How Music Developed - free ebook by W. J. (William James) Henderson

How Music Developed A Critical and Explanatory Account of the Growth of Modern Music

NEW YORK FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY PUBLISHERS Copyright, 1898 By Frederick A. Stokes Co. Printed in the United States of America. TO CHARLES BAMBURGH...

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The Beginning of Modern Music

IN reading any history of the development of music as an art one must ever bear in mind the fact that music was also developing at the same time as a popular mode of expression, and that the two processes were separate. The cultivation of modern music as an art was begun by the medieval priests of the Roman Catholic Church, who were endeavoring to arrange a liturgy for their service, and it is due to this fact that for several centuries the only artistic music was that of the Church, and that it

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Harmony, Notation, and Measure

IN the growth of modern music the second step was the introduction of harmony. The simultaneous sounding of notes of different pitch in combinations called chords is so essential a part of the music of today that even the uneducated mind has difficulty in conceiving a tune as wholly dissociated from the coloring influences of its harmony. Every schoolboy is accustomed to hearing melodies with what he calls a "bass" (an accompaniment founded on chords), and in the commonest music-hall songs the f

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The Birth of Counterpoint

THERE is one peculiarity of the early attempts at writing in several melodious parts which must now be brought to the attention of the reader, and which is very difficult to explain to a person not versed in musical laws. Instead of writing free melodies to accompany the fixed chants, the early composers took up the practice of making the tune serve as its own accompaniment by the employment of a number of ingenious devices, all included in the art of counterpoint. I shall presently endeavor to

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The Golden Age of Church Counterpoint

AT the period of musical history which we have now reached, the Dutch, as I have had occasion to say in another work, "led the world in painting, in liberal arts, and in commercial enterprise. Their skill in mechanics was unequalled, and we naturally expect to see their musicians further the development of musical technic." The Dutch musicians at first revelled in the exercise of mechanical ingenuity in the construction of intricate contrapuntal music. In the first period of their great school t

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Progress of Popular Music

WE saw that as far back as Dufay's time composers began to introduce secular melodies into the mass. This was an evidence that the ecclesiastical composers had been forced to make attempts to popularize their works by a rude adoption of the melodies of the people. The question, therefore, naturally arises: Who were the composers of the secular music? Of course that is a question that cannot be answered very definitely, but we do know who were the secular musicians of the time, and we know that t

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The Simplification of Music

IT is hardly necessary to tell the reader that the methods employed in writing church music prior to the dawn of the seventeenth century were not always judicious. The use of secular tunes together with their texts prevailed for more than two centuries, and led to great laxity in the treatment of the liturgy. In the course of time too many composers came to regard the words of the mass as mere pegs to hang tunes on, and the tremendous complexity of the huge polyphonic works was such that the wor

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The Evolution of the Piano

THE piano, like all our contemporaneous musical instruments, is the result of a long development. Its fundamental principle is the setting of a stretched string in vibration by a blow, the vibrations acting upon the air so as to produce sound. A subsidiary principle (subsidiary because common to all stringed instruments, such as violins, harps, or guitars) is the shortening or lengthening of a string in order to obtain a higher or a lower note. In the piano, the application of this principle giv

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The Evolution of Piano Playing

The first systematic method of playing the organ and harpsichord was set forth in 1593 in a book by Girolamo di Ruta, a Venetian, and it contained rules for fingering which were in use for more than a century. A work by Lorenzo Penna, published at Bologna in 1656, shows very clearly what the general principles of clavichord and harpsichord technic were in that day. "In ascending the fingers of the right hand move one after the other,—first the middle, then the ring finger, again the middle, and

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Climax of the Polyphonic Piano Style

WHEN instrumental music began to develop independently it naturally followed the lines already followed by vocal music. That had been wholly contrapuntal, and instrumental music was at first entirely polyphonic. In its development the art of music inevitably fashioned certain forms, for no art can exist without form, which is the external demonstration of design. Without design there is no art. Musicians very soon learned that the first principle of form in music was repetition. A phrase of melo

