The story of music; an historical sketch of the changes in musical form
Bekker, Paul, 1882-1937 | Herter Norton, M. D. (Mary Dows), 1892- | Kortschak, Alice (Alice Plaut)
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PUBLISHERS' NOTE The illustrations are reproduced from the collec- tion of Mr. Joseph Muller of New York. The book is designed by Mr. Vincent Cicatelli. The Publishers gratefully acknowledge their obligation to both these gentlemen. CONTENTS Foreword 13 CHAPTER PAGE I HOW TO APPROACH THE HISTORY OF MUSIC 19 II EARLY CHARACTERISTICS— THE GREEKS . 30 III GREGORIAN MUSIC— FIRST TO TENTH CENTURIES 40 IV POLYPHONY, A NEW ART— TENTH TO FOURTEENTH CENTURIES 51 V THE NETHERLANDS 64 VI POLYPHONIC AND HARMONIC MUSIC- SIXTEENTH CENTURY 74 VII INSTRUMENTAL HARMONY 84 VIII THE ITALIANS— OPERA AND ORATORIO- SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 94 IX BACH AND HANDEL 105 X BACH AND HANDEL, CONTINUED . .119 XI THE SUCCESSORS OF BACH AND HANDEL . 130 XII HAYDN 141 XIII GLUCK 155 XIV MOZART 168 XV BEETHOVEN 182 XVI EARLY ROMANTICISM— WEBER AND SCHUBERT 196 XVII NATIONAL ROMANTICISM IN CONCERT AND OPERA 212 XVIII WAGNER, VERDI, BIZET 225 XIX LATE ROMANTICISM IN CONCERT AND OPERA 240 XX MODERN TRENDS 254 INDEX 269 9 ILLUSTRATIONS Bach Frontispiece Guido of Arezzo 55 Handel . . 115 Haydn ........... 145 Gluck . . .159 Mozart 169 Beethoven 185 Weber ........... 197 Schubert 207 Verdi 235 11 FOREWORD Two years ago, the Southwest German Radio Cor- poration asked me if I were prepared to give a series of lectures in the Radio High School on the history of music. There were to be some 20 lectures, each of a half hour's duration. At first I was doubtful whether to take up the suggestion. The lectures seemed to me too few and too brief for dealing with the subject, and moreover, as a self-taught individual, I felt some scruple about trusting myself in a matter which seemed to demand treatment by a professional his- torian of music. On the other hand, I had to admit that the present academic attitude toward music history is scarcely calculated to bring the subject nearer to the layman. It is quite possible — I say it without implying anything derogatory — that the painstaking philological studies carried on today by the musicologists are necessary and useful, and that after a time a constructive personality will appear among these learned gentlemen who will be able to correlate their work to some productive purpose. Meanwhile, since this individual is not at hand it re- mains for the unacademic person to choose whether he will modestly await his coming, or in all temerity set about making his own history of music. 13 14 FOREWORD I freely confess that I have chosen the second course, not from any lack of modesty, but because I believe that the presentation of history is a matter less of knowledge than of point of view. For this reason the invitation of the Radio Corporation attracted me particularly, as it gave me the opportunity of testing the soundness of the ideas developed in my book on Wagner and my pamphlet on "The Nature of Tone" in the larger field of music history as a whole. These lectures, which were given under the title of "The History of Change in Music," are here presented in book form. While the title has been changed, the lec- ture form has been retained because it gives the original layout of the material. I shall probably be accused of "construing" the facts in my own way. I shall not dispute the accusa- tion save to add that I know no presentation of his- tory which is not a "construction" in this sense. Every scientific theory is a construction — we should not allow ourselves to be pleasantly misled as to the sig- nificance of alleged "facts." The question is not whether facts are construed, but what is the quality of the interpretation put upon them. If it leads to a creative attitude, there must be something alive in it, of which we must take heed, even though it may not have received academic sanction. I beg the musicologists to forgive me, to disdain me if they must. No one is obliged to read my book; whom it angers, let him lay it aside. Perhaps a few FOREWORD 15 readers may be found to whom it will give pleasure, and for these it is intended. Paul Bekker. Cassel, March 1926, THE STORY OF MUSIC CHAPTER I HOW TO APPROACH THE HISTORY OF MUSIC The following pages were originally entitled "The History of Change in Music." The title was not chosen at random. It indicates the point of view from which I approach the material in hand, the process which we call music history, that is, the occurrence of events in music from its early beginnings as we know them to the present time. I do not intend to describe in detail the lives of individual composers or the great types of musical form as they appeared at different times and in different countries. An attempt to press so much into the limits of this volume would be doomed to failure, and even in other circum- stances I would not venture upon such a task. For events and dates and the lives of famous musicians we may learn about in books. But there is something which as yet we cannot learn about in books, and that is, how to look at and understand music history as a whole. When I say that Beethoven lived from 1770 to 1827, he was born at Bonn and died in Vienna, he wrote for the piano, voice and orchestra, he used 19 20 THE STORY OF MUSIC mainly the sonata form; even when I explain these statements more exactly, I am only supplying knowl- edge which means little to the reader and which he will soon have forgotten. But if I try to explain just why at Beethoven's time piano chamber and orchestra music enjoyed such peculiar prominence, how the