MUSIC. 



HISTORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF MUSICAL ART. 



' TV/T USIC is a new art ;' so says a recent accom- 

 IV J. plished writer upon the subject ; and the 

 statement, although almost paradoxical in appear- 

 ance, is perfectly true in fact. No doubt, the art of 

 making sounds from which the adjective ' musical ' 

 could not in strictness be withheld has become 

 known to every nation at a very early stage of its 

 progress towards civilisation, and frequently, at a 

 not much later stage, the art of making these sounds 

 succeed each other in what must strictly be called 

 a ' melody ;' but using the word music even in 

 the wide sense of any succession or combination 

 of musical sounds pleasing to our ear, still Mr 

 Hullah's assertion holds good, that ' music is a new 

 art.' We esteem the Grecian statue unapproach- 

 able ; its very fragments, buried for centuries, and 

 but now unearthed, are priceless ; we strive to 

 imitate, not to excel, the Grecian temple ; we 

 reverently build the towers at Cologne in the 

 spirit of the first architects of that glorious cathe- 

 dral ; but with music we live in the present, not 

 the past. Mozart died in 1792, Beethoven in 1827 ; 

 Weber, Mendelssohn, Schubert, and Schumann 

 have all flourished in the present century, and 

 Wagner still lives. Scarcely any, indeed, of the 

 composers whose works are now performed (with 

 the exception of a few Church writers), but were 

 alive in the middle of the last century. 



But music is not only modern, but local. Among 

 all European nations one musical system is 

 adopted, and one method of subdividing the scale 

 only satisfies our ears. But among the eastern 

 and other nations the whole system and sub- 

 division differs essentially from ours. Frequently 

 their music cannot be written in our notation ; 

 they use sounds unknown to us ; our ears derive 

 no satisfaction from their cadences and closes ; 

 and, in fact, their music and ours has scarcely any- 

 thing in common but the name. The difference, 

 it must be borne in mind, is not the difference 

 between barbarous and civilised music. European 

 music in the middle ages, and Greek music, so far 

 as we know anything of it, was barbarous enough ; 

 but we can trace its gradual expansion and de- 

 velopment all through the centuries, and see that 

 the germ of modern music really was in it 

 The tonality (the mutual relation between the 

 different notes forming ' the scale ') of the Greek 

 chorus was the same as that of Tann/iauser, 

 so that we could write the former in the 

 same notation as the latter. But a Bengali 

 chant can never develop into a German opera ; 

 the two things are entirely apart and distinct. 

 The question of the possible or probable develop- 

 ment of these non- European music systems is a 

 very interesting one, but one which has attracted 

 little attention. Time only can decide whether 

 they will disappear, supplanted by European 

 tonality, or whether they will follow their natural 

 course of development, merely stimulated by 

 European culture. All that we can be certain of 

 97 



is, that they cannot develop into music pleasing 

 to European ears, as at present constituted 



In this paper we shall endeavour to sketch the 

 rise and development of musical art in Europe. 

 We shall avoid biographical details, which can 

 easily be obtained elsewhere, and speak of indi- 

 vidual artists only in connection with their 

 influence upon this art. 



GREEK MUSIC. 



There can be few subjects in reference to which 

 the disproportion between what has been written 

 and what is really known is greater than the 

 music of the Greeks. The more important of 

 the facts actually discovered or known may be 

 very shortly summed up. The Greeks were 

 acquainted with both vocal and instrumental 

 music, and, in the time of their greatest prosperity, 

 these two seem to have been always used to- 

 gether. In the choruses of the plays, the vocal 

 part was unisonous, and consisted, probably, of 

 monotonous phrases without time, in our sense of 

 the word (but possessing rhythm and accent), and 

 also without melody in the modern sense. They 

 were ignorant of the principles of 'key relation- 

 ship,' and using the scale of C,* formed their 

 melodies in various ' modes,' each of which had 

 for its fundamental tone some note in that scale, 

 and for its other tones the related notes in the 

 same scale. Some idea of the effect of this will 

 be obtained by playing any melody written in 

 the keys of D or E upon the piano on the white 

 notes only. On the whole, it seems probable that 

 the music to which the choruses were sung very 

 greatly resembled the (so-called) Gregorian chants. 

 The Greeks possessed several varieties of lyre, 

 and had also pipes or flutes, as well as instruments 

 of percussion. Until a comparatively late period, 

 these seem to have been used in the theatre 

 only as accompaniment to voices. Whether they 

 played in unison and octaves with the voices, or 

 played any kind of harmony, has been a point 

 keenly contested, and on which we cannot here 

 give an opinion. If any harmony were used, it 

 was probably a succession of fifths and fourths 

 which would be intolerable to the modern ear. 

 But it would be more interesting to know what 

 the music of the people was outside the theatre 

 than in it, and of this, unfortunately, there is no 

 trace. It is difficult to suppose that a people 

 like the Greeks, vivacious as well as cultured, 

 should have had no domestic music, and it is 

 almost equally difficult to suppose that the Hel- 

 lenic ploughman whistled nothing more lively 

 than Gregorian chants to his team. If we can- 

 not accept either of these positions, we must 

 suppose that there was a school of popular music 

 existing along with the classical music of the 



In the ' diatonic genus.' In the * chromatic ' and ' enharmo 

 genera, the case was different, but these are les important 

 historically, and need not be described hew. . 



