little else. And even up to the end of the fourteenth century the effect produced by getting a certain number of voices to go together at all seems to have been so new and attractive that it was hardly necessary to go any further afield to strike men with wonder at the achievement.

All this development naturally proceeded under the wing of the Church. The system of the modes prescribed by ecclesiastical authority, and such rules of counterpoint as ecclesiastical theorists discovered, pervaded such secular music as there was quite as much as the genuine Church music. There were plenty of attempts made to compose secular motets, and lively secular tunes with a sense of rhythm in them made their appearance therein, but the contrapuntal procedure was the same in all; and the same phases of progress are noticeable in one as in the other. Even folk-tunes were influenced by the modes which were taught by the Church; and the more highly organised songs of the Troubadours, little as their authors wished it, had to submit to the universal influence. The ecclesiastics were the only people who had devised any system for recording music accurately, and therefore even if a man wished to strike out an independent line, his musical utterances were sure to be recorded in terms which only the musicians trained in the school of the Church knew how to use.

The Troubadours indeed stand outside the line of the direct development of modern music, as their efforts seem to have been purely melodic; and though there are some beautiful tunes still remaining which are attributed to them, they represent a development of lyrical music which appears to have had no immediate consequences. It was the fruit of an isolated outburst of refined poetic feeling, and when its natural home in the South of France was harried and ruined by the Church the impulse dwindled and ceased.

But the crude efforts of the early contrapuntists, whether secular or ecclesiastical, served as the immediate foundation of one of the greatest eras in the history of musical art, and, through that era, as the ultimate source of the characteristic system of harmony which forms the distinguishing feature of modern music.

CHAPTER V

THE ERA OF PURE CHORAL MUSIC

THE early period from the ninth till the end of the fifteenth century was, as it were, the babyhood of modern music, when ideas and modes of musical thought were indefinite, unsystematised, and unpractical. The Church, like a careful mother, watched over and regulated all that was done, and the infantile efforts scarcely emerged at any time into definiteness either of form or expression.

The two centuries which followed, up to the beginning of the seventeenth century, were the period of the youth of modern music-a period most pure, serene, and innocent-when mankind was yet too immature in things musical to express itself in terms of passion or of force, but used forms and moods of art which are like tranquil dreams and communings of man with his inner self, before the sterner experiences of life have quite awakened him to its multiform realities and vicissitudes. The manner in which the inevitable homogeneity of an early stage of art presents itself is still discernible from every point of view. The most comprehensive fact is that almost all the music of these two centuries is purely choral—that is, either written for several voices in combination without independent accompaniment, or devised upon methods which were invented solely for that kind of performance. It followed from this general fact that the methods of art were also homogeneous; for the processes which are fit to be used by voices alone are more limited in range and variety than those which can be employed by instruments, owing to the greater difficulty of taking awkward intervals and of sustaining the pitch, and to the necessity of adapting the notes to words; and also to the fact that the words often lessen the need of absolute principles

of design, by supplying a meaning to the music in general, when without them it would be incoherent.

The principal reason of this absorption of composers in the cultivation of choral music is obvious. It is a well-ascertained law of human nature, that men will not go out and labour in the desert at haphazard when they are fully occupied in extracting unlimited gold from a rich mine. Neither will they (in a healthy state of existence) abandon an occupation which is full of absorbing interest, and constantly presents fresh problems most tempting to solve, for the mere chance of amusement in some other direction. At the time when the great era of pure choral music was beginning, musical human beings, earnestly disposed, were just awakening to the singular possibilities of beauty which the combinations of many singing voices afforded. They were awakening to the actual beauty of the sound of chords sung by voices to the beauty of delicate variety between one chord and another, and between chords in different positions (partly owing to the various qualities of the different registers of the voices)— to the beauty of the actual human expression of the individual voices, and to the beauty of the relations of the melodic forms of the different parts to one another. To win the delight of realising the various phases of these effects was enough to keep them fully occupied on even severer labour than the development of artistic technique; but the incitement quickened their musical instinct marvellously, and in a short time developed in them a delicacy of perception of artistic means and a sense of style which is almost unique in the history of the art. In later times composers are distracted by the varieties of style and taste which have been developed, in the necessary course of musical evolution, for different artistic purposes, such as the theatre and the concertroom; and they often introduce the formulas which belong to one kind of art into another to which they are quite unsuited; but in the early days there were no such distractions. Men's minds were occupied by the conditions of choral performance alone; and the better they understood what they were trying to do, the more refined and pure their artistic methods became.