sonata form came to be so firmly established; if I endeavor to make intelligible the conditions govern- ing historical occurrences; then, though the details of my exposition too will soon be forgotten, a different picture will remain. We shall see that history is not a collection of dates and incidents and so-called facts, but the great life process of mankind, which we may comprehend, not by looking at it as a kind of his- torical costume parade, but only by trying to recognize the forces which control it. The present book is written from this point of view, which, since it is not the customary way of regarding the march of events, I shall devote this first chapter to ex- plaining. When we open a history of music today we en- counter the word development in every other sen- tence. Everything develops. Pre-Christian music develops into the polyphony of the Renaissance, vocal music develops into instrumental music, the symphony develops from the Mannheim school through Haydn and Mozart to Beethoven, the song develops from Schubert to Hugo Wolf, and so on. This is the usual manner of presentation, in which APPROACH TO MUSIC HISTORY 21 the simple always figures as the forerunner of the complex and the complex as an improvement over the primitive. This conception may be explained by recalling that the musical science of today is a product of the 19th century. The ideas of the 19th century were dominated by the theory of evolution. In the interpretation of this theory, however, there were undoubtedly misunderstandings. It is clear enough that a causal connection exists between the different stages of development, that each stage is an organic consequence of the preceding stage; and in making clear such relations, even between many great species which appeared fundamentally different, lay the extraordinary contribution of the theory of evolu- tion. But the theory becomes unsound whenever it tries to make later developments appear necessarily higher in the sense of absolute improvement over what went before. Here lies an error in interpretation. Since the constructive forces always remain the same, since nothing can be added or lost, it follows that the total value of the result must always remain the same too. Only appearances change, so that what takes place is a transformation and not a development. Goethe, who early grasped the idea of evolution, speaks not of the development of the plant but of its meta- morphosis, the series of changes in the plant organism. This idea of metamorphosis as opposed to the idea of development we must accept as the basis of approach n THE STORY OF MUSIC to all history, especially the history of art. Men have been men at all times, at least as clever, at least as talented and as inventive as ourselves. We have no right to look down on any former times and speak of them as primitive. Though they had to do without many things we consider essential to daily existence, the people of those times in turn possessed qualities which we do not appreciate only because, having changed ourselves, we are no longer aware of them. Development in the sense of progress, of higher degree or improvement, I cannot admit; at least not in works of art, in which I find only the metamor- phosis of ceaselessly working forces. The concern of history, therefore, lies not in presenting events them- selves, but in making intelligible the laws and forces which determine their transformation. In these laws and forces life itself is at work, while events are merely the effects of their activity. So I shall discard the idea of development as mis- leading and put in its place that of metamorphosis, of transformation. I beg the reader to keep in mind as the basis for all further discussion of different periods in history that the forms of art never develop, they can only change; that the music of all times is artisti- cally, absolutely, ever the same; that it always reflects the nature of the people who created it; and that we, finally, have no reason to believe that the in- tellectual and artistic capacities of the people of APPROACH TO MUSIC HISTORY 23 former centuries were not at least as high as our own. Another important point should be considered in the history of music; namely, that no other art has left us so inadequately informed about its past. This is primarily because of the nature of its material; for the material of music is tone and tone is vibrating air. The plastic arts work with stone, canvas and color; poetry works with thought which can be accurately written down. But how shall the works of an art which manifests itself in vibrations of air be preserved through thousands of years? Music, of course, has also a written language in no- tation, but for exactness this does not compare with the written letter. Even today we are no longer in a position to say definitely how music was performed in the 18th century; nor can we be sure, in spite of all the notes in the world, what idea of tone Bach and Handel had in mind when they composed. And this difficulty is negligible compared with the difficulties we encounter as soon as we go back two or three centuries further, where the question of how the composer wanted his works performed, whether with voice alone or with instruments as well, gives rise to much learned dispute. This in turn appears trifling in comparison with times still more remote, where the simplest questions of rhythm, the duration of a single tone perhaps, can only be guessed at from the nota- tion. And finally we come to a time where our nota- 24 THE STORY OF MUSIC tion does not yet exist, where note-writing consists of so-called neumes, signs somewhat similar to our sten- ography. These neumes, which