Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/98

Rh 86 MUSIC [HISTOKY. some place as &quot; York,&quot; &quot; Windsor,&quot; &quot; Dundee,&quot; or by some other unsignifying word ; in North Germany a tune is mostly named by the initial words of the verses to which it is allied, and consequently, whenever it is heard, whether with words or without, it necessarily suggests to the hearer the whole subject of that hymn of which it is the musical moiety undivorceable from the literary half. Manifold as they are, knowledge of the choral tunes is included in the earliest schooling of every Lutheran and every Calvinist in Germany, which thus enables all to take part in performance of the tunes, and hence expressly the definition of &quot; choral.&quot; Compositions grounded on the standard tune are then not merely school exercises but works of art which link the sympathies of the writer and the listener, and aim at expressing the feeling prompted by the hymn under treatment. Recita- On the verge of the 17th century a novelty in music tive and was originated that was as pregnant of consequence as 7 ric! anything that has yet been noticed ; this was recitative with its special characteristics. Vincenzo Galilei was one of a band of Florentine nobles and gentry who devised the appropriation of music to free declamation, and they engaged authors and productive and executive musicians to put the conception into practice. Galilei had already come promi nently into public notice in a controversy with Giuseppe Zarlino, the most esteemed of all the writers on music in his age, who was the author of a treatise that expounded and justified the Ptolemaic division of the scale with the major and minor tones, and the former below the latter ; this was answered by Galilei in support of the Pythagorean doctrine of equal tones, which is confuted by the pheno menon of harmonics, and Zarlino in turn replied to him. During two and a half centuries the art of music had been untouched by the New Learning, which had had the effect of regenerating all the other arts, and had wrought the intellectual change now known as the Renaissance. The members of the Florentine association thought it possible to apply ancient principles in modern practice, and so to re produce the effect to which the newly-revealed writings of Greece testified, but of which these gave no such technical description as could be the groundwork of any reorganiza tion. Obviously, the poetic power of Greek music must have lain in the force it gave to declamation ; in exalting speech into song it must have given to words a clearer yet more varied significance than they could else have had, and to the passions words embody it must have given an otherwise impossible medium of expression. There existed two classes of music at the time under notice. The music of the people consisted of concise rhythmical tunes that were either composed to accompany dancing, or so constructed that, though made for singing, they were applicable to that other use ; and these tunes, being repeated again and again to the almost countless stanzas of some ballad poems, could have in themselves no quality of expression beyond a vague character of sadness or gaiety ; for, what might have been expressive of the pre valent feeling at one stage of a long story would neces sarily be fallacious in the subsequent diversities of the tale. The music of the schools consisted of ingenious con trivances of wholly artificial nature, either to assign the same melody to several successive voices in canonic con tinuance or fugal imitation, or else to multiply more and more the parts for simultaneous execution ; in the former case definition of rhythm is annulled, as has been shown by the entry of one part with a phrase while that phrase was uncompleted in another part, and in the latter case the manifold melodies so obscured the sound of one another classed under hymnody. In Scotland, also, the tune for the 124th Psalm is associated with its proper text. that none could be distinguished, a fact that must be self- apparent if we think of the sound of twelve, or twenty- four, or so many as forty simultaneous currents of song. In this music there could neither be expression nor even articulation of the words, and hence, our Floren tines assumed, the purpose of music was perverted and its inherent poetical essence was abused. Such combination of diverse melodies is now styled polyphony, a term that might better be applied to simple counterpoint in which the many sounds are onefold in accent than to the florid counterpoint it is employed to define, wherein the many parts have various movement. With the idea before them of the ancient rhapsodists the association proposed the setting of music to verses with the main, nay, only object of expressing the words. This music was not to be rhythmical, but was to consist of longer or shorter phrases in accordance with the literary sense ; its intervals were not to be chosen with regard to their melodic interest, but in imitation or idealization rather than exaggeration of the rising and falling of the voice in ordinary speech, the speed being hurried or relaxed by the exigency of the passing sentiment ; and the accompaniment of the singer was to be on some unobtrusive instrument or, later, some combination of instruments, that should, as did the lyre of old, verify the intonation and, in the new era (what had not been in the classic), enhance the vocal expression by some pungent harmony. Applied solely to recitation, the new invention was called recitativo (recitative), musica &amp;gt;ar^cmfc, or stilo rappresentativo. The first instance of its composition is said to have been a cantata that is, a piece for a single voice with instrumental accompaniment II Conte Ugolino, composed by Galilei, but of this no copy is known to exist. Doubt prevails as to whether II Combattimento d Apolline col Serpente by Giulio Caccini or II Satiro by Emilio del Cavalieri was the earlier production ; they were both given to the world in 1590, were both in dramatic form, and both exemplified the new, if not the revived, classic style of music. Caccini was fitted to make the experiment by practice and excellence as a vocalist more than by con trapuntal erudition, and he was soon associated with Jacopo Peri, a musician of his own class, in the composi tion of Dafne, a more extensive work than the foregoing, indeed a complete lyrical drama, which was privately per formed in the palace of one of the Florentine instigators of the experiment in 1597, or, according to some, in 1594. These two again worked together on the opera of Euridice, which was publicly represented in Florence at the nuptials of Henry IV. of France with Maria dei Medici in 1600, its production having been preceded by that of Cavalieri s posthumous oratorio in Rome, La Rappresentazione dell Anima e del Corpo, before noticed. That the first public performance of a dramatic oratorio and of a secular opera, both exemplifying the recently-devised declamatory power of music, should have occurred in the same year is a re markable coincidence. That the first experiments in the novel art of lyrical declamation were confided to practised executants who brought their experience as vocalists to bear upon composition for a hitherto untried phase of vocal effect was excellent for the purpose of proving the proposition. The success of the experiment was, how ever, to be established when a composer already renowned as such, one who had drawn exceptional attention by his then new views of harmony, gave the force of his genius and the weight of his name to the novel class of writing. Such was Monteverde (1568-1643), who in 1607 brought out at the court of Mantua his opera of Arianna, followed in 1608 by his Orfeo. In these works, and in those of the same nature that he subsequently produced at Venice, is anticipated the principle (and, so far as the resources of the time allowed, the practice also) which was revived by