Critical and Historical Essays
11. MARCH.--Same as the old march, but modified in character
and movement according to its title--funeral march, military
march, cortege, festival march, etc. In funeral marches,
the third and fourth periods are generally in major.
The modernizing of dance forms has been undertaken by
almost every writer from Scarlatti (d. 1757) down to our
day. Scarlatti joined sections together with isolated measures,
repeated sections and phrases before completing the period,
and added short codas to periods indiscriminately. Since his
time, everyone has added to or curtailed the accepted forms
by putting two forms together; hence the fantaisie-mazurka,
etc. Wagner represents the culminating point of the modern
tendency to disregard forms which were interpreted differently
by every composer, and which had their origin in dances.
The attempt to emancipate music from the dance commenced very
early; in fact, most of the earliest secular music we know
already shows the tendency towards programme music, for,
from an emotional standpoint, secular music began at the
very bottom of the ladder. It was made to express _things_
at first, just as in learning any new language we naturally
first acquire a vocabulary of nouns to express things we see,
such as table, chair, etc., in the same way that in _written_
language the symbols first take the shape of animals or other
things they are meant to represent. This same characteristic
naturally showed itself in music before the words for _emotion_
came, the common, everyday nouns were sought for in this new
language. The madrigals of Weelkes and their word painting show
this, and the same occur in instrumental music, as in Byrd's
"Carman's Whistle," one of the earliest English instrumental
works contemporaneous to the madrigals of Morley and others.
In France, many of the earliest clavichord pieces were of
the programme type, and even in Germany, where instrumental
music ran practically in the same groove with church music,
the same tendency showed itself.
I have given the forms of most of the old dances, and also the
elements of melodic structure (motive, phrase, etc.). I must,
however, add the caution that this material is to be accepted
in a general way, and as representing the rhythms and forms
most frequently used. A French courante differed from the
Italian, and certain dances were taken at different _tempi_ in
different countries. Poor, or at least careless construction,
is often the cause of much confusion. Scarlatti, for instance,
is especially loose in melodic structure.
It was only with Beethoven that the art of musical design showed
anything like complete comprehension by the composer. Until
then, with occasional almost haphazard successes, the art
of pushing a thought to its logical conclusion was seemingly
unknown. An emotional passage now and then would often betray
deep feeling, but the thought would almost invariably be lost in
the telling, for the simple reason that the musical sentences
were put together almost at random, mere stress of momentary
emotion being seemingly the only guiding influence. Bach stands
alone; his sense of design was inherent, but, owing to the
contrapuntal tendency of his time, his feeling for _melodic_
design is often overshadowed, and even rendered impossible
by the complex web of his music. With a number of melodies
sounding together, their individual emotional development
becomes necessarily difficult to emphasize.
Bach's art has something akin to that of Palestrina. They both
stand alone in the history of the world, but the latter belongs
to the Middle Ages. He is the direct descendant of Ambrose,
Gregory, Notker, Tutilo, etc., the crowning monument of the
Roman Church in music, and represents what may be termed
unemotional music. His art was untouched by the strange,
suggestive colours of modern harmony; it was pure, unemotional,
and serene. One instinctively thinks of Bach, on the other
hand, as a kind of musical reflection of Protestantism. His
was not a secluded art which lifted its head high above the
multitude; it was rather the palpable outpouring of a great
heart. Bach also represents all the pent-up feeling which
until then had longed in vain for utterance, and had there
been any canvas for him to paint on (to use a poor simile),
the result would have been still more marvellous. As it was,
the material at his disposal was a poor set of dance forms,
with the one exception of the fugue, the involved utterance
of which precluded spontaneity and confined emotional design
to very restricted limits. It is exactly as if Wagner had
been obliged to put his thoughts in quadrille form with the
possible alternative of some mathematical device of musical
double bookkeeping. As it is, Bach's innovations were very
considerable. In the first place, owing to the lack of the
system of equal temperament, composers had been limited to
the use of only two or three sharps and flats; in all the
harpsichord music of the pre-Bach period we rarely find
compositions in sharp keys beyond G, or flat keys beyond
A[flat]. To be sure, Rameau, in France, began at the same time
to see the necessity for equal temperament, but it was Bach
who, by his forty-eight "Preludes and Fugues," written in all
the keys, first settled the matter definitely.
In the fugue form itself, he made many innovations consisting
mainly of the casting aside of formalism. With Bach a fugue
consists of what is called the "exposition," that is to say,
the enunciation of the theme (subject), its answer by another
voice or part, recurrence of the subject in another part which,
in turn, is again answered, and so on according to the number
of voices or parts. After the exposition the fugue consists
of a kind of free contrapuntal fantasy on the subject and its
answer. By throwing aside the restraint of form Bach often
gave his fugues an emotional significance in spite of the
complexity of the material he worked with.
