HISTORY OF MUSIC. 



Callum; and in the Mixo-Lydian we have Scots 

 ivha hae, and many others. Unfortunately, in 

 several instances, a zeal without knowledge has 

 4 amended' the old tunes, and by sharpening a 

 note here, and flattening there, has brought them 

 into accordance with modern ideas, at the expense 

 of all their beauty and originality. 



GREGORY THE GREAT. 



After the death of Ambrose, the music of the 

 church seems again to have fallen into the direst 

 confusion, in which it remained until the time of 

 Gregory the Great (pope, 590-604 A.D.). Gregory's 

 labours are better known to us than those of 

 Ambrose, but it is questionable whether his work 

 was really so difficult. The limits of the Ambrosian 

 tones had become very uncertain, and the church 

 singing altogether too free and secular ; and 

 Gregory's first work seems to have been to find 

 out what was really authorised by the Ambrosian 

 system, and to clear away the many abuses with 

 which two centuries had encumbered it He 

 added to the four ancient or 'authentic' modes 

 four others, called 'plagal ' or derivative, each of 

 which began with a note a fourth lower than the 

 authentic mode from which it was derived. The 

 lowest notes of the eight scales thus formed a 

 complete diatonic scale, and these were indicated 

 by Gregory by the first seven letters of the alpha- 

 bet, this nomenclature being the same as that 

 which is still used. Gregory collected the results 

 of all his labours into an Antiphonarium, an 

 authorised collection of church music, which is 

 used to this day in the Roman Catholic Church. 



During all this time, musical notation was 

 scarcely known, and it was the work of years to 

 train a chorister. With our present system of 

 notation, clumsy and imperfect as it is, still 

 every note and phrase is so defined that it can 

 only be rightly sung in one way. For the 

 first eleven centuries of our era, however, the 

 very reverse was the case. The MS. music of 

 this period is very uncertain in its indications of 

 pitch, and totally wanting in any indications what- 

 ever of time or expression. It must be remem- 



bered always, though, that however little rhythm 

 there is, or seems^ to be, in the old ecclesiastical 

 forms, it can never have been wanting in the 

 popular music, if for no other reason than that the 

 universal amusement of dancing must necessarily 

 have had a rhythmic accompaniment 



GUIDO ARETINO. 



The great churchmen of whom we have been 

 speaking seem to have been so much absorbed in 

 arranging the forms in which music was perforce 

 to be moulded, that they were never able to look 

 at the matter as a whole, and for many years their 

 successors had not the genius to do so. No 

 attempt seems to have been made fairly to grapple 

 with the difficulties of music, or even to ascertain 

 what these were, for more than four hundred years 

 after the time of Gregory, and the study of music 

 was still so difficult as to be the study of a lifetime. 

 At. the beginning of the nth century there rose 

 another great musical monk, who applied him- 

 self to the clearing up and removal of these diffi- 

 culties with so much vigour and success as to 

 put the art of music fairly on a new footing. This 

 man, to whom music owes so much, was Guido 

 Aretino, or Guy of Arezzo, a Benedictine of a 

 monastery at Pomposa. He has been well called 

 ' the father of all music-masters,' for he was, so far 

 as we know, the first to adopt any really rational 

 system of teaching music. The system which he 

 used was one which was revived centuries after- 

 wards ; it consisted in impressing upon the pupils 

 the nature of the various tones and intervals in 

 connection with the signs standing for them, by 

 shewing them these same signs or intervals in 

 melodies with which they were familiar, and caus- 

 ing them to associate the one with the other. To 

 fix in their memory, in this way, the signs which 

 stood for the notes C, D, E, F, G, and A, he chose 

 the very ancient melody of a hymn to John the 

 Baptist, which had the peculiarity that each line 

 began with the note immediately above that with 

 which its predecessor had commenced from C up 

 to A. This melody has so much historic interest 

 that we print it entire, with its words : 



m 



Ut que-ant lax - is Re - son - a - re fi-bris 



Mi - - ra ges - to - rum Fa - mu - li tu - o - 1 



EE 



Sol - - - - ve pol - lu - ti La. - bi - i re - a 



Fig- 3- 



turn Sane 



to Jo - han DCS. 



The suitability of this tune, familiar to the ears of 

 all Guide's pupils, to help them to remember the 

 signs which stood for the notes C, D, &c. is evident 

 at a glance. But the interest of the tune to us is 

 even greater than this. After the time of Guido, 

 the first syllables of the lines of the hymn came to 

 be definitely associated with the notes to which 

 they were sung, and so was formed the solmisation 

 Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La; Ut being changed to Do 

 at a later date, and the name, Si, of the seventh 

 added. It is scarcely necessary to add that these 

 names are still in constant use among us. In 



France and Italy, they still stand for the absolute 

 pitch notes with which they were at first associated ; 

 while with us the key-note of a piece of music is 

 always called Do, and the other syllables are 

 applied to the notes which bear the same relation 

 to this Do that D, E, F, &c. bear to C, the original 

 Do. 



Franco of Cologne, a priest who lived about the 

 end of the I2th or the beginning of the ijth cen- 

 tury, wrote a treatise on the Cantus Mensurabilu 

 (Measured Music), which is the first authentic 

 record we have of the use of notes similar to those 



