Page:EB1911 - Volume 13.djvu/17

Rh variety of fixed chords needs a much more rigid harmonic scheme to control it, but they can never be falsified. And when Beethoven in his last “Bagatelle” raises the 6th of a minor scale for the pleasure he takes in an unexpectedly bright major chord; or when, in the Incarnatus of his Mass in D, he makes a free use of the Dorian scale, he is actuated by precisely the same harmonic and aesthetic motives as those of the wonderful opening of Palestrina’s eight-part Stabat Mater; just as in the Lydian figured chorale in his A minor Quartet he carries out the principle of harmonic variety, as produceable by an oblique melodic scale, with a thoroughness from which Palestrina himself would have shrunk. (We have noted that in 16th-century music the Lydian mode is almost invariably Ionicized.)

III. Modern Harmony and Tonality.—In the harmonic system of Palestrina only two kinds of discord are possible, namely, suspensions and passing-notes. The principle of the suspension is that while parts are moving from one concord to another one of the parts remains behind, so as to create a discord at the moment when the other parts proceed. The suspended part then goes on to its concordant note, which must lie on an adjacent (and in most cases a lower) degree of the scale. Passing-notes are produced transiently by the motion of a part up or down the scale while other parts remain stationary. The possibilities of these two devices can be worked out logically so as to produce combinations of extreme harshness. And, when combined with the rules which laid on the performers the responsibility for modifying the strict scale of the mode in order to form satisfactory closes and avoid melodic harshness, they sometimes gave rise to combinations which the clearest artistic intellects of the 16th century perceived as incompatible with the modal style. For example, in a passage written thus the singer of the lower part would be obliged to flatten his B in order to avoid the ugly “tritone” between F and B, while the other singer would be hardly less likely on the spur of the moment to sharpen his G under the impression that he was making a close; and thus one of the most complex and characteristically modern discords, that of the augmented 6th, did frequently occur in 16th-century performances, and was not always regarded as a blunder. But if the technical principles of 16th-century discord left much to the good taste of composers and singers, they nevertheless in conjunction with that good taste severely restricted the resources of harmony; for, whatever the variety and artificiality of the discords admitted by them, they all had this in common, that every discord was transient and could only arise as a phenomenon of delay in the movement of one or more parts smoothly along the scale (“in conjunct motion”) or of a more rapid motion up and down the scale in which none but the rigorously concordant first and last notes received any emphasis. No doubt there were many licenses (such as the “changing-note”) which introduced discords by skip, or on the strong beat without preparation, but these were all as natural as they were illogical. They were artistic as intelligible accidents, precisely like those which make language idiomatic, such as “attraction of the relative” in Greek. But when Monteverde and his fellow monodists tried experiments with unprepared discords, they opened up possibilities far too vast to be organized by them or by the next three generations. We have elsewhere compared the difference between early and modern harmony with that between classical Greek, which is absolutely literal and concrete in expression, and modern English, which is saturated with metaphors and abstractions. We may go further and say that a 16th-century discord, with its preparation and resolution, is, on a very small scale, like a simile, in which both the figure and its interpretation are given, whereas modern discord is like the metaphor, in which the figure is a substitute for and not an addition to the plain statement. It is not surprising that the sudden opening up of the whole possibilities of modern harmony at the end of the 16th century at first produced a chaos of style.

Another feature of the harmonic revolution arose from the new habit of supporting a single voice on chords played by an instrument. This, together with the use of discords in a new sense, drew attention to the chords as things in themselves and not as moments of greater or less repose in a flux of independent melodies. This was as valuable an addition to musical thought and expression as the free use of abstract terms is in literature, but it had precisely the same dangers, and has until recent times vitiated harmonic theory and divorced it from the modest observation of the practice of great masters. When, early in the 18th century, Rameau devoted much of his best energy to the elaboration of a theory of harmony, his field of observation was a series of experiments begun in chaos and resolved, not as yet in a great art, but in a system of conventions, for the contemporary art of Bach and Handel was beyond the scope of contemporary theory. He showed great analytical genius and sense of tonality in his development of the notion of the “fundamental bass,” and it is rather to his credit than otherwise that he did not emphasize the distinction between discords on the dominant and those on other degrees of the scale. But his system, with all subsequent improvements, refutations and repairs only led to that bane of 19th-century theory and source of what may be called the journalese of harmonic style, according to which every chord (no matter how obviously artificial and transient) must be regarded, so to speak, as a literal fact for which a root and a scientific connexion with the natural harmonic series must at all cost be found. Some modern theorists have, however, gone too far in denying the existence of harmonic roots altogether, and certainly it is neither scientific nor artistic to regard the coincidence of the major triad with the first five notes of the harmonic series as merely accidental. It is not likely that the dominant 7th owes all its naturalness to a resemblance to the flat 7th of the harmonic series, which is too far out of tune even to pass for an augmented 6th. But the dominant major 9th certainly gains in sonorousness from its coincidence with the 9th harmonic, and many cases in music could be found where the dominant 7th itself would gain from being so far flattened as to add coincidence with a natural harmonic to its musical significance as an unprepared discord (see, for example the “native wood-notes wild” of the distant huntsmen in the second act of Tristan und Isolde, where also the 9th and 11th are involved, and, moreover, on horns, of which the natural scale is the harmonic series itself). If the distinction between “essential” and “unessential” discords is, in the light of history and common sense, a difference only in degree, it is thus none the less of great aesthetic importance. Arithmetic and acoustics show that in proportion as musical harmony emphasizes combinations belonging to the lower region of the harmonic series the effect will be sonorous and natural; but common sense, history and aesthetics also show that the interaction of melody, harmony and rhythm must produce a host of combinations which acoustics alone cannot possibly explain. These facts are amply competent to explain themselves. To describe them in detail is beyond the scope of the present article, but a few examples from different periods are given at the end in musical type.

IV. The Minor Mode.—When the predecessors of Bach and Handel had succeeded in establishing a key-system able to bear the weight of free discord, that key-system took two forms, in both of which the three chords of tonic, dominant and subdominant occupied cardinal points. In the one form the tonic chord was natural, that is to say, major. In the other form the tonic chord was artificial, that is to say, minor. In the minor mode so firm is the position of the tonic and dominant (the dominant chord always being major) that it is no longer necessary, as in the 16th century, to conclude with a major chord, although it long remained a frequent practice, rather because of the inherent beauty and surprise of the effect than because of any