A Popular History of the Art of Music

CIES EFF

art of music was deepened, ennobled and immeasurably enlarged in every direction. There were four causes co-operating in this transformation of the art, and it is not easy to say of any one of them that this one was the chief. First of these, in the Roman empire, or in the south of Europe more particularly, for about 800 years the Greek principles remained more or less in force. The Church is here the foremost influence, and its part in the transformation already noted will be considered presently. In the north of Europe the Goths, Celts and Scandinavians built mighty empires and impressed their enthusiastic and idealistic natures upon the whole form of modern art. The Saracens conquered a foot-hold in the south of France about 819, and remained there

than consonance-better because more appealing. The law of the introduction of dissonances is that every dissonance must arise out of a consonance, and subside into a consonance. When this law is observed there is hardly any combination possible in the range of music which may not be employed with good effect. Here already we have a progress in perception of tones, in the ability to discriminate between those which harmonize and those which dissonate. All consonance and dissonance are purely relative. There is no such thing as a dissonant tone in music, by itself considered; a tone becomes dissonant by being brought into juxtaposition

ent. Third, the establishment of these materials of music in the mind in such depth and fullness that their ?sthetic implications became realized as elements of expression, so that when a composer had a certain feeling to express, the proper combination of consonance and dissonance immediately presented itself to his mind. The first of these steps was taken by the minstrels of the north, somewhere between t

nd a point of repose for the melody were chosen arbitrarily; the beginning was here made, and still more the ending was conducted to this point of repose. Between the beginning and the ending the same tones were emplo

melody is thereby changed, until such time as the hearer has forgotten the change of key effected by the introduction of the foreign tone. It is not at all unlikely that what little of melodic expression the music of the Greeks had, may have rested to some extent upon an unconscious perception of these relations, which, although foreign to their musical theory, may nevertheless have made their way into the ears of these acute minstrels. The discovery of simple tonality seems to have been due to the northern minstrels, for it is here that we fi

is he cannot realize the true place of the melody tone in key, and therefore rests unconscious of its real expression. It is, indeed, possible for him to make a mistake in regard to the tones which he unconsciously associates with the tones actually heard-as, for example, when one hears an E followed by a C higher, and one thinks of the four white keys of the piano between them, while the melody may be thinking of the black keys between them. In the one case the melody would be in the key of C, in