE RENAISSANCE

often bristled with the artificial devices of the artistry of the time. The
chanson of the middle of the sixteenth century was a highly sophisticated
composition, set to various kinds of texts, mostly amatory. Referred to
by a contemporary writer as lascives, sales, et impudiques, and by a
modern writer as " airy, sprightly, and full of pretty babblings/' these
compositions are truly French in nature, having fresh, lively melodies,
pleasing wit, spirited words, and piquant rhythms.

As might be expected, the chansons were mostly composed according
to the old tradition of writing in several simultaneous melodic lines,
each of them requiring an individual interpreter. They often showed a
peculiar tendency toward tonal painting a tendency that was later to
reappear in a more elaborate form in French music. C16ment Jannequin,
best-known composer of the chanson, wrote several celebrated program
pieces, notably the Bataille de Marignan (descriptive of the defeat of
the Swiss by Francis I in 1515, and ending realistically with a Swiss
cry of defeat, in dialect: "Everything is lost, by God! "); the Cifs de
Paris, depicting the street noises of the time; La chasse, in which we are
present at a court hunt; and, best of all, Le chant des oiseaux, a piquant
description of a bird concert, with na'ive references to the amorous
customs of the period.

Other well-known writers of the chanson were Claudin de Sermisy
(his lovely En entrant en ung /ardin is characteristic), Claude le Jeune
(Revoici venir du printemps), Guillaume Costeley (/e voy des glissantes
eaux), and Charles Tessier (Au ;oli bois).

Unquestionably there were various ways of performing these works.
The usual one was to assign each part to an individual voice, the whole
composition thus being sung; but often some of the parts were given to
instruments, the resulting effect being partly vocal and partly instru
mental. We have evidence that the chansons were often played by in
struments alone, with a result that must have been pleasing, for their
general style is quite neutral and not dictated by any considerations of
voice or instruments, either bowed or wind. Musical archaeologists have
discovered in old libraries pages of chanson music with the first words of
a poem at their head but with no words under the staves, thus showing
that they were copies made for purely instrumental use with no thought

MUSIC FOLLOWS THE OTHER ARTS

Courtesy of Musee Camavalet

" GUINGUETTE " AT THE TIME OF FRANCIS I
The setting is in the environs of the Quai St. Bernard, Paris.

of vocal execution. The fifteenth-century Flemish composer Obrecht's
gay chanson Tsat een mesfa'n is an example of such a case.

The earlier chansons were largely polyphonic in nature, each voice
being of equal importance and having individual interest. Later on,
affected by the Renaissance ideal, we find many in which this purely poly
phonic interest has been displaced by a melody in one of the parts,
with the others serving a subordinate role. Evidently this was the sort
of thing that was favored at the height of the French Renaissance under
Francis I. Claudin's En entrant en img Jaidin was certainly sung this
way, as were most of the works in Pierre Attaignanfs Trente-cing livres
contenant chansons, published in Paris from 1538 to 1549. There is a
charming picture in the Mus^e Carnavalet showing a compagnie of this
period gathered in the country just outside Paris. We can imagine the
three musicians of this picture playing and singing Claudin's happy song,
the vocalist supplying the melody and indicating the rhythm with his
hand for his accompanists, who play the other parts on flute and lute.

256 THE RENAISSANCE

Such a development of new senses of vocal and instrumental relation
ships, as well as those between preponderant and subordinate voices, led
directly to our modern ideals of harmonic music. Another factor that
greatly heightened this development was the reduction of the accompani
ment of these chansons to a form suitable for playing on the lute, a great
number of such arrangements being made and printed in France. The
first collection was issued by the celebrated printer Attaignant, who
seems to have had exclusive possession of the field, in 1529; he called
it Trs brve et familire introduction, and it contained a large number
of arrangements of chansons in the manner of the Italian lutenists.
Twenty-five years later there appeared another under the title of Hoites
Musarum, and again in 1571 Adrian le Roy and Robert Ballard, im-
prim eurs du Roy, issued a third. Thus in a period in which the printing
of music was by no means common, there were issued in France within
less than fifty years three great collections of these lute songs. With real
melodies of a rich character and definitely subordinated accompani-
mental parts, they did much to tune man's ear to the harmonic sense
of tone to which it later became so accustomed. The French musician of
the later sixteenth century was thus as strong an influence in disseminat
ing the ideals of the Italian Renaissance as were his brother artists, the
sculptors, the painters, and the architects.

RELIGIOUS MUSIC OF THE RENAISSANCE

Sixteenth-century France, as anyone who knows the history of this
brilliant country will remember, was far from being united in matters
of religion. The latter half of this hundred years was given over to a cruel
series of wars between Protestants and Catholics, in which the leaders
of both parties, as well as two of the French kings, fell by the hands of
assassins. It was a generation of intolerance of opinion and barbarity of
action, each side striving to force its beliefs on the country as a whole; and
yet this religious strife had a stimulating effect on music.