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Monophonic Style and the Sonata

THE fundamental difference between the sonata and the polyphonic forms is that the sonata is written in the monophonic style. Polyphony is, indeed, occasionally employed, but the reigning style is that in which a melody, song-like in character and sung by a single part, is accompanied by other parts written in chord harmonies. The necessary repetition of the melodic ideas is made, not by the process of imitation, as in the fugue, but by what is called the cyclical method. In this a tune or a com

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Evolution of the Orchestra

THE modern orchestra is about two hundred years old. That is to say, the first skeleton of our present arrangement of instruments is found near the close of the seventeenth century. Earlier than that the distribution of instruments and the manner of writing for them contained none of the essential elements of the present style. Three centuries ago lutes and viols were employed in combination with drums and trumpets in a very confused manner, and even for this assembly of instruments there were n

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The Classic Orchestral Composers

Haydn improved not only in his method of developing the subjects of his movements, but in his knowledge of the kinds of themes best fitted for orchestral treatment, which are organically different from those suited to the piano. His experiments in instrumentation went far towards assisting composers to a true knowledge of the art of orchestration (writing for orchestra). He himself learned rapidly from the trials of his own combinations by the Esterhazy band. In his early days, for instance, he

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The Romantic Orchestral Composers

THE classical period in musical history is that in which composers appear to have been engaged in perfecting the form and technic of composition. The impulse which led them to make their improvements was the romantic impulse, for by romanticism in music we mean an impulse which urges the composer toward expression. Such an impulse has always been at work in music, but it was impossible for the classical composers to give it free exercise, because they had not fully established a method of compos

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The Development of Chamber Music

BY chamber music is meant all that class of compositions written for small collections of instruments and therefore suitable for performance in small rooms only. It embraces trios, quartets, quintets, sextets, septets, and octets, named according to the number of instruments employed. The trio is most frequently written for piano, violin, and 'cello, but other combinations, such as piano, violin, and horn, etc., are used. When the word "quartet" is used alone, it signifies a string quartet, cons

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The Birth of Oratorio

HAVING traced the development of piano music, chamber music, and the symphony, from the time at which these began to be separate branches of art up to the present, it now becomes necessary to return to the point of departure and follow a new line of progress. It is the task of the reader now to accompany me in an examination into the origin of oratorio. Difficult as it may be to realize it now, the oratorio was in its infancy a dramatic performance, and it took its origin from the ancient religi

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Work of Handel and Bach

THE history of passion music previous to that of Bach is voluminous. Early in the middle ages the history of the passion according to the four evangelists was sung on the four days of Holy Week. This was done in the Roman Catholic churches. A priest intoned the words of the narrative, a second priest the words of Christ, and a third those of the other personages in the story. The words of the populace, the crowd, were sung by the choir in the polyphony of the time. The Protestant authorities saw

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Haydn and Mendelssohn

FOR a considerable period after the deaths of Handel and Bach nothing of note in oratorio form was produced. One must seek for the cause of this in the vitiated state of public taste. Europe was addicted to the Italian opera habit, and in those days Italian opera was quite as empty, meaningless, and insincere as it has been at most periods in its history. There were no Italian composers who had sufficient genius to combine dramatic truth with musical beauty, so those who were writing contented t

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The Birth of Opera

THE modern opera was the result of a deliberate attempt to revive the Greek drama, and that attempt was caused chiefly by dissatisfaction with the music of medieval festival plays. The direction of the attempt was guided by the revival of Greek learning in Italy, a revival of which the reader has already been informed in Chapter VI. In order, however, that the reader may have a clear understanding of the conditions which led to the birth of opera, it is necessary that the author should briefly r

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Italian Opera to Handel's Time

