Page:Pratt - The history of music (1907).djvu/166



occurred either melodically or harmonically, and in the treatment of thirds and sixths in certain connections.

All regular composition had been for voices in chorus. It now began to be seen that the chorus of instrumental tones was equally valid. Instrumental writing branched off from vocal with timidity, at first following the vocal type slavishly, but presently noting that every instrument capable of concerted effects has a genius of its own, so that a piece for organ, virginal or lute ought to be essentially diverse from one for a choir, since the tonal and mechanical elements are different. While instrumental styles for a time floundered helplessly in their search for proper forms or types, the future of such styles as a great department of musical art was prefigured in the lute-music, the organ-fantasias and the clavichord-dances of this experimental period.

Furthermore, the genuine harmonic idea of composition now disengaged itself from the purely contrapuntal, and the handling of tones in simultaneous masses or chords was felt to be of importance. The old notion had been that the individual voice in its progress was the unit of reference and that what chords were produced were incidental. Now it was felt that the chord as such was another unit and that such massive units might be joined in series, making the voice-part motion incidental to the harmonic sequence. Thus a revolution of procedure gradually came to pass—one that did not so much destroy or drive out the old as reveal a deeper principle with which the old might be associated without losing its own value.

Associated with this recognition of chords as working units was a new analysis of scales and tonality, whereby was disclosed the imperfection of the modes as formulæ (embodying the ancient tetrachordal idea) and of the hexachords. Room was made for the instinct of secular music for major or minor scales laid out in octochords (or heptachords), with a positive keytone, a cadential leading-tone, and a dominant and subdominant that were accessory chord-centres with the tonic. Hitherto melodic procedure had rested on arbitrary assumptions as to the principality of tones; now it circled inevitably about natural foci to which certain primary chords belonged. Melody and harmony were thus found to be twin faces of the one truth of tonality. The unique importance of the leading-tone as establishing the tonic and providing for obvious cadences now attained its full significance.