During the first part of the century the music of the established
church was able to resist most of the infiltrations that had so affected the
character of the chanson and the madrigal. Jean Mouton (d. 1522), a

RELIGIOUS MUSIC 257

pupil of Josquin des Pres's, was the outstanding composer of Catholic
church music at this time. He was a singer in the royal chapel choirs of
both Louis XII and Francis I and was a composer who developed a
virtuoso contrapuntal technique while maintaining a natural gift for
simple and grand effects.

During the second half of the century, Orlando di Lasso (or Orlandus
Lassus) came into his own as a composer. Born in Mons about 1530, he
traveled over all civilized Europe during the course of his life and so
learned to adapt himself quickly and easily to different national styles.
In spite of his fluency and facility in writing, he was a composer of definite
individuality, one whose brilliant achievements in both sacred and secular
music are too little known. In no other composer is the influence of the
Renaissance so clearly evident. He took the old Josquinian counterpoint
as the basis for his writing, and on this he imposed the decorativeness of
the Italian madrigal style together with its dramatic chromaticism, mix
ing with them a dash of Venetian passion and color. The result is irresisti
ble. He was able to achieve a happy apposition of polyphonic and homo-
phonic effects and expressed his strong religious beliefs with a joyous
exaltation and an elan that is robust and human in comparison with the
mysticism of his contemporary, Palestrina. 2 The effect of Di Lasso's
music is powerful and inevitable, brilliant to the last degree; its imagina
tion is above all the other writing of the time. If, as is so often done, we
are to liken Palestrina to the tranquil Raphael, Di Lasso must be com
pared to Michelangelo in his heroic strength and variety of expression.

2 Lehman Engel has made the following pertinent comparison between these two
great men: " Palestrina's work was closely associated in every sense with the past,
while Lassus's was greatly affected by his own present. Through it he reached out
toward the future. His works are far more varied and cover a wider range than do
Palestrina's, and his aesthetic and emotional approach is personal and warm in contra
distinction to Palestrina's, which is remote and impersonal. Lassus often wrote
' light ' music intended purely as entertainment and often wrote to texts which were
bawdy and even pornographic. He set out to succeed in a world in which there was
only superlative success or obscure servitude. His success was a complete one in com
petition with some genius and much near-genius. Viewed today Lassus's work bears
the stamp of inspired greatness, and his quality of workmanship is unexcelled by any
later master. He combined the skill of the Netherland craftsman with the more pro
found and deeper personal sentiment of the rising German art. One wonders whether
the overwhelming success of his life in art was not due to rather than in spite of the
unceasing hectic demands made on his talents."

THE BAVARIAN COURT CAPELLA UNDER THE DIRECTION OF

DI LASSO
(From Hans Mielicli Kodex in the Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

Di Lasso sits at the clavier; around him are the players on viol and gamba, lute, zinke,

bassoon, and trombone; the singers make up the background.

258

FRENCH REFORMATION MUSIC 259

There are over five hundred motets for 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, and even 12
voices in his great collection Magnum opus musicam. Perhaps the best
example of his poetic lively style of motet writing is his Alme Deus,
written originally to secular words. He wrote also a number of Masses
and settings of psalms. Especially effective are his settings of the seven
so-called " Penitential Psalms/' filled as they are with the deep anguish
of his soul.

Mention should be made also of Di Lasso's compatriot, Philippe de
Monte (c. 1521-1603), whose work likewise showed the strong in
fluence of his Italian predecessors. Some 38 of his Masses and 318 of his
motets have come down to us. In them are again found the ideals of the
earlier Flemish contrapuntal masters combined with the puissant uses
of color, dramatic effectiveness, and melodic charm of the Italian writers.
He was Kapellmeister to the emperor Maximilian from 1568.

FRENCH REFORMATION MUSIC

A peculiar outgrowth of the Renaissance influence in France was the
production of Protestant religious music which followed the break with
the established church. We shall see in our discussion of the Renais
sance in Germany what a tremendous influence the Reformation had
on the development of music there: Luther gave a great deal of time and
attention to its cultivation for his new ritual. But the Protestant leaders
in the other countries were not so artistically minded. Zwingli excluded
music entirely from the services of his church, and Calvin limited it to the
unisonal singing of psalms, thus, as he believed, emulating the ancient
Hebrews in excluding all secular and human elements from the worship
of the church. In France, where the Calvinistic movement gained con
siderable headway, two poets of the time which in general was an ex
ceedingly prolific one for French poetry furnished metrical transla
tions for these psalm settings favored by the Genevan reformer: Clement
Marot, previously given to writings of a decidedly frivolous nature, and
Theodore Bza. The musical settings were largely the work of Claude
Goudimel, who during his early life had set many a Catholic Mass to
music (but who gave up his life in defense of his new faith in the

260 THE RENAISSANCE

massacres following St. Bartholomew) , as well as of Claude le Jeune, who
likewise wrote a great deal of secular music.

