692 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1912. 



best expression to this when, in his "Pictures of the German Past" he 

 muses on how solemnly the first bells must have sounded in the 

 German primeval forest. Now these first church bells were small 

 instruments made out of pieces of tin and iron nailed together and 

 hung in clumsy wooden frames, and their sharp tinlding was certainly 

 not an agreeable sound. What we call church music, however, has 

 no other relation to the musical art of early Christianity than that 

 wliich the sound of our splendid church bells has to these miserable 

 tinklings. 



We have at present the opportunity of demonstrating the effect 

 of the old Christain church music in the numerous forms of the 

 Hturgic songs which the church has preserved with exact fidelty, at 

 least as regards their tune. Among all these forms there is scarcely 

 a more eloquent one than the responsive chant of the litany on a fast 

 day. Regarding the Significance and the range of the idea of the 

 cantus planus, or plain song, one may dispute, but what musica plana — 

 that is, even, compact music — means, everyone knows who has once 

 felt the charm of the powerful hturgic songs. The monotony of 

 these songs, which we, fascinated, can not discern as coming from any 

 particular place, and of which the lively rhythm of the words does 

 not relieve the rigidity benumbs the senses and makes them sus- 

 ceptible of suggestions of all kinds. It is entirely immaterial what 

 immediate origin one may assign to the old Christian psalmody, 

 whether to the Jewish responsive chanting, the Greek ceremonial 

 music, or (as is made probable by the latest investigation of music) 

 the joint spoken prayer that the priest pronounces first and the congre- 

 gation repeats after him, always in the same restrained penitent tone, 

 one may say, which characterized the litany. The essential fact is 

 that the clear and unmistakable general character of the old 

 Christian psalmody approaches the primitive horizontal music, and 

 that it is entirely foreign to the characteristic European feeling. 



Attempts are constantly made in certain quarters to ascribe to the 

 oldest church music a definite sensuous beauty which it can not 

 have had. The cantus planus itself must be a very late develop- 

 ment and identical with the cantus firmus, a firm principal part 

 around w^hich a series of subordinate parts are woven. From such 

 beginnings it is not possible to explain any litany, or indeed any later 

 choral. It can not have been different with music than with the 

 structural arts. We see the Christians taking over the types of 

 classical art, but with their transference the old life was unfavorably 

 affected. The ancients thought in marble and bronze, while Christen- 

 dom, like priestly Egypt, thought in granite, and a granite saint must 

 hold the same relation to a Greek statue as the early church music 

 to the musical art of antiquity. A really free, lightly moving music 

 would have been the widest disturbance in the early Christian church. 



