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Art. IV. THE EVOLUTION OF MUSIC.

1. The Oxford History of Music. By H. E. Wooldridge. Vol. I.-The Polyphonic Period. Part I.-Method of Musical Art, 330-1330. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901. 2. The Evolution of the Art of Music. By C. Hubert H. Parry. Second edition. London: Kegan Paul, 1897. IT is curious to observe how long it takes for improved methods to be adopted from one branch of intellectual activity into another. Within the memories of many who are not very old, the teaching of general history proceeded on very familiar lines; the end of a reign meant the end of a chapter; and those whose unwilling steps were urged along the old path knew that to-morrow's lesson would assuredly begin with the accession of the next king. These methods of learning history are probably to be found only in a few school-rooms in the present day; even the ordinary board-school child, we may suppose, no longer thinks of the deaths of successive monarchs as marking the close of successive periods. Green's 'little book,' as he called it, has probably done more than anything else to rout the old methods, and to make the world in general familiar with the idea that the scientific way of studying history is to trace the growth and decay of movements, intellectual or political, of constitutional changes or reforms, rather than the lives and careers of kings and queens. But it has taken long to get the modern historical method applied to the arts, although in one and all of them historians have recognised the advantage of grouping together individual poets, painters, or musicians of the same artistic convictions, as members of one school. In the case of music the adoption of the newer principles has taken longer than in any other art. Hawkins, indeed, arranges his material on a plan a little more like the modern system than that adopted by Burney, but both alike are perpetually stopping the course of their narrative in order to give exhaustive biographies of the most prominent composers or performers.

In one way, it is true, writers on music were not so far behind critics of the other arts; for the modern craze for altering what the critics of painting call 'attributions' may be held to have begun, in respect of musical works,

long before the days of Morelli. The desire to take from the men of established supremacy some of the honours that mankind has conferred on them must be inherent in humanity; and even the Shakespeare-Bacon absurdity is perhaps only to be regarded as the American version of a tendency that is almost universal in the present day. In music it seems to have begun in the times when a close analysis of 'Israel in Egypt' and other Handelian works made it certain that a great deal of music universally accepted as Handel's was not originally his at all. The case of Handel, who, so far as can be ascertained, deliberately passed off other men's work as his own, is not quite on a level with the strangely numerous compositions which were accepted in the middle of the nineteenth century as specimens of the work of various eminent men who certainly never heard of them. The vogue of 'Stradella's "Pietà, Signore," of 'Pergolese's "Tre giorni son che Nina," of 'Schubert's "Addio," and 'Weber's "Last Waltz," is quite enough to show that the public had at that time a special love for what was spurious. These compositions would have been just as good as they are if their real authors' names had been known, but they would not have been as famous; and it is characteristic of the taste of the period that a great number of persons of average intelligence knew the composers' names mainly, if not exclusively, by the spurious works, not by those of undoubted authenticity. The work of detecting such spurious music as has been mentioned occupied the minds of writers on music long before the rise of the school of art-criticism which is profanely said to find employment in detaching all the labels from the pictures in any given collection, in thoroughly shuffling them, and in dealing them out afresh over the gallery.

For the application of the newer historical methods to music, amateurs and students have had to wait until quite recently. Even now, when research has left little or nothing to be discovered, when musicians in all countries have reached a higher level of general intellectual attainment than ever before, the newer methods have not been accepted in all countries. To take two examples in the same branch of musical literature-DrOskar Bie's masterly 'History of the Pianoforte,' while tracing the development of technique from the earliest to the latest times, has

many points at which the course of the narrative stops in order to remind or inform the reader, not merely that Bach, Beethoven, or Liszt, was born and died in such and such years, but that they did such and such things apart from the pianoforte; and Signor L. A. Villanis, in an admirably arranged treatise, 'L'Arte del Clavicembalo,' groups each period of his history around some single prominent name. In the dearth of good standard works on music in the Italian language, we may forgive Signor Villanis for telling us once more the well-known anecdotes of the childhood of Bach and Handel; but we cannot help wishing that the description of the latticed bookcase from which Bach drew the roll of music, or that of Handel's pursuit of his father's carriage on the way to Weissenfels, could be finally despatched to the limbo in which an appropriate place of repose has been found for King Alfred's cakes, or the surfeit of lampreys which figured so largely in childhood's imagination.