For the actual church service these men wrote an adaptation of what
was known as the chanson mesuree, secular songs composed according to
the strict requirements of verse, their syllables being sung simultaneously
by all voices. There resulted a simple sort of four-part chordal harmony,
built around a melody placed in the tenor. Except for this latter fact,
these Huguenot psalm settings sound very familiar to modem ears, their
syllabic treatment of the words and general style being that known to
generations of singers of Anglican hymns or Presbyterian psalms. These
simple settings were the only ones allowed by Calvin in his church,
and Goudimel and Le Jeune composed a great number of them, some of
which are still to be found in our hymn books.

But even Calvinism could not entirely discourage the love of artistry
that had been fostered by the current ideals of the cinquencento. The
French Protestant composers realized that it was not enough to write
music for the faithful in order to direct their minds and thoughts toward
higher things. It was necessary also to furnish music which could be
sung with some of the aesthetic pleasure and sense of satisfaction that was
to be derived from the other arts of the time. And so they produced anr
other type of music, using a much more elaborate style and requiring
greater skill in its execution music not to be sung in church, as
Goudimel said, but for the praise of God in the home. These richly
polyphonic settings seem tojtake on an added impulse of freedom and
suggestion of artistry from their increased movement. One or another
of the parts takes little flights around the voice which holds the melody.
Nothing is overdone; and all is charming, simple, and seemly, as befitted
the spirit of Calvinistic reform.

INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC AND DANCES

The lute music of the sixteenth century may be regarded as the first
really independent instrumental music. We have observed that this in
strument was very popular during this period, and it was natural that
an independent type of music was developed for it alone. This was

INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC AND DANCES 261

done, as we shall see, in Spain; but its use spread rapidly to every country.
All Europe during the sixteenth century seemed seized with a desire to
play the lute. France, with its cultivation of all the luxuries of the world,
was no exception, and its lute music possesses a delicate refinement that
sets it off from the rest. Attaignant published ( 1 529 ) the first book of lute
music, Dix-huit basses danses, and this was quickly followed by others,
notably by John Baptiste Besard's Thesaurus harmonicus, containing
original and arranged works by all the great lutenists of the time. This
lute style reached its culmination in France in the seventeenth century,
when Gaultier published a series of pieces which exhausted the instru
ment's possibilities, combining all the rhythmic and melodic effects of
which it was capable.

In 1589 a priest in Langres, writing under the pseudonym of Thoinot
Arbeau, published a celebrated treatise on dancing, the Orchesographie,
which gave not only the description of the various steps then in vogue
but likewise a notation of the different tunes to which they were danced.
Many of these tunes were played on the lute, others on various sorts of
brass, wood-wind, and string instruments. About the middle of the
century a troupe of Italian violinists came to Paris and established
themselves in the favor of the French court; this troupe came to be
known later as the vingt-quatre violons du Roy, the most famous dance
band in history. From that time, all the court dance music was played by
orchestras of bowed instruments, another instance of the Italian shaping
of French taste.

The most popular of these sixteenth-century dances 8 seems to have
been the basse danse, 4 its graceful steps being danced by two people.

8 At the present time it would seem that the oldest printed book on the dance
is the copy of an anonymous treatise, I/art et instruction de bien danser basse danse
(now in possession of the Royal College of Physicians, London), originally published
by Michel Toulouze at the sign of La corne du cerf, Paris, probably as early as 1496.
This is now issued in a modern reprint, as is another pamphlet of about the same
time, The manner of dancing of bace dances after the use of France and other places,
translated out of the French in English by Robert Coplande, the original of which is
in the Bodleian Library. Both of these are of fascinating interest to students of early
music and dances.

4 The basse danse is supposed to owe its name to the gliding motion of the feet
that was used, in contrast to the dances in which the feet were lifted from the ground.
The name may suggest nothing more than its lowly origin.

262 THE RENAISSANCE

Always associated with this was the tordion, an " after-dance " contrasting
in rhythm and character and marked by leaping jumps. Another popular
dance was the pavan, with its pendant galliard. " The steps of the pavan
and the basse danse are slow and heavy, those of the galliard and tordion,
light and graceful/ 7 says the Orchesographie. The branles were lively
round dances executed by a whole ring of dancers, circling first one way
around, and then the other, and gradually accelerating in speed
whence the possible derivation of our word brawl, which suggests the
probable final culmination!

On account of her comparative later insignificance in the world of
creative music, we are likely to forget France's important and significant
place in the early development of the art. During the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries she was especially active in cultivating that which
came to her from her meridional neighbor, impressing this music with
the peculiar grace and charm that clarity and balance that we have
come to recognize as French.

THE RENAISSANCE IN SPAIN

THE PARADOXES OF SPAIN

FRIEDRICH SCHILLER, the great German poet, in his play Don
Carlos has given an unforgettable picture of sixteenth-century Spain,
the one great country of Europe which, while the others were beginning
to expand under the warming spirit of the Renaissance ideal of liberty
of thought and action, found itself still bound fast in the medieval chains
of absolutism. At the very height of her one great period of prosperity,
at a time when she might have made herself for centuries the dominating
force in Europe, it was Spain's misfortune to be governed by the hand
of an absolute despot who, in order to further his own bigoted ambitions,
completely abolished all privileges and rights whichr might in any way
interfere with his desires and suppressed all independence of thought by
force of arms and by the malevolent processes of the Church's agency for
the punishment of heresy the Inquisition.