The turning-point from the helpless experimental crudity which marks the infancy of the art, to the comparative certainty of aim and execution which indicates its healthily maturing youth, was somewhere about the end of the fourteenth century. The state of transition is most strongly apparent in the works of the English composer Dunstable, who in some works still illustrates the bewildering amorphousness of the early stages of the art, and in others shows a fair mastery of both design and general effect; casting his vocal movements in thoroughly intelligible designs, and disposing his voice parts so as to obtain a really attractive quality of sound, not for the casual moment only, but in passages which are sufficiently long to be artistically effective. It marks no little advance in skill and in the mastery of technique, when composers were able to look beyond the mere overcoming of incidental difficulties and to make use of their devices for a purpose; and after Dunstable's time a definite purpose of some sort is more and more apparent in all they attempted.

It is probably common to all arts, that when the early stages of wrestling with technical difficulties have been passed, the aim of artists seems to be to produce effects which are more noteworthy for their beauty than for definiteness of expression and variety of characterisation. Distinctive definiteness of expression was certainly not the aim of the composers of the great choral period; and if it had been, they could not have succeeded without launching out beyond the limits of the art which they understood into that of experiment without precedent and without standards of test. Indeed, they were quite sufficiently occupied in applying the skill they had developed to the simple purpose of making groups of various voices produce effects of smooth and harmonious tone. In the main, the music was singularly indefinite in almost every respect. The style had grown up entirely under the influence. of the Church, and composers had learnt how to solve their earliest artistic problems by using the old Church melodies as a basis whereon to add voice to voice and make a harmonious combination; and as the devotional sentiment of the Christian religion belonged to that inward class of spiritual

emotions which expressed themselves vocally rather than by animated gestures, it followed that all this music was unrhythmic; and consequently it was also divested of all that kind of regular orderliness of structure which seems so indispensable in the maturer art of modern times.

It is true that composers had successfully elaborated methods for regulating the lengths of the notes, but the establishment of principles of relative duration tended rather to obscure the rhythmic or metrical order of the music than to define it at first, owing to the manner in which they applied them. The reason for this lay in the strong feeling musicians had for the independence of the voice parts. Their artistic instinct was specially attracted by the fascinating effect of diverse movement controlled into the unity of a perfect flow of harmony. To them it was still essential that each individual voice part should be pleasurable to sing, and the more subtly the independence of each singer or voice part was suggested, the more fascinating was the artistic effect. The result was that in one phase of this kind of art composers aimed chiefly at making the accents and climaxes of the various voice parts constantly alternate with one another. One voice part rose when another fell, one held a note when another moved, one came to its highest climax at one moment, and then descended, while another, as it were overlapping, moved up in its turn to another climax, and then in turn gave way. And as the skill of composers in managing such progressions improved, they found out how to distribute the climaxes of the various voice parts so as to make them gain in vital warmth by coming ever closer and closer; and the hearer could in a moderate degree be excited by the sound of successive crises in different qualities of tone, sometimes tenor, sometimes treble, sometimes bass; each of which seemed successively to rise into prominence within the smooth texture of the harmonious flow of sound, and then to be merged into it again as another voice took its place.

The tendency of all such devices was to obscure the rhythmic element of the music. But the necessity for orderliness in the relative lengths of notes brought about