The Beginnings of Modern Music

In regard to the question, At what point can the history of modern music strictly be said to begin? Few authorities, probably, would wholly agree; but one thing may be taken as certain, that for its beginnings we must look far back into the mists of the Middle Ages, when history is barely distinguishable from romance, and fact and fiction stand side by side. First of all it is necessary to find out precisely what we mean by modern as opposed to medieval music, and in what essential points the one differs from the other.

In a word, then, the main characteristics of modern music as opposed to medieval are rhythm, harmony, and the key system. The evolution of our modern system of harmony from the weird "organum" of Hucbald, and of our keys from the ecclesiastical modes, was so gradual that it is impossible to fix upon any date as the precise moment when one gave way definitely to the other.

The idea of rhythm is, of course, as old as the human race itself. The primitive efforts of a savage to give musical expression to his feelings are rhythmical without being musical, and the idea of melody is a far later and more advanced development. Yet, in spite of the hoary antiquity of rhythm, what we may call its artistic employment is of comparatively recent growth, and it is the use of rhythm in this sense that forms one of the main characteristics of modern as opposed to medieval music. To the union of rhythm with harmony modern music owes its birth, and it is to the first dawn of an attempt to incorporate these two mighty forces that we must look if we wish to date the beginnings of modern music.

From the time of St. Ambrose onward the river of music flowed in two channels, parallel but independent. The course of ecclesiastical music under the leaden sway of the Church was so little removed from actual stagnation that it was not until the tenth century that the first feeble attempts at harmony were made by Hucbald, and it took another five hundred years to arrive at even such mastery of counterpoint as is exhibited by the composers of the fifteenth century. Meanwhile, the music of the people pursued its way independent of ecclesiastical influence. Ignored, or at any rate despised, by the monks, the self elected guardians of intellectual development, it flourished wherever men had hearts to feel and voices to sing.

The folk songs of the Middle Ages, which happy accident has preserved to us, have all the freshness, melody, and rhythmic force that the Church music of the period is so conspicuously without. Nothing can express more vividly the narrow outlook upon life of the medieval Church than the fact that this rich store of music, ready to every man's hand, should have been allowed, so to speak, to run to waste. Yet from time to time some holy brother, less dehumanized than his fellows, had glimpses of the musical possibilities of folk song. In England, for instance, far back in the thirteenth century, a monk of Reading took the lovely folk song, "Sumer is icumen in," and, with a grasp of the principles of counterpoint which for that period is nothing short of amazing, made of it a round for four voices upon a drone bass given to two voices more. He even went as far as to hallow it to the service of the Church by fitting sacred words to the music. Whether it was sung in the choir of Reading Abbey or not we cannot say, but if it was it ought certainly to have revolutionized Church music on the spot, for after singing that liquid and lovely melody, harmonized with so much charm, to go back to dreary plain chant and the ear lacerating harmonies of the "organum" must have been, one would think, more than even a thirteenth century monk could endure.

However, both as an example of folk song being used as the foundation of Church music and as a contrapuntal triumph, "Sumer is icumen in" appears to have been an isolated phenomenon. Nothing like it of the same period has been preserved. Certainly it cannot be taken as typical of any tendency of the time toward a more natural and truthful method of expression. In the thirteenth century the epoch of freedom was still far away. If we compare "Sumer is icumen in" with the Tournay mass, which was written about a hundred years later, we find ourselves back once more in the dismal darkness of the Middle Ages. In this mass, written for three voices by some unknown Fleming, there is very little advance on the earliest strivings toward harmonic expression of the tenth century. Hucbald's system of consecutive fourths and fifths--the so called organum--is still in full swing, and the result to our ears is indescribably hideous.

A century later came Willem Dufay, one of the most important names in the history of early music, who was a contemporary of the English Dunstable and of the Burgundian Gilles Binchois. With Dufay the influence of popular upon ecclesiastical music first takes definite shape. He wrote masses which are founded upon melodies associated with popular songs, a practice which, though it afterward led to strange and scandalous developments, unquestionably had the immediate effect of giving life to the dry bones of Church music. Further, we may note in the music of Dufay and his period a feeling for definite rhythm such as could only have been produced by the influence of popular music. Modern music was now fairly started upon its career. The generation that succeeded Dufay, of which Okeghem may be taken as a typical figure, had an unmistakable feeling for sheer musical beauty, and we find the composers of his day actually attempting to describe the sight and sounds of nature in tones of music. By the side of this we interesting aspirations there was a disheartening tendency toward cleverness for its own sake. Okeghem and his fellows were never so happy as when inventing abstruse "canons" -- musical puzzles which taxed the resources of the most learned to solve. Nevertheless, these exercises could not but give technical dexterity, and as a matter of fact during this period the mechanical side of music was developed to an astonishing extent.