THE PARADOXES OF SPAIN 263

Courtesy of The Metropolitan Mztseum of Art

PHILIP II OF SPAIN
Engraved by Cornelius Visscher

With words such as these the hero in Schiller's play addresses his king,
Philip II, pleading for the future which he sees possible for his land
" those rich and blooming provinces, filled with a great and decent people:

Restore us all you have deprived us of!
And generous as strong, let happiness
Flow from your horn of plenty!

Let man's mind

Ripen in your vast empire give us back
All you have taken from us, and become
Amidst a thousand kings, a king indeed!
Renounce the mimicry of Godlike powers
Which level us to nothing! Be in truth
An image of the Deity himself!
Never did mortal man possess so much
For purpose so divine . . . one pen stroke now,
One motion of your hand, can new create
The earth! "

264 THE RENAISSANCE

This is only one of the many paradoxes of Spain, that in the face of
such an opportunity for becoming the world's most powerful empire, the
only thing she did was to waste her substance and break her proud spirit
in a series of fanatical religious persecutions. There are many others.

A rocky peninsula set at the far western end of Europe, surrounded by
wild seas and encircled by precipitous ranges of mountains, Spain has
nevertheless been able to give the world some of its most valued
agronomic products. Her history has no analogy to that of any other
Christian nation. In one century she made herself the mistress of all
Europe; hardly more than a hundred years later, through her lack of in
tellect and oversupply of wealth, she rapidly deteriorated into a " soulless,
mortifying corpse, gloomy and self-consuming/' And this she has re
mained ever since, unable alike to live in the past or go on to the future. A
people convinced of its own superiority and strongly resistant to all in
novations, the Spanish race has never been able to create either a united
country or a completely indigenous art, but has borrowed from and
imitated, one after another, all the schools and styles in Europe, often
times exaggerating their characteristics and combining their elements in
such astounding ways as almost to approach caricature. 5

THE ROOTS OF SPANISH ART

" A study of Spain will ensure the art lover at least one thing a new
leaf in the album of his experiences/' begins a well-known historical
sketch of Spanish architecture, sculpture, and painting. The art lover
will be able to recognize all the familiarities of the Romanesque, Gothic,
and Renaissance styles, but with a strange difference; for added to the
characteristics of these schools as he knows them in Italy, France, and
Germany are certain traits derived from the creations of the country's
ancient conquerors, the Moors and the Arabs, that give them that spirit

5 Those who have not made a close study of Spanish history are likely to forget
the tremendous influences which have been exerted on the country from outside:
Romans, Visigoths, Jews, Syrians, and Arabs in turn have occupied the Spanish
peninsula. The conflict with the Arabs and the Moors, who first came to Spain in
the eighth century, lasted over eight hundred years; and the peculiar desire for reli
gious and racial unity which followed their withdrawal was a natural result.

THE ROOTS OF SPANISH ART 265

which we can call " Spanish/' The Arab taste exerted a strong influence
on architecture, modifying the Gothic and Renaissance styles throughout
the country. The native feeling for plastic art was strongly touched with
it, and it was combined with Italian, French, and even German ideals
in various parts of the peninsula. Spanish painting, grounded securely
on an Italian-Flemish foundation, owes its peculiar genius for fiery-
energy and truthful realism to this distinctive blend of racial qualities.

As in the other European countries, Spanish art has been inextricably
bound up with the political history of the empire. The story is quickly
told, being largely one of a few powerful, and not particularly brilliant,
monarchs. The sixteenth century was the great epoch of Spanish history,
an epoch that opened in 1469 with the marriage of Ferdinand and Isa
bella and the consequent union of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon.
Thus was laid the foundation for what might have been the world's most
powerful kingdom; but the expulsion of the Jews and the Moors the
two most useful and enterprising races of the country made such an
eventuality impossible, in spite of Spain's discovery of America and the
consequent opening up of undreamed resources and wealth.

The outlook of the Isabelline artists was purely Gothic, as the churches,
sculpture, and painting of the time show clearly enough. Mixed with this
Gothic taste was a love of fantastic splendor and elaborate design
which we have spoken of as derived from the Arabs. In 1516 the Haps-
burg, Charles V, became emperor and reigned over Spain for a period of
forty years, conquering in that time Mexico, Peru, Chile, and Tunis
and extending the Spanish borders until they included a good part of the
Old World as well as most of the New World. It was during this apogee
of Spanish power that the ideals and principles of Italian Renaissance
art began to be felt in the land: beginning with the brilliant plateresque
sculpture and architecture, which was Gothic in form and Renaissance
in detail, this Italian influence made itself felt in all parts of the country,
achieving notable results in painting, literature, and music.

The cause for the rapid decline from these dizzy heights of political
and material power has been suggested the unreasoning bigotry and
stupidity of an iron-handed tyrant, who tried to stay the progress of
thought and the natural evolution of the ideas originating with the

THE MAIN DOORWAY OF THE COLEGIO DE SAN GREGORIO

A fine example of Spanish plateresque architecture, the college was built in Valladolid

during the sixteenth century.

