All these features are of historic importance, since they are traceable at periods when formal composition was timidly groping its way, and when the supposed value of the old modes and of contrapuntal structure, with its lack of 'form,' was keeping musicians from these more natural methods. All of them were noted in the Troubadour and Minnesinger periods (secs. 37-40), but their decided influence belongs rather to the 15th and 16th centuries. Even until 1600 some features of folk-music seemed to educated musicians rather vulgar. To-day we can see that there was no more valuable element in the evolution of modern styles than this same despised music of the people's instinct.
50. The Minstrel Class.—Popular music in a settled community involves a somewhat organized class of persons who make their living by it. Like the bards of the older time, the mediæval itinerant minstrels constituted a significant type. Such rude musicians were the medium through which folk-music was disseminated and preserved. By them the songs and dances of one locality were mingled with those of other places. They often wrought what they found into a finer shape or added to it from their own invention. They were usually skillful players, and often greatly improved musical instruments. Their business was not to theorize about music or to play the rôle of formal composers, but to render it with voice and finger so as to make it socially attractive and indispensable. They were bound to keep in touch with strictly popular taste. The minstrel, as his name implies, was the 'servant' of his audiences. Yet, wherever he was also something of a genius, he was incidentally a leader and teacher as well.
Throughout the Middle Ages the popularity of traveling singers and
players is constantly indicated. Perhaps they may have been the successors
of the tricksters and mountebanks of the later Roman domination.
The line between the clown and the minstrel proper was seldom sharply
drawn. Often there was a strong prejudice against all such itinerants because of their lawlessness—a prejudice that took shape in edicts, civil
and religious, which sometimes attempted to suppress them altogether.
But the popular craving for amusement—all the stronger because of
the hard and narrow conditions of life—gave them employment and a
measure of wondering admiration. Part of the contempt that has pursued
the whole art of music even to modern times is due to the mediæval association
of it with coarse buffoonery, athletic tricks and shows of trained
