History of the Pianoforte and Pianoforte Players
9781465681904
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
It is in the Elizabethan age that the clavier begins for the first time to play a part in the world. In the English clavier-music, as in all English music at that time, there is a ravishing bloom, which vanished just as quickly from the popular concerts, never to appear again. Circumstances combined to favour it. A certain repose, a dependence upon art came upon the London society of that day, and at such times art penetrates easily into the privacy of the home. For centuries had the Low Countries held the sway of music; but the art of tone, which had made its way thither under the stars of Dufay, Okeghem, and Josquin des Près, remained in the service of the Church. It represented the rapid development of contrapuntal vocal harmony, as it had slowly developed itself into music per se from the figurations, which at the end of the tenth century began to found themselves on the canto fermo of the Gregorian material. Around the Gregorian pillars there had arisen a mathematical system of rules and proportions; of musical vaultings, symmetries, and mouldings, in which the ordering world-spirit seemed to have realised itself. As yet, however, there was no melody whose contour was unifying; no harmony whose development was to be foreseen; no singing voice resting on the support of an accompaniment. The voices ran according to the laws of their tempi, all equally important from soprano to bass; and their harmony only aided in reducing them to an average. The instrument of this great sacred music was the human voice, at first only the bearer of the tone, but then gradually here and there betraying a greater depth of feeling: and yet this great function of the voice had a value for expression which is not to be underrated. Even in this mathematical tone-system there lay the power of exhibiting nature as she is. If art was to escape from these rudiments into more intimate circles, the appropriate social surroundings must be provided. The home must develop. The public art of the Middle Ages had divided its favours between church and hall; it was in the church that counterpoint found its development; it was in the hall that the old popular song, without making special advance, maintained itself. The popular song ranged itself over against counterpoint, for it was pure melody, as we understand melody to-day, and it was well arranged as to rhythm in four or eight-bar “strains.” In two ways, however, counterpoint and popular song might meet: the first might absorb the second, or vice versa. It is well known what took place when counterpoint absorbed the popular song: throughout the later Middle Ages popular songs, even the vulgarest, are taken up in masses or motets as motives for figures; nay, more, when they alternate, while the Gregorian cantus holds its own alongside, church hymns are named after popular songs, and we stumble everywhere upon masses named after their underlying melody, “L’homme armé,” “Malheur me bat,” “O Venus,” and the like. But, as might be expected, these are taken up utterly into the framework of the voice-mathematic; their peculiar aroma disappears; they are thrown into contrapuntal form.