In the middle of the fifteenth century Josquin des Pres was born, the first man who can properly be called a great composer in something like the modern acceptation of the term. In Josquin's music there is a beauty which can be appreciated without any reference to the man's position in the history of music. Josquin is the first musical composer who gives a modern hearer the impression that he knows how to get the effects at which he is aiming. The purely pioneer stage of musical development is over. For the first time we are in the presence of an artist. A glance at Josquin's music reveals the importance of his position with regard to the development of modern music. He shows us for the first time a highly gifted composer consciously blending popular and ecclesiastical music. From the popular he gets his freshness of melody and his sense of rhythm, from the ecclesiastical his knowledge of the principles of harmony and counterpoint. In his secular music, in the part songs and canzonets of which he was practically the inventor, we find what are obviously harmonized versions of popular airs, little gems of melody, such as "Petite Camusette," which are as entrancing now as on the day he wrote them. And in his sacred music the popular influence is scarcely less noticeable. Take, for example, the "Ave Maria," which has been printed by M. Charles Bordes in his "Anthologic des maitres religieux primitifs," and compare it with a motet by Dufay or Dunstable, written only a generation earlier. Instead of the long un-rhythmical sweep of the Gregorian tunes, we have short crisp phrases, sometimes treated canonically, but often harmonized in simple chords, just in the modern fashion. The motet, too, is constructed in a curiously advanced style, the flow of the piece being broken by a delightful little passage in triple time, in which the influence of popular music is unmistakable.

The importance of Josquin's work was speedily proved by the generation that succeeded him. Willaert in Venice, and Jannequin in Paris, to name only two of his pupils, carried his tradition far and wide. In England, where general progress was retarded by the Wars of the Roses, the music of the early part of the sixteenth century shows little race of Josquin's influence, but in other European countries the iron traditions of Church music began to yield at the touch of popular song. In Germany folk tunes, such as "Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen," were openly annexed by Luther and the Reformed Church, and used as hymns, a proceeding akin to that of the Salvation Army in our day. In Italy the invasion of the Netherlanders was followed by the establishment of music schools, that of Goudimel at Rome, where Palestrina was a pupil, being the most famous. At Venice, Adrian Willaert is said to have introduced antiphonal writing into Church music, fired thereto by the presence of two organs in St. Mark's Church, of which he was organist, but it is only necessary to glance at Josquin's music, the "Ave Maria," for instance, to which reference has already been made, to find there the germs of antiphonal writing, as indeed of much else that is attributed to a later age. The sixteenth century saw the rise of the madrigal, which with its offshoots, the canzone, the balletto (the latter designed for dancing as well as singing), the villanella, and other delightful forms of unaccompanied vocal music, speedily gained wide popularity in Italy, and before the end of the century in England as well.

In music of this kind we find not only the most brilliant display of technic, but an ever growing feeling for musical beauty. Allied to this was a rudimentary taste for realistic effects, taking form in an attempt to echo the sounds of nature and of human life, at first purely imitative, as in Gombert's musical imitation of bird calls and Jannequin's famous "Bataille de Marignan," and afterward more artistic, as in Luca Marenzio's lovely madrigal, "Scaldava il sol," with its chirping grasshoppers, or his still more beautiful "Strider faceva," with its imitation of shepherd's pipes, or the numerous "cuckoo" pieces by English composers, in which the bird's cry is used as a definite musical motive with admirable effect.

Experiments of this kind led naturally to innovations in harmony, and long before the end of the sixteenth century composers began to be uneasy in the fetters of the modal system. The process of development which ended in the Church modes being replaced by our modern key system was very gradual; in fact, it was not until the age of Bach that the older system ceased to exercise some sort of influence upon music, but by the beginning of the seventeenth century the battle was practically over. All through the sixteenth century the composers of Italy and the Netherlands were continually enlarging the borders of permissible harmony, and every innovation meant a nail in the coffin of the modal system. The increasing use of accidentals, which in the strict days of the modal system were only permitted with many restrictions, and the gradual acquisition of the principles of modulation had the result of effacing the subtle distinctions which existed between the various modes. The laws of evolution worked here as consistently as in the animal kingdom. The fittest of the modes survived and became the major and minor scales of the new key system; while others, though lingering for a while in Church music, soon ceased to have any vital influence upon the development of music.

The English composers of the Elizabethan age were among the hardiest innovators of the period. Not only were they continually making experiments in harmony, often with hideous if interesting results, but they appear to have been in advance of their Italian and Netherland contemporaries in their grasp of the principles of modulation. The attempts of Byrd and Orlando Gibbons to express the emotions of pity and terror by crude violations of the accepted rules of harmony are among the first signs of a revolt against the laws which governed the polyphonic school, while in the madrigals of Wilbye we find a consummate ease of technic and a graceful flow of modulation such as are rare even in the most accomplished Italian writers of the period, and are certainly not to be found in the productions of the Netherland school, at any rate before the days of Sweelinck. But in spite of the beauty of the English madrigals, it is in the sacred music of the Italian masters that we find the most perfect utterance of the time, and of all the Italians the most gifted was Palestrina, whose name stands for all that is best and purest in the music of the Church, in whose development he played so striking and so formative a part.