were in use until after the nth century, differed in different times and places. They have been deciphered with partial success, al- though this question also has aroused divergent opin- ions. All our knowledge is relative, at best, for the only reliable test, the practical demonstration of an- cient music, is no longer possible. We shall never achieve an authentic idea of how the music of the 1 6th century, of the 12th or the 9 th, and still less that of the old Greeks, really sounded. We may be very well informed, we may exercise the utmost care in our researches and we may know what man can only know today; still when we speak of ancient music, it is as the blind man speaks of color. We lack the liv- ing intuition for it which is irretrievable, forever lost. So we see how difficult it is to discuss the history of music. In painting, in sculpture and in architecture the objects themselves are before us in indisputable reality; in poetry we have written documents. In music we have only a notation which offers liberal opportunity for arbitrary interpretation. Even the in- struments we use today are not over two or three hun- dred years old, some considerably younger. We know of their immediate predecessors, but they are no APPROACH TO MUSIC HISTORY 25 longer familiar to us and already sound strange. The farther we penetrate into the past the less we know what were the technical requirements for the execu- tion of music. Even if we had an adequate notation, we would not know what to do with it because we lack the knowledge which in its time was taken for granted. It is as though I were to put a Wagner score before a person living in the 13th century; even though I were to explain all the indications carefully, he would not be able to visualise the whole because he would lack the intuitive understanding of the music. And as the man of the past would fare with the music of today, just so do we fare with the music of the past. Let me try to make this clearer by a picture. Sup- pose we visited an old castle, famous for its fountains and cascades, like Versailles or Wilhelmshoehe. We see the plan, the structure of the terraces for the waterfalls, the network of pipes, the places where the fountains are meant to rise. Does that give us any idea of the effect of the whole? Scarcely, unless we see tall shafts of water spout up where the dull apertures of pipes had stared at us, or swift streams rushing over the bare terrace steps; unless, in other words, all this lifeless framework should suddenly burst into activity. But if the water has dried up, the pipes are choked and only a few fragments of this once great structure remain visible, then we may i6 THE STORY OF MUSIC indeed see that an imposing project had once been here, but how it functioned and with what effects we can only guess. This picture symbolises our relation towards the music of the past. What music we have in old manu- scripts or know of through the findings of investiga- tors covers a period of approximately 2500 years. Only the compositions of the last 250 years, or roughly a tenth of this time, are still accessible to us. For the rest, the living spring has gone dry, the pipes are choked, the grand stream of sound that once flowed through them is silenced. We may attempt to reconstruct it but we do not know how accurately our plan will correspond with the original. I have tried to make very clear the difficulties of understanding music of the past, in order to show once more the error of regarding history as a develop- mental process. Since our picture of the past is but fragmentary and indistinct, we easily conclude that the past itself must have been imperfect, destined to unfold but gradually into perfection, a development being implied. It is like standing at the entrance to an avenue of poplars which extends as far as our eye can reach; the nearest trees will seem quite large, those a little farther off somewhat smaller, and those way back at the horizon like dots. Are they there- fore in reality mere dots? Certainly not. If we walk along the avenue we find that the individual trees are different, one with a stronger trunk, another with APPROACH TO MUSIC HISTORY 27 richer foliage, but essentially they are all alike, and the last one, which looks like a dot, may well be bigger than the one we first stood next to. The cause of this illusion is not in the trees themselves but in the nature of our vision which shows us distances only in the foreshortening of perspective, a fact of which early plastic art was well aware, although it failed to use perspective, not because it was incapable of doing so, but because it would not admit the optical illu- sion. The history of music is such an avenue of trees, along which we shall pass in the following pages. I have tried to show that we must constantly bear in mind the inadequacy of our vision, yet we need not for this reason assume that we cannot arrive at any understanding of the subject. Even where details are not clear, we know that a tree is always a tree, man always man, the musician always a musician, that the same initial forces operate in all these forms as are active within ourselves. Just because the musical past is so veiled in mystery, we cannot try too hard to grasp the warmth, the living human quality of what lies hidden in it. We must approach our sub- ject through the comparative study of the varying phases of human thought and feeling by which music has always been conditioned. We must try to look upon history as if we lived it, as if we ourselves were the characters and took part in the events of which we speak; we shall then see them imbued with life, 28 THE STORY OF MUSIC divulging