266

SPAIN'S PLACE IN MUSIC 267

Renaissance. The religious controversies were bad enough; but in their
wake came the destruction of the great Armada that was to have stood
as the symbol of Spanish mastery of the seas, the loss of Portugal, and
the insurrections at home in Catalonia. Before a century was out, the
once proud empire was permanently crippled and forever doomed.

Because of this brief, dazzling flash of power and riches, her romantic
history and her remarkable ethnological constituency made up as it
was of Iberians, Celts, Basques, Goths, Arabs, Moors, and Jews Spain
was able to achieve an influential position in the history of art. Not only
did she produce some of its greatest men, such as Velasquez, Cervantes,
and Victoria, but modern research is beginning to show that her contact
with Asia during the Middle Ages was far more direct than that of any
other nation and that it has profoundly influenced all European art.

SPAIN'S PLACE IN MUSIC

The first that we hear of music in Spain is in connection with dancing,
which has always been one of the country's chief amusements. Martial,
an early writer, described the castanetted rhythms of the dances of Cadiz
as being " wild and lascivious." Dances and danceable music may be said
to have constituted the dominant influence in Spanish music up to the
fifteenth century; as a matter of fact, dances such as Martial described
may still be seen in the mountainous regions of Andalusia in the south,
their rhythms persuasively conveyed by the Moorish gypsies.

But the Moors left behind them more important evidences of a musical
culture than merely rhythms. We have shown in the section on the music
of the troubadours how the latest Spanish research on the subject indi
cates that Spain received with open arms and developed to a point of
great beauty the Arabic music brought in at the time of the invasion of
the Moors. 6 In the universities founded by the far-seeing Moorish princes

6 The greatest collection of these Arabic tunes extant is that made by Alfonso the
Wise at the end of the thirteenth century, Las Cantigas. Formerly supposed to have
been influenced by the troubadours, Ribera interprets them as corresponding to the
lyric and rhythmic system of the Spanish Moors and says that they were probably set
down by a Moorish musician employed by Alfonso.

268 THE RENAISSANCE

of Granada, musical theory was made the subject of profound study, the
result being that the peculiar melodic physiognomy of this Arabic music
left a profound influence on the folk music of Spain. It is difficult for
modem musicians to realize what an enormous amount of this didactic
literature was produced by these Spanish pedagogues, a literature that
was based not on the ideas which other medieval writers had developed
from their study of Greek theory, but which was entirely different, being
influenced by medieval Arabic forms and enriched through practice.

This gave Spanish music from an early period a rhythmic and melodic
character which it otherwise would not have possessed. Some of this
literature was devoted to the plainchant, some to instrumental music, its
express purpose being that of the practical training of pupils in all
branches of the art. It was one of these Spanish theorists who, around
1480, conceived the idea of tempering the twelve semitones of the scale,
one of the foundation stones upon which the system of modern music
has been erected. 7 Another, in 1565, wrote a method for teaching the
playing of keyboard instruments, giving fingering and other similar de
tails. In 1553 Diego Ortiz, Kapellmeister to the Duke of Alba, published
a course in the forming of variations over a given bass, this being the
popular way of improvising music for the court dances of the time.

7 In this connection it is necessary to remember that during the course of
music's development there have been a number of varying schemes for arranging
sounds into the most workable order. These have been based on differing acoustical
plans adopted as the result of experiments by theorists, which reach as far back as the
sixth century B.C., when the Greek Pythagoras first investigated the basic mathematical
ratios between the different series of ordered sounds which came to be grouped into
the modea. It became necessary to modify slightly the intervals making up the various
scale patterns, because an interval whose mathematical ratio made it sound perfectly
" in tune " in one scale could not be incorporated into another without sounding
" out of tune/' Hence arose what are known as systems of " temperament/' that is,
means of distributing these inaccuracies, inevitable in any system that is to allow free
passage from key to key, so as least to offend the ear. Developing from the Pythagorean
system, the chief types of temperament which have been adopted have been (i)
" equal temperament/' in which only the interval of the octave is exact, all the others
being slightly inaccurate, but none so much so as to distress the average ear; (2)
"mean tone temperament " (in use from about 1600 to 1800), in which a few inter
vals are absolutely accurate, the rest not, making it practicable to use some, but not
all, keys without distress; (3) "just intonation," in which all the intervals are dead
in tune, making passage from one key to another impossible. Observe the difference
between these systems by listening to the records prepared by Mr. N. Lindsay Norden.

