1890.] on Evolution in Music. 59 



The development of harmony for six hundred years, from 

 A.D. 1000 to A.D. 1600, had underlying it a constant but very slow 

 change in the structure of the scales ; and the progress was made all 

 the slower by the notion prevalent in men's minds that these scales 

 were divinely-appointed institutions, and that tampering with them 

 was like mending the ordinances of the Deity. Much of the neces- 

 sary mending was done by profane secularists, who wrote dance tunes 

 and secular songs ; and the changes crept into serious music in defiance 

 of papal restrictions and ecclesiastical reluctance, in obedience to 

 the instinct which was as powerful in its slow steady action as any 

 law of the pliysical world. The thin end of the wedge for altering 

 the scale was inserted in the shape of certain arbitrary accidentals 

 which were introduced to modify obvious crudities of harmony ; 

 and when people got accustomed to them they by degrees established 

 themselves as part of the scales, and supplied the means of a new 

 system of classifying and defining the relative importance and func- 

 tions of notes in a scale. 



The methods adopted by the mediaeval composers for regulating 

 a piece of music were distinctly homogeneous. The commonest was 

 to take a familiar tune and give it to the tenors to sing, and to add 

 other parts to it in such a way as to produce a harmonious and 

 expressive whole. 



Another common device was to take two familiar tunes and to 

 twist and alter them about till it was endurable to sing them to- 

 gether ; sometimes adding another part, which sang nonsense syl- 

 lables, such as Balaam, Portare, or what not, to such notes as were 

 available. 1 cannot say that the result is commonly pleasing, but they 

 improved in the course of centuries, and the art in general got the more 

 heterogeneous as they found out fresh methods of artistic procedure. 

 In all of these, till the end of the sixteenth century, the same prin- 

 ciples are discernible. The harmony is always arrived at by com- 

 bining independent voice parts together, never by writing definite 

 lump chords. It was not till after the great development of pure 

 choral art had passed to its highest culmination, in the time of 

 Palestrina and Marenzio, that men began to think of writing chords 

 as chords. While this lengthy development was going on, they were 

 unconsciously absorbing the impressions which the sounds of chords 

 produced upon them ; and no one ever produced more divinely pure 

 sounds in the shape of choral chords than Palestrina and Marenzio ; 

 but they managed to contrive them by the marvellous skill with which 

 they distributed their combined independent voice parts, and not by 

 writing them deliberately as chords ; and the reluctance of the human 

 mind to come to close quarters with chords as such hindered them 

 from discovering the relationship of chords to one another; and 

 hence kept their art in a singularly indefinite state. All the choral 

 music of the greatest period, as well as of earliest days, is singularly 

 indefinite in design, owing to this lack of a sense of chord relation- 

 ship, and to uncertainty and variableness in the aspects of the cadences. 