more to us than all our searching among facts. For at best, these so-called facts are very un- certain notions. They are random fragments of a complex which could have real factual significance only as a whole, but which will never again appear in this entirety. We see only bits of the former reality, so that what today may count as fact and so serve as the basis for a broad theory of history, tomorrow may be found erroneous and completely overthrown by the discovery of new facts. Facts are aids to his- torical research but should be used with the utmost prudence; for, in truth, we never get beyond the stage of hypothesis. Our hypothesis must be built not upon external facts, therefore, but upon the realization that art is conditioned by thought and feeling. This realization teaches us that art is art at all times, that it knows no ascent, climax or decline, no development, only unceasing transformation. This transformation is determined not by discoveries, so-called improve- ments in technique, or other influences from without. It is determined solely by the changes in man's capac- ity of perception. It is what we experience every day, every hour, every minute, within ourselves. It is the constant rearranging and transforming of forces which we call the process of life, and only so long as we change do we live. Thus the history of music is to be seen as a mould- ing of human life in material ever so delicate, perish- APPROACH TO MUSIC HISTORY 29 able, and elusive — the ringing, vibrating air which we call tone. We shall try to see it as the life story of tone, of the resonant forms of air, as the history of change in those perceptions by which men have grasped sound and moulded it into an art. CHAPTER II EARLY CHARACTERISTICS— THE GREEKS We have seen that the growth of form is not a development but a change in those perceptions by which the stuff of vibrating air is shaped into con- stantly new forms. The question now arises, what are the forces at work here which govern these changes in form? If we survey the whole known course of music history in all countries, from the most ancient times to the present day, from exotic island nations to Western Europe, we find everywhere two great main categories: cult music and secular music. In this re- spect music is like architecture, which also develops a cult and a secular type in every style. Cult music usually serves the purposes of the church, although in ancient times it was used in the art of healing as well, when medicine was still linked with religious rites and the cult of magic. As long as the church has the power of holding the people to a common cult, that is, of satisfying their religious impulse by its doc- trines, so long is cult music ecclesiastical. It is almost always so, but there are periods during which the power of the church relaxes and then we observe that 30 EARLY CHARACTERISTICS 31 cult music — music, that is, which makes a universal popular appeal — inclines to become secular. We have just left such a period behind us, beginning in the 1 8 th century with the so-called era of "the En- lightenment" and including the whole 19 th century. During this time cult music turns away from the church and makes use of secular forms, to wit, the symphonies of Beethoven and Bruckner, the concert- masses of the 19 th century, the spiritual music of Brahms and the operas of Richard Wagner — composi- tions which all show a mixture of the elements of cult and secular style — while actual church music decays and is employed merely for liturgical uses. But such periods are exceptional. They interrupt the nor- mal course and are usually followed by more spiritual periods which bring forth a new spiritual cult music, indications of which, indeed, we may notice at pres- ent. Thus cult music, one of the two great categories, derives its impulse mainly from spiritual needs. Its task is thereby circumscribed. It serves to express the solemn, the sublime, the mystical, artistic conceptions of the superhuman, the divine, the mysterious. The one important characteristic of music which differ- entiates it from all other arts, the invisibility of its form, is consciously used for the benefit of the cult. Secular music, the other great category, is dis- tinguished from cult music by the fact that it seeks not to preserve or increase the effect of the invisible, 32 THE STORY OF MUSIC but rather to do away with it by associating itself with other more obvious forms of expression, easily perceptible to the senses. In this way the invisible is made clear by connection with something visible or definable; it is robbed of its incomprehensibility, it becomes secularised. This may be accomplished in different ways: first, through the combination of music with bodily movements, in the dance; secondly, through the combination of music with a poem, capable of existence without music, in the song; and thirdly, through the combination of music with both song and dance, the various forms of which are clearly coordinated and held together by a story. The last is the most artistic form of secular music, evolving later into the oratorio and the opera, forms which need not be discussed here save to realize their origin in song and dance. The dance and the song are the fundamental forms of all secular music, the essence of which always consists in clothing the invisibility of music with some other expression easily perceived by the eye or the reason, such as dance movements or the words of a song. Having seen that musical forms originated at all times and in all countries in these two fundamental types — cult music, the servant and helpmate of the church, and secular music, the medium for the worldly