SPAIN'S PLACE IN MUSIC 269

That these sixteenth-century Spanish educators in music were familiar
enough with the work of their European predecessors and confreres is
evident from such a treatise as that of Fernando Esteban, which includes
quotations from such representative non-Spanish composers as Philippe
de Vitry, Guillaume de Machaut, Dunstable, Dufay, and Ockeghem.
The Spaniards studied this counterpoint assiduously and were thoroughly
conversant with all the details of its craftsmanship, a fact that can be
proved by a look at their works. But their background made them more
interested in preserving the poetic value of their texts than were the
writers of France and Italy, who did not seem particularly concerned
when the meaning of the words they set became entirely lost through
the intricate and involved weaving of the parts. In the Spanish romances
and villancicos, the two forms most popular in the sixteenth century, the
composers achieved a happy blend of the craftsmanship of the scholastics
and the individual flavor and characteristic features of the popular Ara
bian and Moorish music. Dr. Sachs has expressed it thus: when the com
posers of one of these sixteenth-century works contemplated the words
of a romance recounting the exploits of that glorious past that is undying
in the memory of every Spaniard, or of a lyric villaiicico containing a
poetic idea many times repeated, he seemed to forget all about the
bounds imposed by strict polyphony. Fired by the spirit of the words, he
created a vigorous and almost entirely independent melody that com
bined both aristocratic and popular elements.

Thus we have the peculiarly Spanish phenomenon of composers who,
having made their bow to European tradition and having written their
works in the international three-and-four part forms, lost no time in
issuing versions for solo voice, with an accompaniment by a sort of guitar
lute known as the vihuela, an instrument that was used by high society
as well as by the musicians of the lower classes.

Representative composers of secular works during the golden age of
Spanish music were Fuenllana, Gonzales,, Vasquez (whose charming
villancico, Vos me matasteis, can well stand as a representative example of
the whole period), Pisador (who published a Libro de musica de vihuela
in 1552), and above all the others, Antonio de Cabezon, an outstanding
composer of clavier music, and Luis Milan, the greatest of all Spanish

MH-19

2 7

THE RENAISSANCE

THE LUTE PLAYER
By H. Brosamer, 1537

writers of instrumental music. Milan was the first to write specifically for
the vihuela; his pieces in the Libro de musica published in 1 536 are perfect
examples of the virtuosity which marked this sixteenth-century instru
mental style. Milan was also a poet, courtier to the Valencian sovereigns,
and an outstanding performer on the lute, which, because of its suitabil
ity for outdoor use, had secured such a firm hold on Spanish affection.

THE POPULAR LUTE

The most popular of Renaissance instruments, the lute, as employed
in Spain, was built like a flat, pear-shaped guitar and had six pairs of
strings, tuned a fourth apart. Its tone was not very powerful but was
capable of a great delicacy and sweetness of utterance. Its possibilities
were limited by the mechanical difficulties of fingering, which made pos
sible only combinations of simple polyphony and detached chords. But
its sharp-cut, accented tone emphasized the rhythmic features so char
acteristic of dance music; thus, while tradition made it an aristocratic in
strument, its practical possibilities made it a popular one.

THE POPULAR LUTE 271

The place which this instrument held in the life of its time s may be
gathered from a seventeenth-century description, A Recreative Praele-
dium to the Lute Part of Musick's Monument, or a Remembrancer of
the Best Practical Mustek both divine and civil that has ever been known
to have been in the world, by Thomas Mace, one of the clerks of Trinity
College, Cambridge:

" Beloved Reader, you must know,

That Lutes could Speak ere you could so;

There has been Times when They have been

Discourses unto King and Queen;

To Nobles and the Highest Peers;

And Free Access had to Their Ears

Familiarly; scarce passed a Day

They would not Hear ^hat Lute would say:

But sure at Night, though in their Bed,

They'd Listen well what then She said.
She has Discourses so sublime,

No language yet in Any Time

Had Words sufficient to define

Her Choice Expressions so Divine

Her Matters of such High Concern

No Common Folks can It discern

'Twas ne'er intended for the Rude

And Boisterous Churlish Multitude;

But for Those Choice-Refined-Spirits

Which Heav'nly Rapture oft Inherits."

Milan's great lute fantasias, which he called pavanes, are perhaps the
greatest music ever written for the instrument. Taking their general form
from the Italian dance, they strongly suggest the romantic fire and earnest
sincerity that are typical of the best Spanish art.

8 This instrumental family included members of various sizes, from the large
theorbo to the small mandore. The Spanish lute (vihuela) had a body somewhat
resembling a modern guitar. It is interesting that Leonardo da Vinci, going to the court
of Milan in 1482, was known as a musician as well as a painter and that he took with
him at that time a silver lute of his own making, shaped like the head of a horse.
Marsilio Ficino, the famous humanist scholar, according to tradition, died with his
lute in his hands.

272 THE RENAISSANCE

CABEZON

The beginning of the sixteenth century shows efforts on the part of
the composers in all countries to experiment with instrumental contra
puntal music; but none of them can compare in actual artistic results
with the Spaniards. Outstanding among the writers of clavier music was
the blind musician Cabezon, whose works were collected and edited by
his son, under the title Obras de musica. This collection, published in
1578, some years after the death of the composer whose name it bears, is
one of the most significant works of Spain's golden age in music. It con
tains a number of pieces for tecla (keyboard instruments), as well as
others for the harp and vihuela, some of them playable interchangeably
on all these instruments. There are also contrapuntal pieces invented
or written over liturgical melodies, variations, and tientos (toccatas).

