58 Professor C. Hubert R. Parry [Feb. 28, 



falling to pieces of their empire. I should like to think that -their 

 neglect of the higher art of music was a concomitant of the corrupt 

 condition of society which led to their downfall. At any rate, the 

 state of music when we take it up in the Christian era, is but a ragged 

 reminiscence of Greek traditions. Their scale system had been 

 maintained to a certain extent in the use of the Christian Church, in 

 some of those curiously vague and jDicturesque pieces of melody 

 which go by the name of plain song, or cantus planus. One of the 

 characteristics of these tunes is their strange indefiniteness, which is 

 the chief cause of their picturesqueness ; as our minds instinctively 

 divine them to belong to an ancient and undeveloped age, and recall the 

 poetical side of a primitive religion. This vagueness and homogene- 

 ousness only by degrees passed away, under a phase of musical de- 

 velopment which belongs exclusively to modern times. Under the 

 influence of the development of harmony the scale was classified 

 into new groups, in which the relation of every note to every 

 other in every scale, and the function of every one of them, 

 became by degrees established. The development of harmony pro- 

 ceeded in exactly the same manner. The first experiment was the 

 essentially homogeneous one of singing the same melody in 

 two or three parts at difierent pitches simultaneously. The 

 interval chosen always astonishes the modern mind, because it is 

 so alien to our habits. But it is very easily accounted for. The 

 musicians of the tenth and eleventh centuries chose the intervals of 

 fourth and fifth, partly because it suited the relative distances of the 

 voices from one another, such as tenor to bass and soprano to con- 

 tralto ; and also because the fifth and the fourth are the only intervals 

 at which melodies can be sung without any marked contradiction 

 occurring between the notes of the respective scaler,. If a third was 

 taken, a leading note below the third would conflict with the second 

 of the lower scale, and the second of its scale would conflict with the 

 fourth of the lower, and so on ; whereas the scales of the fourth and 

 fifth only rarely conflict with the lower scale. 



Combined with this is the fact that these mediasvals' sense of 

 harmony was slow in developing. At first they only regarded the 

 fifths and fourths as consonant, and were very slow indeed in developing 

 the appreciation of such intervals as thirds and sixths. The human 

 mind had to be trained and educated up to it, much in the 

 same way as moderns are educated up to Brahms and Wagner. 

 From harmony in pure fifths, musicians passed slowly on by intro- 

 ducing ornamental notes, which was often done extemporaneously by 

 singers, giving rise to what was called the " contrapnnctus a mente" of 

 later times. 13ut the homogeneous condition of fifths and fourths was 

 slow in passing to a greater variety, and composers were several 

 centuries overcoming the elementary difficulties of part singing, to a 

 large extent owing to the fact that their scale, which had been 

 contrived for melodic clfcct, was not suited for the purposes of 

 harmony. 