dance and song — the question now urges itself upon us: what made people want to make music and how did they come upon this art? How was it EARLY CHARACTERISTICS 33 possible to shape the invisible air into the likeness of music? The answer would mean an inquiry into the origin of music which I do not intend to follow up here. It involves prehistoric times, about which after all we can only guess, and does not belong in a historical survey which should deal only with times in which music has taken definite form. Music may have orig- inated in natural love-calls, or in religious ceremonies, or from the observation of the effects of vocal sounds prolonged in varying pitch; but all these questions belong in a separate field of research and have nothing to do with the history of music as an art. Nor shall we discuss here the invention of the first instruments. It is most probable that man first sang and then be- gan to imitate the sound of the voice by mechanical means. But the reverse procedure is also imaginable. Very early in his experience, long before music can be historically dealt with, man must have known that he could produce tone by blowing tube-shaped in- struments, striking resonant surfaces, or plucking vibratile strings. As far back as we can think, we have to reckon with his ability to produce tone both by singing and by means of instruments, and as this ability still exists among most uncivilized peoples, we may assume that it is to be found everywhere within historic times. Many are the ways in which air was fashioned into tone. The difficulty of the process may be measured 34 THE STORY OF MUSIC when we observe that there is scarcely a tone to be found in nature which remains fixed at the same pitch. To sing a given tone is difficult and demands exact self control. A naturally sung tone rises and falls with stronger or weaker breath. But as in build- ing stones must be cut and shaped with a certain similarity in order that they may be laid one on top of another, so must the natural material of tone be cut and moulded, as it were, to a certain likeness. Tone as it is made into the material of music is divested of its natural character and formed according to certain arbitrary laws; it is stylised. The natural sound of the human voice in singing, which is a sort of cry sliding over several tones, is modified into a single rigidly fixed tone to which is added at a strictly defined distance, a second fixed tone, and similarly a third, a fourth, a fifth, sometimes a sixth, seventh, and more. Thus the whole compass of sound, which in the beginning had been somewhat chaotic, is now divided up according to certain definite laws. This division of tones into exact relationships we call a tone-system, and the standardization of tone in the tone -system is the first step in the construction of an art of music. The principle in this process is the same among all civilized peoples, but the execution — the number of tones used, their respective distances from each other, the way, in other words, in which the chaos of sound crystallizes into single tones- — varies greatly. This di- EARLY CHARACTERISTICS 35 versity is not surprising if one considers that the human voice undoubtedly played the leading role in the beginnings of artistic culture. Singing was bound to vary among the different peoples on account of racial divergences in temperament and feeling, dif- ferences in climatic conditions and especially in phy- siological make-up and language. So we have a con- siderable number of tone-systems underlying an equal number of musical cultures. Not all, to be sure, have evinced the same germinating power or have been equally productive. It is well to remember, never- theless, that our "Western European tone-system, while very significant and marvellous in its way, is but one branch on the tree of musical culture. It is not possible to compare here the various exotic tone -systems, as for example the Chinese, Siamese, Arabian, and others. How they differ from ours in type and origin I have indicated. They rest upon essentially different perceptions of the nature of tone, of the distances and relations between tones. I would like now to limit our subject to the consideration of Occidental, and particularly of Western European music. Here, too, we find some variations in detail, for even within one cultural zone a tone -system does not remain unaltered but, like other symbols of cul- ture, is subject to changes in perception. The tone-system of the Greeks, who, though an Eastern European people must be included here on account of their general cultural importance, differed 3 6 THE STORY OF MUSIC from that used during the first thousand years of the Christian era ; the later Middle Ages, then the Renais- sance and Baroque periods, again organised totally different systems, and at the present time changes are once more taking place. All these systems, however, are culturally one in that they are all constructed of whole and half tones and all based on the conception of the octave as the unit of measurement. They differ in many details, especially in the disposition of the whole and half tones, that is, in the formation of tonalities. The Greeks, as the people nearest to the Orient, even made use of quarter tones. But these differences are secondary to the main distribution of sounds into whole-tones chiefly and a few half-tones, and the limiting of the series at the octave. The enigmatical similarity in sound between the first tone and its octave, which lies five whole and two half tones distant from it, is probably due to the percep- tion of an acoustic law. If a string stretched between two bridges is divided exactly