CHAPTER IV

INCIPIENT HARMONY

It can hardly be doubted that music was called into existence by religious feelings as soon as by any of which human creatures are capable. Even the most primitive rites are accompanied by something of the nature of music, and the religious states of awe and wonder and of ecstasy and devotion are all familiarly liable to engender musical utterance. The relation of religion to various arts varies with its principles and objects, and with the dispositions of the people who profess it. The religion of the ancient Greeks comprised everything which expressed the emotional inner being of mansuch as dances, theatrical performances, orgies, and an infinite variety of curious ceremonies which expressed every phase of what a man in modern times would consider essentially secular feelings. Similarly, many religions, of all times and types, comprise dancing of a frenzied description, and functions which call forth the most savage instincts of the human creature. In such cases the music is not limited to things which a modern Christian would regard as suitable for church purposes; for the Christian religion is distinguished from all others by its inwardness and quietude, and the absence of any outward energetic signs of excitement; and it is only on rare occasions that eccentric outbursts of ecstatic fervour in any cf its professors find utterance in lively gesticulations or rhythmic dance. From the very first the spirit of the religion was most perfectly and completely reproduced in its music, and even the various phases it passed through in many succeeding centuries are exactly pictured in the art which most closely presents the spiritual side of man.

In the early middle ages the warlike priest was not an

unfamiliar object; but nevertheless the spirit of the religion and religious life was essentially devotional and contemplative; and it followed that all the music employed in church ceremonies was vocal or choral, and almost totally devoid of any rhythmic quality and of everything which represented gesticulatory expression. This state of things was eminently favourable to the development of certain artistic features which were a necessary preliminary to the ultimate building up of the modern musical art. Dance music demands very little in the way of harmony. The world could go on dancing to the end of time without it; and whatever harmony is added to pure dance tunes, even in days of advanced art, is generally of the simplest and most obvious description. But vague melodic music, and vocal music which is sung by voices of different pitch, seem to call imperatively for the help of harmony; and unless the instinctive craving for choral harmony had led men to overcome its initial difficulties, the art could never have developed that particular kind of regularity in time which is independent of dance rhythm. It was the necessity of regulating the amount of time which should be allowed to particular notes when singers sang together, which brought about the invention of the standards of relative duration of notes, and the whole system of breves, semibreves, minims, and crotchets; and also the invention of the time signatures, which do not necessarily imply rhythm, but supply the only means by which various performers can be kept together, and irregular distribution of long and short notes made orderly and coherent. It is perfectly easy to keep instruments or voices together when the music is regulated by a dance rhythm; but in pure choral music, such as was cultivated from the tenth century till the sixteenth, it is quite another matter; for the parts were so far from moving upon any principle of accent, that one of the most beautiful effects, which composers sought after most keenly, was the gliding from harmony to harmony by steps which were so hidden that the mind was willingly deceived into thinking that they melted into one another. The mystery was effected by making some of the voices which sang the harmony

move and make a new harmony, while the others held the notes that belonged to the previous harmony; so that the continuity of the sound was maintained though the chords changed. This would have been impossible without some means of indicating the duration of the notes, and no style could so soon have brought men to face the necessity of solving the problem involved as the growing elaboration of choral music, of that unrhythmic kind which was the natural outcome of religious feeling of the Christian devotional type.

It is very remarkable how soon after the first definite appearance of Christian Church music as a historical fact men began to move in the direction of harmony. The harmonic phase of music has been exactly coeval with the development of that particular kind of intellectual disposition which continued to manifest itself more and more as modern Europe slowly emerged from the chaos which followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. It is as if harmony-the higher intellectual factor in music-began with the first glimmerings of modern mental development, and grew more and more elaborate and comprehensive, and more adapted to high degrees of expression and design, simultaneously with the growth of men's intellectual powers. As long as the Church reigned supreme, harmony remained more or less in the background, and made its appearance mainly as the result of the combination of the separate melodies which various voices sung at once. But towards the end of the sixteenth century it began to assert itself as the basis of certain new principles of design, and in the succeeding century, as secular life grew more and more independent of ecclesiastical influences, it became more and more the centre and basis upon which the whole system of artistic musical design was founded; and it ultimately became not only the essence of the structure, but a higher and richer means of immediate expression than was possible by the subtlest and most perfect treatment of any other kind of musical device.

But the first steps in this important development were slowly and laboriously achieved under the influence of the

ancient Church.

There seems no reason to doubt that the music used in the early Christian ritual was of Greek origin, and that certain traditional formulas for different parts of the service had been handed down from generation to genera. tion by ear. These were certainly quite unrhythmic and also rather melodically indefinite; but the circumstances under which they were used were so favourable to their preservation that they possibly obviated the difficulty which such vagueness puts in the way of accuracy of transmission. For anything which is part of a ritual has a tendency to be very carefully guarded, and in course of time to be strictly stereotyped; because whatever people hear and see when they are in the act of worship seems to share the sacredness of the function, and ultimately becomes itself a sacred thing which it is profanation to meddle with. But it was nevertheless inevitable that after the lapse of a few centuries the practice of different churches should have ceased to be quite uniform, and the authorities of the Church endeavoured in the fourth and sixth centuries to give special sanction to the traditions which appeared to have the best credentials. It was then that the connection of the music of the Church with the ancient Greek system was definitely acknowledged (as described on page 41); and though the regulations for systematising the art did not quite agree with the Greek system, owing to lack of opportunity to discover exactly what that was, the slight discrepancies did not affect the artistic consequences that followed. The Ambrosian and Gregorian schemes included a number of vocal formulas, consisting of traditional melodies, which became the basis of an extraordinarily prolonged and comprehensive development. They were the few established facts of musical art then existing, and upon them the fabric of modern music soon began to be

built.

The immediate source of a most important new departure seems to have been the simple fact that men's voices were of different calibres; for as some were deep basses and some high tenors, and some between the two, it was manifestly inconvenient that they should all sing their plain song at

the same pitch.

Some could not sing it high, and some could not sing it low. In extreme cases low basses and high tenors could sing an octave apart, but as a rule that was too wide for convenience; so men had to find some other relation of pitch at which it would be convenient to sing the plain song or chants simultaneously. In such a case it is of first importance to find a relation of pitch which shall sound agreeable in itself, and also one which would not cause certain notes of one part in the reduplicated melody to jar with certain notes in the other part. It must be clearly understood that such a process of doubling was not what is called singing in thirds or sixths in modern times. When people sing in that manner now, they do not each sing the same melody. The upper voice takes the melody, and the lower adds major or minor thirds, and sings tones or semitones, according to the nature of the scale or key in which the music is written. Thus if two voices sing the following

simple succession of notes together,

B

it is not a reduplication of melodies, but a process of harmonisation. The upper voice sings a semitone in the first step, A, where the lower sings a whole tone; and in the last step, B, the upper voice sings a whole tone where the lower sings a semitone. If the melodies were justly reduplicated at the

third, the result would be as follows,

Such a progression would have the tones and semitones in the same places in both melodies, but the effect would be hideous to modern ears, and would have been impossible to early medieval musicians, because they had not developed their scale sufficiently to supply such conflicting accidentals. And the same difficulties present themselves with all the intervals