Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/384

372 distinguished among the Scandinavians as "skalds" and among the Anglo-Saxons as harpers and gleemen. Thus we read:—

"The gleemen added mimicry. . . dancing. . . tumbling, with sleights of hand. . . . It was therefore necessary for them to associate themselves into companies."

"Soon after the conquest these musicians lost the ancient Saxon appellation of gleemen and were called ministraulx, in English minstrels."

Moreover in the old English period the minstrel "was sometimes a household retainer of the chief whom he served, as we see in the poem of Beowulf." And since it was the function of the minstrel now to glorify his chief and now to glorify his chief's ancestors, we see that in the one capacity he lauded the living potentate as a courtier, and in the other capacity he lauded the deceased potentate as a priest lauds a deity.

While, with the decay of the worship of the pagan gods, heroes, and ancestors, some music became secularized, other music began to develop in connection with the substituted religion. Among the Anglo-Saxons, "music was also cultivated with ardor. . . . Permanent schools of music were finally established in the monasteries, and a principal one at Canterbury. So, too, was it under the Normans:" great attention was now paid to Church music, and the clergy frequently composed pieces for the use of their choirs." And then in the fifteenth century—

"Ecclesiastical music was studied by the youths at the Universities, with a view to the attainment of degrees as bachelors and doctors in that faculty or science, which generally secured preferment."

But the best proof of the clerical origin of the musical professor during Christian times, is furnished by the biographical notices of early musicians throughout Europe. We begin in the fourth century with St. Ambrose, who set in order "the ecclesiastical mode of saying and singing divine service;" and then come to St. Gregory who in 590 arranged the musical scales. The tenth century yielded Hucbaldus, a monk who replaced the two-lined stave by one of more lines; and the eleventh century the monk Guido d'Arezzo, who further developed the stave. A differentiation of sacred into secular was commenced in the twelfth century by the Minnesingers: "their melodies were founded on the Church scales." Developed out of them, came the Meistersingers, who usually performed in churches, and "had generally a sacred subject, and their tone was religious." "One of the first composers who wrote in regular form" was Canon Dufay of the Cathedral of Cambrai in 1474. The sixteenth century brought Lasso, who wrote thirteen hundred musical compositions, but whose status is not named; and then, showing a pronounced secularization, we have, in the same century, Phillipus de Monte, Canon of Cambrai,