in the middle by a third bridge, each half will give the octave of the original tone. Our sense of the octave, therefore, corresponds to a sense of symmetry or proportion. I have said that the tone-system of the Greeks differs somewhat from our own, and this undoubtedly holds good of their entire music. If we usually begin the history of Occidental music with the Greeks, it is more from a sense of moral obligation toward Greek culture than because the influence of Greek music EARLY CHARACTERISTICS 37 itself was particularly strong. Indeed we can say little about its influence because we have but a very incomplete idea of Greek music as a whole. It would be untrue to say that we know nothing about it. We do know a good deal. We know that it played an important role in education, worship, drama, in the whole public life, that its significance was the sub- ject of thorough philosophical investigation, from which an extensive theoretical literature of aesthetics developed which was influential well into the Chris- tian era. We know that Greek music underwent several great changes in style, occasioned partly by the invasion of Greek culture by Asiatic elements. These Asiatic influences apparently brought instru- mental music into greater prominence, causing a growth in individual virtuosity, generally speaking, and a strengthening of secular music as against the older cult music. This secularisation was looked upon as a form of weakness and aroused a violent opposition which echoes through the dialogues of Plato. I shall pass over the musical forms developed particularly in Greek worship and Greek tragedy. What I em- phasised in the introductory chapter holds true here: that in spite of a fairly extensive knowledge of details, we cannot possibly imagine how this music sounded. Several pieces of Greek music have been preserved, deciphered and transcribed into a more modern nota- tion; but even these transcriptions seem dead to us, mummified material fit for museums. The insur- 38 THE STORY OF MUSIC mountable difficulty in the way of our understand- ing Greek music lies in the fact that this music was essentially bound up with the language and received plastic form only through the living spoken word. We- may study an ancient language, learn its gram- mar and approximately fathom the logic of its thought, but the inner meaning — the undefinable sen- sation of rhythm, of cadence, of tempo — in short, the sound of the language, its very soul, remains closed to us. It is the possession of ancient man alone and has been buried with him. We differ from him in all respects because our perceptions and our at- titude towards life have changed. Now it is precisely upon the feeling of the Greeks for their language that Greek music was based. It was not music as such, not an art. As the Greeks thought of themselves not as individuals but as members of a community whose lives centered in their common interest, the city- state, so their music was but a part of their language, their education, their community life, their culture. We understand enough to reconstruct but the skele- ton of its original form. We know that the Greeks had a number of scales, each of which had its own character or ethos. We know that they disposed the tones not as we do, from below upwards, but from above downwards. We know that the Greeks did not possess harmonic music in our sense, but sang in unison or in octaves, the parallel voices apparently being freely embellished vocally or instrumentally. EARLY CHARACTERISTICS 39 We know that the Greeks did not have a musical rhythm in our sense, but gave their song a metric form in compliance with the laws of their language, to the latent music of which such treatment was particularly suited. We know here or there a theoreti- cal detail, but the most important thing of all we do not know: namely, how this music really sounded. Greek music is a beautiful myth of a world that has been. Its great influence upon succeeding times consists less in handing on actual musical examples than in stimulating ever anew the desire to recon- struct something that probably never existed in that particular form. For many efforts have been made — ever since the days of the Renaissance, of the Florentine opera and French tragedy, of Gluck's operatic reforms, of Schiller's "Bride of Messina" and Wagner's "Studies in Music"— to reconstruct antique drama with its peculiar relation to music. The Greek theorists also exercised a profound influence on the earlier Middle Ages. It is probably safe to say that all these efforts were based on mistaken ideas about Greek music, but the misunderstandings led to great productive results. We may therefore conclude, with all deference to research, that the true historic value of Greek music lies in the myth it has created about itself. The creation of this myth, which for centuries had a fructifying influence, was its greatest achieve- ment. CHAPTER III GREGORIAN MUSIC— FIRST TO TENTH CENTURIES Greek music, in creating this myth about itself, became an inexhaustible source of inspiration to the theorist of early Christian times and to the creative artist from the later Christian era to the present. The less people knew about it the higher rose its prestige. That what they did know of it could be so soon for- gotten was an inevitable consequence of the organic relation of Greek music to the Greek language. In the same measure that the language lost its inner vitality, the music was doomed to oblivion. The lan- guage was the tree on which music was in truth but the blossom. Of the history of music during the great period of change marked by the growth of the Roman empire and the rise and spread of