" No one who seriously studies the works of Cabezon is likely to feel
that any praise of him is exaggerated. To associate him with Bach signifies
more than the expression of an unconsidered admiration. It points to an
inner relationship that links the Spanish master more closely to the great
German than perhaps to any other musician. In any event, I know of no
one among the clavier and organ composers of all time who, by reason
of musical spontaneity, profundity, and exalted seriousness of purpose,
austerity and sublimity of thought, and last but not least complete
contrapuntal mastery, more properly belongs in his company " ( Willi
Apel: Musical Quarterly).

MORALES AND VICTORIA

The other great names in Spanish Renaissance music are Cristobal
Morales, born in Seville about 1512, and Tomas Luis de Victoria, born
about 1540. Both these men wrote church music and lived their produc
tive years during the time of the Spanish ascendancy. Their art shows
little of either Gothic or Moorish influence, being strongly Renaissance
in its character; yet it cannot be said that there is nothing Spanish about
it. Both men were influenced by their surroundings, just as was El Greco,
the Greek artist who lived in Spain and whose paintings may be said to.

MORALES AND VICTORIA

273

THE DEAD CHRIST
By El Greco

express the essence of Spanish character. All these men studied and ab
sorbed the European technical methods of their predecessors. The point
is that they were able to feel like Spaniards. No one who has heard
even such a short work as Victoria's sublime motet O vos orrmes could
ever mistake his style for that of one of his Italian contemporaries, any
more than he could think of El Greco's superrdigious combination of
asceticism and ecstasy as being anything but intensely Spanish.

Victoria felt that music should be devoted entirely to the aim and end
for which it was originally intended " the praise and glory of God ";
and he carried out this ideal to such an extent that he refused altogether
to write secular music. Jn this respect it is important to remember that

2 JA THE RENAISSANCE

the Renaissance did not have the same freeing influence in Spain that it
did in the other countries of Europe. Racially conscious and integrated
to an almost unbelievable degree after his long fights against the Moor
and the consequent saving of Europe for the Christian religion, the six
teenth-century Spaniard felt himself a man chosen of God for the special
purpose of upholding his true religion.

Consequently there could be none of the questioning of faith that
occurred in the other countries, a fact which explains much of the ardor
and fire of Victoria's music and of El Greco's painting. The Spanish at
the time of the Renaissance still maintained the medieval conception
that this world is a mere interlude between birth and a glorious, all-
important afterlife. Their whole point of view regarding art and life was
that of loyal allegiance to the Church, their strong, burning faith feeding
their natural ardor and increasing their native intensity.

Critics speak of El Greco as a painter whose temperament was unusu
ally sympathetic to the religious ecstasy of sixteenth-century Spain. There
is a peculiar quality about his composition, an excitement and intensity
about his method of depicting light, an ability to make us feel that his
figures defy all natural and materialistic laws, that give his pictures their
atmosphere of mysticism. " Where painting touches upon the ecstatic
and the supernal," says Cheney, "El Greco is master above all others/'

The same may be said regarding Victoria. In Rome, where he seems to
have spent much time, he came into contact with the other great musical
giants of the period; 9 but he remained true to his national feeling and
continued to incorporate into his music the fiery mysticism that was so
characteristic of the Spanish soul. Nothing shows this better than the
Kyrie from his Mass Orbis Factor. In the piquant setting which he gives
the words " Lord, have mercy upon us/' we hear his strong personal con
viction as well as his national temperament. It is as if he had been able
to catch the elevated thought and devout mysticism of his contemporary,
Palestrina, and infuse into them his own passionate nature. He wrote
extensively in all religious forms, and his works should be much better
known today than they are: only occasionally do we have opportunity

9 This Italian influence in Victoria is exactly paralleled in the art of El Greco,
which, although essentially Spanish, is based on Italian Renaissance forms.

" THE ENGLISH, ARE THEY HUMAN? " 275

of hearing them, even in the service music of the Church. A more inti
mate study would convince us that we have in the sixteenth-century
Palestrina and Victoria two companion figures such as are so familiar in
the eighteenth-century Bach and Handel.

THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLAND

They have no fancy, and never are surprised into a covert or witty word
. . . but they delight in strong earthy expression, not mistakable . . .
This homeliness, veracity, and plain style . . . imparts into songs and
ballads the smell of the earth, the breath of cattle and, like a Dutch
painter, seeks a household charm, though by pails and pans.