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Such stories as these are not repeated, and of everything that would interrupt or obscure the clear course of the argument there is a minimum, in Sir Hubert Parry's 'Art of Music,' or, as it is more fitly called in the later editions, The Evolution of the Art of Music.' There is hardly even a date from beginning to end; yet this is never felt as a drawback, so vivid and eloquent is the story of how music developed, and so keen is the insight into the true meaning of the various tendencies with which the book deals. Compared with the ordinary handbooks of musical history, this work may be said to be written from the inside, while the others, accurate and thorough as they may be in matters of fact, never seem to penetrate below the surface. It is no doubt desirable for musicians to know that Beethoven wrote so many symphonies and so many sonatas; but even if this fact had not been told us a thousand times before, how can its value compare with such a sentence as this?

'Beethoven had a great gift for extemporisation; and there are many subtle devices in his work that look as if he had tested the power of his audiences to follow his points by actual observation. Like Scarlatti, he often seems to play upon his audience, and to follow the processes that will be going on in their minds; and so well to forecast the very things that

they will expect to happen, that he can make sure of having the pleasure of puzzling them by doing something else.'

Here is one of the subtlest pieces of artistic analysis in existence, and one which could hardly have been made by any but a great creative musician, one who understood with fullest sympathy the mental processes involved in the highest kind of composition. The whole book is full of pregnant sayings like this, which at first may provoke opposition in the ordinary reader, but which cannot fail to stimulate every intelligent person who comes across them. In the intensely suggestive introductory chapter called Preliminaries,' for example, the writer briefly

says,

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In music, form and design are most obviously necessary, because the very source and reason of existence of the art is so obscure'

an utterance of which the aptness grows on the reader the more closely it is considered. After this introductory chapter, Sir Hubert goes on to trace the origins of music from the point at which it can be called music at all. Many, if not most, writers on the history of music have felt bound to begin, as it were, before the beginning; to engage in fruitless discussions as to the artistic status of prehistoric nations, or to darken counsel concerning the achievements of the ancient Greeks. There exists the first portion of a book which set out to be a complete history of the art; but its author got so befogged in the mists of antiquity that he left his task undone. The Art of Music' comprises a complete history of music, but does not stay longer than necessary over personal or other details; and the vexed question of Greek music is admirably summed up in a passage ending with the words:

'It still seems possible that a large portion of what has passed into the domain of “well-authenticated fact" is complete misapprehension, as Greek scholars have not time for a thorough study of music up to the standard required to judge securely of the matters in question, and musicians, as a rule, are not extremely intimate with Greek.'

This sentence occurs in an interesting and valuable chapter on 'Scales,' in which the scales of various nationalities are

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lucidly analysed. The succeeding sections on Folk-Music' and Incipient Harmony' give us some insight into the early, half-conscious efforts of the music-makers; and the curiously complete revolution, which divided the perfection of the polyphonic school at the end of the sixteenth century from the tentative beginnings of the monodic period, is reasoned out in a way which carries complete conviction that so, and not otherwise, must the men of the time have faced the problems that lay before them. The comparison between Bach and Handel, in the chapter called 'Combination of Old Methods and New Principles,' is as striking as anything in the book; and that between Haydn and Mozart, in the chapter entitled 'The Middle Stages of "Sonata" Form,' is scarcely inferior to it. In another place the effect of sonorous choral music is described in words which are not only eloquent in themselves, but describe unconsciously the work of one man only among modern living composers-of Sir Hubert Parry himself.

"The perfection of a great master's management lies in his power to adjust the distribution of his successive climaxes of sonority and complexity proportionately to the receptive capacities of human creatures, beginning from different points, and rising successively to different degrees of richness and fulness.' (The immediate application of the words is to fugal writing, but they hold good in a more general sense.) 'Bach at his best manipulates all his resources so well that even his quietest moments have some principle of interest which keeps the mind engaged, and his final climax of sound and complicated polyphony comes like the utmost possible exultation, taking complete possession of the beings who hear with the understanding as well as the senses, and raising them out of themselves into a genuine rapture.'

To Sir Hubert's words on Beethoven reference has already been made; and the chapter dealing mainly with him, called 'The Balance of Expression and Design,' comes perhaps nearer than any other written words to giving an explanation of the supreme position of Beethoven over all the masters of music. In Modern Tendencies' we have a survey of the later men down to Brahms; and the chapter excels in rapidity and thoroughness. With certain chapters on opera, old and new, we reach ground that may be called debatable. Sir Hubert Parry has a whole

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