Christianity, we can, as in the case of Greek music, assert but little accurately. We know that the Romans were not a musical people; they imported their artists from Greece. Thus Greek music was transplanted to Rome, principally the more appealing instrumental music. Already strongly permeated with Asiatic elements in its home land, it 40 GREGORIAN MUSIC 41 lost still more of its Greek character amid the con- glomeration of cultures in Rome. We must bear in mind that at that time Rome was as important eco- nomically and politically as England in the 18 th and 19th centuries and America in the 20th. Artists ambitious for a wide success and large earnings naturally sought the metropolis of the world. They could scarcely be called bearers of culture, however, since the taste of those who buy their art is apt to demand entertainment after its own kind. Thus Greek singers, dancers, sculptors, musicians, migrated to Rome to find audiences, patrons and money, adapting their performances to meet the wishes of pampered but unimaginative connoisseurs. Simultaneously there came to Rome another form of art, less complaisant. The Christian communi- ties which spread from Asia Minor through Greece .into Italy, employed a form of singing in which a new cult music came into being, which originated probably without any artistic intention and was for that the more pregnant and profound in its effect. Of the origin of this music we know nothing definite. It may be connected with the Hebrew worship or traced back to Greek or other influences. The probability is that it sprang from several sources, transforming the stimuli thus acquired into something new in accord with the changed conditions. The impulse towards musical reform came at first from the new worship which in its very contrast to the earlier cult demanded 42 THE STORY OF MUSIC other artistic forms. But the deeper need of change emanated from that which had first given the old cult music life, the language, I repeat, we cannot sufficiently beware of looking at the music of that time as a thing in itself. When we think of music today, we think involuntarily of music for its own sake, as a concert, the performance of a symphony or chamber music. But this kind of music only came about with the shaping of modern life. To men of ancient times music was conceiv- able only in connection with some event, whether worship, dance or recitation of poetry. The word was the most powerful influence in giving such music form. I have already pointed to the importance of tone-systems as preliminaries to a musical art. This means not that people constructed tone-systems and then began to make music with them, but that the artistic use of sound only begins when its fundamentals are defined by a tone -system, just as the artistic treatment of language is possible only when it has attained a reasonable vocabulary, logi- cally connected to express thought. I have compared the formation of the tone-system with the simple laws by which a stone-cutter trims stones in order to build with them. But to achieve a building there must always be two things: first the building material, and secondly the building idea. These do not oppose, but are conditioned by, each other. This explains why ancient musical forms were originally based upon the feeling for the rhythmic quality of language and upon the physiological con- ditions of speech. So we see why Greek music bad to disappear leaving scarcely a trace when transplanted to Western Europe. Furthermore we may understand the peculiar picture presented today by the music of the first ten centuries of the Christian era. For all that has come down to us from this long period is some church music. But the simplest reflection tells us that people have always danced and sung; they have never devoted themselves exclusively to prayer, but, though things might be going ever so badly with them, they have held their festivals and made merry. Profane music must always have existed alongside of cult music. That we know little or noth- ing about it, is due partly to the fact that nobody took the trouble to write it down; also partly to the fact that many secular compositions were undoubt- edly taken over by the church in altered and purified form. Nor must we forget that the contrast between church and folk life was not as marked formerly as it is today. Until the later Middle Ages the church 44 THE STORY OF MUSIC was the public gathering place where people not only- prayed, but met, gossiped, did business and exchanged news. Religious paintings even as late as the 15 th and 1 6th centuries represent such genre scenes in every variety. This importance of the church as a general gathering place and center of daily life had probably been greater, rather than less, in earlier centuries. So the music of the church may have met the general demand for music to the widest extent, leaving a comparatively narrow field for secular music. But though these circumstances may appear to explain the predominance of cult music and our ignorance of secular music, the proper explanation, after all, is to be found in what we have said about language. I have pointed out dance and song as the fundamental types of secular music. Dance and song, in so far as they represent forms of art, are forms of national culture; they presuppose a characteristic national language. The culture of the first ten cen- turies after Christ, however, was not a national cul- ture but a church culture; the languages of the time were not national languages, for there was really only one language — the Latin of the church. Therefore there could be only one art music — the church music connected with this church language. 