Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/97

HISTORY.] MUSIC 85 notes should be raised or lowered by sharps or flats, and that these signs were never written but for the direction of boys and other executants who had not attained to mastery of their art. The treachery of tradition is exem plified in the loss of the rules for this once generally under stood practice of notal inflexion ; but the inference is strong that, could these rules be recovered, many of the melodies now called Gregorian might resume a musical character of which they are robbed by strict adherence to their written notes. English In England during the 16th century choral music kept school, pace with the age. This is evidenced in the works of Tallis and Byrde (Bird, or Byrd), who wrote for the Roman ritual, and continued their labours for the Anglican service as modified by the Reformation, which exercised the genius of many another, of whom Orlando Gibbons was the crown ing glory, for the few of his works that are accessible in comparison with what he is believed to have produced are classed among the masterpieces of their style and their period. The same musicians, or most of them, are as notable for their secular as for their sacred writings. Oratorio. It was in the middle of the 16th century that the class of composition now ranked as the highest was originated. The oratorio dates its existence and its name from the meetings held by San Filippo Neri in the oratory of his church in Rome, at first in 1556, for religious exercise and pious edification. He was the confessor and friend of Giovanni Animuccia, whom he engaged to write music to be interspersed throughout his discourses. Originally this consisted of laudi or short hymns, the extent of which was afterwards enlarged ; by and by the spoken matter was replaced by singing, and ultimately the class of work took the form in which it is cast by present composers. Such is the source of the didactic oratorio ; the dramatic ora torio is an offshoot of the same, but is distinguished by its representation of personal characters and their involvement in a course of action. The first instance of this kind of writing was the production of Emilio del Cavalieri, La Rappresentazione dell Anima e del Corpo, which, like its didactic precursor, was given in the oratory of a church in Rome (1600). 1 Domi- To the beginning of the 16th century is due a more nant significant matter than the secularization of studied music, seventh. th an ^ e re f orm O f the music of the church, and even than the labours of those musicians of whose great names only the most notable have been cited. The matter in question refers not to art-forms nor to artists, but to the fact that music has its foundation in the natural laws of acoustics, and thus it lays open the principle for which Pagan philosophers and Christians had been vainly groping through centuries, while a veil of mathematical calculation hung between them and the truth. Jean Mouton of Rolling in Lorraine (1475- 1522) is the earliest musician in whose works has been found an example of the phenomenal chord of the dominant 7th approached with the full freedom of present-day prac tice. The discovery is usually ascribed to Claudio Monte- verde, of whom and of his great art services much will be said when treating of the ensuing century. Like others of the wonders of nature, the chord and its application seem not to have come suddenly into knowledge, much less into acceptance, but to have been experimented upon with less or more of hardihood by one musician after another, until good effect had silenced dispute and authorized the adoption of this beautiful harmony into the language of music. The discovery of the grounds of its justification is to be traced to a still later time. The speciality of the chord consists in its comprising between its 3d and 7th the interval of the diminished 5th, the two notes of our diatonic scale 1 The correspondence of this account with that of the rise of Greek tragedy is obvious. which are omitted by many primitive nations the 4th and 7th from the keynote and which perplexed the con siderations of theorists and practitioners, as has in the foregoing been repeatedly shown. Speculation as to the new delight the first hearing of this combination must have occasioned is precarious ; the opposition with which it was encountered by the orthodox is certain. Yet another prominent feature in musical history dates Hymns from the beginning of the 16th century, the practice of and hymnody. Luther is said to have been the first to write chorals - metrical verses on sacred subjects in the language of the people, and his verses were adapted sometimes to ancient church melodies, sometimes to tunes of secular songs, and sometimes had music composed for them by himself and others. Many rhyming Latin hymns are of earlier date whose tunes are identified with them, some of which tunes, with the subject of their Latin text, are among the Reformer s appropriations ; but it was he who put the words of praise and prayer into the popular mouth, associated with rhythmical music which aided to imprint the words upon the memory and to enforce their enunciation. In conjunction with his friend Walther, Luther issued a collec tion of poems for choral singing in 1524, which was followed by many others in North Germany. The English versions of the Psalms by Sternhold and Hopkins and their pre decessors, and the French version by Marot and Beza were written with the same purpose of fitting sacred minstrelsy to the voice of the multitude. Goudimel in 1566 and Le Jeune in 1607 printed harmonizations of tunes that had then be come standard for the Psalms, and in England several such publications appeared, culminating in Ravenscroft s famous collection (1621); in all of these the arrangements of the tunes were by various masters. The English practice of hymn-singing was much strengthened on the return of the exiled Reformers from Frankfort and Geneva, Avhen it became so general that, according to Bishop Jewell, thousands of the populace who assembled at Paul s Cross to hear the preaching would join in the singing of psalms before and after the sermon. The placing of the choral song of the church within Elabora- the lips of the people had great religious and moral influ- tion of ence ; it has had also its great effect upon art, shown in 10 the productions of the North German musicians ever since the first days of the Reformation, which abound in exercises of scholarship and imagination wrought upon the tunes of established acceptance. Some of these are accompaniments to the tunes with interludes between the several strains, and some are compositions for the organ or for orchestral instruments that consist of such elaboration of the themes as is displayed in accompaniments to voices, but of far more complicated and extended character. A special art -form that was developed to a very high degree, but has passed into comparative disuse, was the structure of all varieties of counterpoint extemporaneously upon the known hymn-tunes (chorals), and several masters acquired great fame by success in its practice, of whom Reinken (1623-1722), Pachelbel (1653-1706), Georg Boehm, and the great Bach are specially memorable. The hymnody of North Germany has for artistic treatment a strong advantage which is unpossessed by that of England, in that for the most part the same verses are associated with the same tunes, so that, whenever the text or the music is heard, either prompts recollection of the other, whereas in England tunes were always and are now often composed to metres and not to poems ; any tune in a given metre is available for every poem in the same, and hence there are various tunes to one poem, and various poems to one tune. 2 In England a tune is named generally after 2 The old tune for the 100th Psalm and Croft s tune for the 104th are almost the only exceptions, unless "God save the King" may ba