Page:Pratt - The history of music (1907).djvu/174

 becomes differentiated as a significant branch of musicianship, especially on the vocal side. Correlative with this is the tendency to transfer certain forms of music from private to public patronage, with consequent changes in the standards of musical ambition and in the social influence of the art. While the century presents no composer of the first order, it is of great interest as a preparation for the creativeness of the 18th century.

75. The Mediæval Plays.—All the fine arts have been powerfully affected sooner or later by the universal craving for dramatic impression. Dramaticness is a quality in art not easily defined. It usually involves features or arrangements that represent or suggest a story, with personages, action, developing situations and a dénouement of some sort, predestined or unexpected. The fascination of dramatic art in all forms rests upon the fact that it recalls living experiences, continually piques curiosity as to the outcome, and in its climaxes is sensationally exciting. The impulse to it is universal in all ages.

In modern society the drama stands as a separate and independent fine art. But it is not always remembered that other fine arts are constantly handled dramatically, even the static arts of sculpture, painting and architecture, and of course the mobile arts of poetry and music in all their larger forms. This general thesis may be extensively developed. It is here mentioned simply to justify references to the general taste for drama, of which the musical drama was a result and by which at first it was dominated.

The entire modern drama—theatre and opera—is immediately descended from practices in the Middle Ages that were instituted and sustained by the Church. The beginning was doubtless in the liturgy itself—the Mass, for instance, being a sort of reënactment of the sacrifice of Christ. But the connection is clearest with the particular undertakings known as Mysteries, Miracle-Plays and Moralities, all of which were originally designed to give religious instruction and edification, though from the first tending to pass over into secular diversions. These were the direct precursors of the opera and the oratorio, even though originally they may have contained no important musical features whatever.

The Mystery was properly a representation of some Biblical story. Its development was most natural in connection with the stories of Easter,