THE rapidity with which the new style advanced may be judged from the fact that seven years after the production of "Euridice" we meet with an opera containing a duet, and a few years later with one containing instrumental descriptions. The composer, who appears to have been the first gifted with a real genius for operatic composition, was Claudio Monteverde (1568-1651). Already many other composers had sought to follow Peri, and Mantua, Bologna, and Venice became homes of opera. Monteverde was

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Italian Opera to Verdi

DOMENICO CIMAROSA (Naples, Dec. 17, 1749—Venice, Jan. 11, 1801) wrote seventy-six operas, none of which are heard today outside of Italy, where recently there has been a movement to revive some of the operas of the end of the last century. Cimarosa's masterpiece is "Il Matrimonia Segreto," a genuinely fine work in the department of Italian opera buffa. The music is distinguished for its flow of genuine and spirited humor and its constant melody. The ensembles are excellently made and have served

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Beginnings of French Opera

THE history of French opera begins with the performance of a curious little pastoral in which the germs of some parts of the lyric drama may be found. The age of the work leads French writers to claim precedence over Italy in the invention of opera, but such claims are easily overthrown by the accumulation of evidence that the advent of Peri's "Daphne" was the result of a systematic series of experiments looking toward the revival of the Greek drama. In 1577 an Italian violinist named Baltazarin

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The Reforms of Gluck

IN spite of the labors of Rameau the prevailing style of Italian opera gained a footing in Paris, where its cheap melody and direct appeal to the unthinking gave it a dangerous popularity. Its unreality, its dramatic infidelity, and above all its exaltation of the singer above the composer, went far toward leading the Parisians astray from the true opera given them by Lulli and Rameau. It required the work of a man of true genius, guided by the sincere dramatic purposes of the earlier composers,

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Meyerbeer and his Influence

THE gradual drift of French opera away from the pure style of Gluck led to the success of one of the most remarkable figures in the history of music, a composer whose works persist in pleasing the public, while they enrage both critics and musicians. This composer was Jacob Meyerbeer, born of wealthy Jewish parents at Berlin, Sept. 5, 1791. He studied music under Lauska, Clementi, and Vogler, and began his public career as a juvenile pianist. His first opera was "Jephthah's Vow,"—a failure, as w

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German Opera to Mozart

THE story of the introduction of opera into German is sufficiently amusing to form part of an operetta plot. There was no opera of native origin, but the fame of the Italian product having reached the ears of the Elector John George I., of Saxony, he determined to have one of these new lyric dramas performed as the festival play at the marriage of his daughter. Heinrich Schütz, whom we have already met as the composer of the "Seven Last Words of Christ," was the elector's court-director of music

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Weber and Beethoven

MOZART, in "Die Zauberflöte," had touched upon an element which always appeals to the peculiar naïveté of the German character. That element is the supernatural. The Germans love a good fairy tale, and the "Nibelungen Lied," their national epic, is a version of the most imposing fairy tale the world knows. It was Mozart's misfortune, however, that he clung to old traditions and served up his German food in Italian dressing. So it was reserved for Weber to join hands with Beethoven and Schubert i

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Wagner and the Music Drama

RICHARD WAGNER (born at Leipsic, May 22, 1813, died at Venice, Feb. 13, 1883) was one of the great geniuses of music and the mightiest master of musical drama that ever lived. For many years his works were the subject of bitter differences of opinion. Persons educated to love the old Italian operas of the Neapolitan school, which were simply entertaining, rebelled against Wagner's demand that the lyric drama be taken as the most serious of art works. Yet, as I shall show, he was simply embodying

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The Lessons of Musical History

NO critical review of the development of the tone art is complete without notice of the intellectual and emotional impulses which governed that development, and of the characteristics of the three grand periods into which the history of music is divided. Two primary impulses have operated in the formulation of a system of musical art. These impulses are called Classicism and Romanticism. The terms are very glibly used by many music lovers, but are not definitely understood by all. The ordinary c

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