Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/57

 by all, whether learned or ignorant. Have I perhaps, in spite of my good intentions employed a somewhat too specialised vocabulary? Here in another way of presenting the same matter:

One may say that since its earliest days music has gone through three great phases, has existed under three forms: monodic, polyphonic, harmonic.

Monody is song without accompaniment, (or accompanied rudimentarily by a single note). The music of antiquity, and Plainsong, which is its continuation, are monodic.

This form was succeeded at the Renaissance by Polyphony. The latter contains in itself harmony, since several voices while singing together different parts have always to find a just harmonic relation among themselves. But the harmonic order of the piece, that is to say the successful choice of chords and sequences of chords, is not, in the eyes of the polyphonic composer, the principal and essential object of musical invention; it is only the secondary and as it were accidental object. What he takes into consideration before everthingeverything [sic] else is the relations between the melodic lines followed by each of the concerted parts. These lines are taken as so many diagrams between which they must always maintain certain formal relations perceptible no less to the eye looking at the score than to the ear that hears it executed. A melodic phrase given out by one part will pass successively into all the others; either by direct imitation or with certain regular transformations under which it remains recognisable and continues to be itself. Imitations, reversals, condensations, elongations of the given theme, these are the springs in play in Polyphony. Harmony is merely a condition to which this play is submitted;