Page:Pratt - The history of music (1907).djvu/408

 CHAPTER XXIII

THEORETICAL AND LITERARY PROGRESS

165. Literature about Music.—Nothing better marks the advance in musical intellectuality than the gain in the amount and quality of the writing about musical questions. In this respect the great productiveness of the 19th century was now clearly foreshadowed. The changes that were going on in practical methods began to be accompanied in the field of theory by attempts to rationalize the facts and to rearrange the principles of composition from the harmonic rather than the contrapuntal centre; but on the whole, owing to the influence of certain leading minds, theory remained more conservative than practical composition. Criticism, however, was freer and more progressive. It now began to be less intensely personal and subjective in character than earlier in the century, and in many quarters reached out after some sort of objective æsthetic system, though it must be said that the usual type of æsthetics was strongly a priori rather than inductive. In the field of pedagogics, the most notable feature was the beginning of a systematic treatment of keyboard technique, stimulated by the rapid advance of the piano and its public use. It was not yet perceived how great an influence this was to have upon the detail of all composition.

More important than these movements was the awakening of a true sense of historical investigation and presentation, shown both in the publication of histories proper and in the accumulation of historic materials by patient research. While the historical works actually produced are now as a rule superseded by later ones, the impetus and example of students like Martini, Hawkins, Burney, Gerbert and Forkel are still matters of admiration.

The increasing thoughtfulness of the musical public is evidenced by the quantity and variety of books, periodicals and pamphlets, of which repeated editions were often demanded.