In 1718, he quotes, as expressing his own ideas, these sorry French verses:
"Ne les élève pas (les anciens) dans un ouvrage saint,
Au rang où dans ce temps les auteurs ont atteint.
Plus féconde aujourd’hui, la musique divine
D’un art laborieux étale la doctrine,
Dont on voit chaque jour s’accroître les progrès."
These lines express his attitude. He is a modern, in the great quarrel between the ancients and the moderns; and he believes in progress. "One must never say to art: Thou shalt go no farther. One is always going farther, and one should always go farther."—"If there is no longer anything new to be found in melody," he writes to the timorous Graun, "it must be sought in harmony."[1]
Graun, the arch-conservative, is alarmed:
"To seek fresh combinations in harmony is, to my mind, to seek new letters in a language. Our modern professors are rather abolishing a few."[2]
"Yes," writes Telemann, "they tell me that one must not go too far. And I reply that one must go to the very depths if one would deserve the name of a true master. This what I wished to justify in in my system of Intervals, and for this I expect not reproaches, but rather a gratias, at least in the future."
This audacious innovator amazed even his fellow-innovators, such as Scheibe. Scheibe, in the preface to his Treatise on Intervals (1739) says that his acquaintance with Telemann at Hamburg convinced him still more completely of the truth of his system: "for," he writes, "I found in this great man's composition very frequent intervals of an unaccustomed character which I had for a
