A New History of English Music

A new history of English music by Ernest Walker, organist of Balliol College, Oxford, brings to mind the great debt that musical civilization owes to England. When Hucbald invented the Organum, the first attempt at harmony, it was nothing but a succession of fourths, giving fifths and octaves by inversion. Later on limits were set to the compass of both voices, which were sometimes forced to begin at unison and separate in oblique motion until they were a fourth apart This formed new intervals which were systematized by Guido of Arezzo. But it remained for England to develop the New Organum that contained contrary motion also. The new principle is shown in the manuscript called the Winchester Troper, dating from before 1100 A. D.

England witnessed the invention of measured notes for Walter Odington shared this honor with Franco of Cologne. England was also the home of Countepoint, which developed from the New Organum. The excellence of the famous "Sumer is icumen in," which dates from 1215 proves that there must have been a flourishing English school in the twelfth century. The Frenchman, Jean de Muris, writing in 1325 laments the good o1d days of the preceding century, and states that the French school of that time was founded on an English model. It was not until the fifteenth century that the Netherland school developed. We are accustomed to think of this century and the next as the contrapuntal period; but the first English school came four hundred years earlier, and even the second, with Dunstable, antedated the Flemish period.

There was still another great English school, at the close of the sixteenth century, and if the Age of Elizabeth had been less marked by literary fame it would have been known as a great musical period. Talli, Tye, White, Farrant, Morley, Weelkes and others made a famous group; Dowland brought lute music to its highest level ; and Wilbye's madrigals won him great renown. A century later the genius of Purcell again placed England in the foreground, but after that the sceptre passed to Handel, and Germany took the lead. Arne, Linley, Bishop and others kept English song at a high standard, but this was only a trifle to offer in comparison with Bach, Beethoven and the rest. A musical blight set in, from which England has not even yet recovered; for the living men whom we call great are nearly all experimenting with orchestral possibilities that they have not mastered.