[13] Pier Luigi, born in Palestrina, near Rome.
XIV
THE MERGING OF THE SUITE INTO THE SONATA
In the previous chapter it was stated that the various dances,
such as the minuet, sarabande, allemande, etc., led up to
our modern sonata form, or, perhaps, to put it more clearly,
they led up to what we call sonata form. As a matter of fact,
already in the seventeenth century, we find the word _sonata_
applied to musical compositions; generally to pieces for the
violin, but rarely for the harpsichord. The word sonata
was derived originally from the Italian word _suonare_,
"to sound," and the term was used to distinguish instrumental
from vocal music. The latter was sung (_cantata_), the former
was sounded (_suonata_) by instruments. Thus many pieces were
called _suonatas_; the distinguishing point being that they were
_played_ and not sung. Organ sonatas existed as far back as 1600
and even earlier, but the earliest application of the word seems
to have been made in connection with pieces for the violin.
Dances were often grouped together, especially when they had
some slight intrinsic musical value. Probably the term _sonata_
first designated a composition in one of these dance forms
not intended for dancing. Gradually groups of dances were
called _suites_; then, little by little, the dance titles of
the separate numbers were dropped, and the _suite_ was called
_sonata_. These different numbers, however, retained their
dance characteristics, as we shall see later. The arrangement
of the pieces composing the _suites_ differed in various
countries. There were French, Italian, German, and English
suites, generally, however, retaining the same grouping of
the different movements. The first movement consisted of an
_allemande_; then came a _courante_; then a _minuet_; then
a _sarabande_; and last of all a _gigue_; all in the same
key. Sometimes the _minuet_ and _sarabande_ changed places,
just as in modern times do the _andante_ and _scherzo_.
Already in 1685, when Corelli's sonatas for strings appeared,
the custom of decreasing the number of movements to three began
to obtain, and a century later this custom was universal. The
_allemande_, _overture_, or _preludio_ formed the first
movement; the second consisted of the _sarabande_, the ancestor
of our _adagio_; and the last part was generally a _gigue_. Even
when the dance titles were no more used (the music having long
outgrown its original purpose), the distinctive characteristics
of these different movements were retained; the _sarabande_
rhythm was still adhered to for the _adagio_ (even by Haydn)
and the triple time and rhythm of the _gigue_ were given to
the last part. In addition to this, these three movements
were often kept in one key. In his first sonatas Beethoven
added a movement, generally a _minuet_, to this scheme; but
returned to the three-movement structure later. His Op. 111
has only two movements, in a way returning to a still earlier
general form of the sonata. Now, as has already been said,
some of the earliest examples of instrumental music were
mainly descriptive in character, that is to say, consisting
of imitations of _things_, thus marking the most elementary
stage of programme music. Little by little composers became
more ambitious and began to attempt to give expression to
the emotions by means of music; and at last, with Beethoven,
"programme music" may be said, in one sense, to have reached
its climax. For although it is not generally realized, he
wrote every one of his sonatas with definite subjects, and,
at one time, was on the point of publishing mottoes to them,
in order to give the public a hint of what was in his mind
when he wrote them.
Analysis may be considered as the reducing of a musical
composition to its various elements--harmony, rhythm,
melody--and power of expression. Just as melody may be analyzed
down to the motives and phrases of which it consists, so may
the expressiveness of music be analyzed; and this latter study
is most valuable, for it brings us to a closer understanding
of the power of music as a language.
For the sake of clearness we will group music as follows:
1. Dance forms.
2. Programme music. (Things. Feelings.)
3. The gathering together of dances in suites.
4. The beginnings of design.
5. The merging of the suite into the sonata.
The dance tunes I need hardly quote; they consist of a mere play
of sound to keep the dancers in step, for which purpose any more
or less agreeable rhythmical succession of sounds will serve.
If we take the next step in advance of instrumental music
we come to the giving of meanings to these dances, and, as I
have explained, these meanings will at first have reference
to things; for instance, Couperin imitates an alarm clock;
Rameau tries to make the music sound as if three hands were
playing instead of two (_Les trois mains_); he imitates sighing
(_Les soupirs_); the scolding voice; he even tries to express a
mood musically (_L'indifferente_). In Germany, these attempts
to make instrumental music expressive of something beyond
rhythmic time-keeping continued, and we find Carl Philip
Emanuel Bach attempting to express light-hearted amiability (_La
complaisance_) and even languor (_Les tendres langueurs_). The
suite, while it combined several dances in one general form,
shows only a trace of _design_. There was more design in one
of the small programme pieces already quoted than in most of
the suites of this period (see, for example, Loeilly's "Suite").
Bach possessed instinctively the feeling for musical speech
which seemed denied to his contemporaries whenever they had no
actual story to guide their expression; and even in his dance
music we find coherent musical sentences as, for instance,
in the _Courante_ in A.