62 Professor C. Hubert E. Parry [Feb. 28, 



Bach's time onwards. The later development of oratorio and opera 

 depended to a great extent upon the progress of instrumental forms of 

 art, which were slower in making a beginning, but developed more 

 steadily, and under the influence of a greater spirit of earnestness ; 

 as in instrumental music the temptations to mere meretricious display- 

 are not so great and inevitable. 



Composers were very slow in finding out what to do in instru- 

 mental music. They imitated the old choral forms, such as madrigals 

 and canzonas, being led to the procedure by the similarity of the 

 group of independent instruments to the group of independent voices, 

 but they did not arrive at anything very enjoyable, except in one line, 

 which was our modern type of fugue. This, in its highest form, is 

 probably as much an instrumental product as a vocal one, though 

 originally based on choral forms of art. The immediate origin of its 

 peculiar traditions for enunciating the subject or musical idea, is based 

 upon the obvious device of making the diiferent voices sing the same 

 phrase to the same words ; which was systematised in early days, up 

 to a certain point, by making the voices take the phrases in the parts 

 of the scale which best suited their register. This resulted in a very 

 effective balance of question and answer (or Dux and Comes) even in 

 early times ; but in the old polyphonic days, after the first statement 

 of the initial phrase by each member of the group of voices, the 

 movement tailed off into indefiniteness, and the initial phrases did not 

 appear again. In course of time composers found out the effect of 

 coherence which a frequent repetition of so salient a feature as the 

 initial phrase gave to a whole movement, and began to repeat their 

 subject over and over again. 



The progress from such modified homogeneity to definite hetero- 

 geneity was arrived at under the influence of modern harmonic 

 conditions and modes of thought, in which these alternations of the 

 subject and the episodes were accompanied by contrasting changes 

 of key — passing out of the original key into others, and drawing the 

 recurrence of the subjects closer and closer as the original key was 

 returned to, and firmly re-established at the conclusion. This form was 

 one of the first to arrive at maturity, partly through the genius of the 

 great organist Frescobaldi, and later, obviously, through Handel and 

 Bach ; and it has not been materially improved upon by after ages, 

 though its wonderful elasticity always admits of its being presented in 

 artistic aspects, and with fresh artistic objects. And though pedantry 

 has run riot in it, it has not ceased to be inviting to some types of 

 really poetical and musical composers. 



The other kind of instrumental music, which was the ultimate 

 basis and root of at least half of all modern instrumental music, was 

 the aboriginal dance form. At the time when this type began to 

 attract the attention of artistic composers, it had reached the not very 

 advanced stage of a tune divided by a strong close into two halves, 

 the first of which tended out from the principal key centre to a 

 melodic or harmonic centre which was in apposition to it, and the 