Emerson on the English

\
" THE ENGLISH, ARE THEY HUMAN? "

THE well-known paradox of the English has been well described by
Dorothy Thompson in a recent commentary on the world scene:
" Consider the English, a most remarkable people. Producers of cotton
textiles, woolen goods, coal, chinaware, the best men's clothes and the
worst women's, dealers in money, sharp traders, the ancestors of our own
Yankees, who dealt in slaves and later went to war to free them. Inhabit-
ers of rows and rows of dingy little brick villas, each with a hedge to
shield him from his neighbors. Prosaic and shrewd. Noted for common
sense and a philosophy glorifying self-interest. Also noted for a love of
nature, a passion for poetry, and the world's largest and best production
of it. By and large a dull people, with a positive dislike of intellect. Yet
producing intellectual giants. Haters of war, who have indulged in as
much of it as any race on earth/' And, we might well add, in some re
spects the most unmusical people in Europe, yet one which, in the first
flush of national consciousness, at the time of the Renaissance, produced
some of the best music ever written. Having done so, they fell silent
until the end of the nineteenth century. A strange and remarkable people
who seem to the rest of the world a little mad, and yet who are always
able to achieve a certain method in their madness.

THE RENAISSANCE

Courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London

KING HENRY VIII artist unknown
(Head from Holbein's portrait)

It was the sixteenth century that saw the development of England
from a medieval city-state into the beginnings of a great world power.
The twenty-four-year reign of Henry VII, marked as it was by careful
thrift and hard toil, did much to repair the ravages of the preceding cen
tury and lay the foundation for the glories to come. Under a series of
rulers remarkable for their individuality rather than for their ability
Henry VIII, a strange combination of artistic ability, intellectual shrewd
ness, and bestial vitality; Mary Tudor, an embittered bigot whose devo
tion to her Catholic faith brought the country to the brink of revolution;
Elizabeth, a clear-headed, unscrupulous woman who was able to maintain

" THE ENGLISH, ARE THEY HUMAN? " 277

herself for so long a period by " meeting the extremes around her with
her own extremes of cunning and prevarication " these hundred years
form one of the greatest ages in England's glory. During them her trade
and seamanship, her learning, literature, art, and music developed enor
mously; moreover, taking whatever she needed from the various elements
of the European Renaissance, England was able at this time to produce
literature, music, even a church that were peculiarly her own and that
reflected her characteristics. Everything at the time tended to increase
this feeling of independence and insularity in the growing empire. The
development of the language, the establishment of a fleet that was able
to command the mastery of the seas, the successful break with Rome and
the consequent establishment of the Church of England all contrib
uted toward the fostering of that confident self-esteem which has re
mained until this day one of the country's most striking characteristics.
Shakespeare, born in 1564, only six years after the accession of Eliza
beth, and therefore a typical Elizabethan, puts it thus:

" This royal throne of kings, this sceptr'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demiparadise;
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war;
This happy breed of men, this little world;
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands;
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England/'

That this was the spirit of the era and not a mere megalomaniac em
broidering of language by a poet may be gathered from a contemporary
passage from the Memoires des sages et royales (Economies d'Estat de
Henry le Grand, written by Sully, the powerful minister of that famous
FrencIrKing, in the early years of the seventeenth century:

" It is certain that the English detest us with a hatred so strong and
widespread that one is tempted to regard it as one of the inborn char
acteristics of that people. More truthfully, it is the outcome of their pride
and presumption, there being no people in Europe more haughty, more

278 THE RENAISSANCE

disdainful, more intoxicated with the notion of their own excellence. If
they are to be believed, reason and wit exist only amongst themselves;
they worship all their own opinions and scorn those of other nations; nor
does it ever occur to them to listen to others or to question their own.
Actually this characteristic harms them more than it does us. It places
them at the mercy of all their fancies. Ringed by the sea, they may be
said to have acquired all its instability/'

THE REAL CULTURE OF THE ENGLISH

A retrospective and perhaps more unbiased glance at the England of
that period suggests that her people may have had good reason for this
" pride and presumption." London, the center of the country then as
now, was already a city of some three hundred thousand souls, with well-
laid-out streets, an important money exchange, many permanent theaters,
and a well-functioning educational system. The city was thronging with
business and vibrant with pleasure; the country was becoming dotted
with large and comfortable manor houses, built in a peculiar blend of
Gothic and Renaissance forms; the average educational level was high:
both men and women read Latin poets, studied mathematics and science,
composed and sang music. - "

An accurate pjcture of the times is given by Morley in his Plaine and
Easie Introduction to Practical! Musicke, published in 1597:

" Supper being ended and Musicke bookes, according to the custome,
being brought to the table, the mistresse of the house presented me with
a part, earnestly requesting me to sing; but when, after many excuses,
I protested unfainedly that I could not, every one began to wonder, some
whispering to others, demanding how I was brought up."

London was a center of a culture which, while it followed the general
ideals of its Renaissance archetypes, became essentially national. The
court and its circle read the poems of Philip Sidney, Thomas Wyatt, Ed
mund Spenser, and Christopher Marlowe all of them obviously pat
terned after Renaissance models, yet as English in their fresh spontaneity
and peculiar imagery as the Sussex downs or the chalk cliffs of Dover.
The plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe, although they used the themes

ENGLISH MADRIGALS 279

common to the time and sounded its general sensibilities, can hardly be
thought of as being anything but English; as a sixteenth-century writer
said, " The Muses would speak Shakespeare's fine-filed phrase if they
would speak English/' And while the influence of foreign models is
strongly shown in the music of the sixteenth century, in no other art did
the native craftsmen achieve such nota