HUGH A. 
 CLARKEr.
 
 .<^&>^ 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT
 
 yr
 
 Highways and Byways 
 of Music 
 
 By 
 
 Hugh A. Clarke, Mus. Doc. 
 
 Professor of the Science of Music, University of Penn- 
 sylvania ; Author of " Music and the Comrade 
 Arts," " The Elements of Vocal Harmony," etc. 
 
 Silver, Burdett and Company 
 
 New York Boston Chicago
 
 Copyright, igoi, 
 
 KY 
 
 Silver, Burdett and Company
 
 Music Library 
 
 Hi 
 
 GO 
 66^ 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 The material of this coilectio?i of essays is 
 drawn from lectures on musical topics delivered 
 on various occasions. In the essay ofi ' ' Myths ' ' 
 the universality of certain striking coincidences 
 is pointed out, and an arg7t?tient for the great 
 antiquity of the Art is draum. That on 
 ' ' Facts ' ' is designed as a peridant to the preced- 
 ing one. ' ' Literary Men and Music " is a 
 plea for the fuller recognition, on the part 
 of literary men that Music as a " great art ' ' 
 is of equal rank with her sister arts. 
 
 In " The Teutonic Element in Music" an 
 endeavor is made to substitute for the theory, 
 advocated by many, that ' ' Art Music ' ' is an out-
 
 Preface. 
 
 growth of Folk- so tig, the theory that the Folk-song 
 is simply an indication of racial temperament 
 out of which ''''Art Music'" may or may not 
 grow, and that the German branch alone, of 
 the great Teutonic family, was possessed of the 
 requisite temperamental cotiditiotis for this 
 growth. 
 
 In ' ' Curiosities of Musical History ' ' the 
 object is to exhibit the strong contrasts between 
 the ancient and the modern ways of viewifig the 
 Art. In ''''Modern Tendencies,'' at the risk of 
 being classed among the " laudatores tempori 
 acti, " the Author has attetnpted to strike a 
 balance between the losses and gains of the Art, 
 since the first quarter of the cetitury just ended. 
 
 H. A. CLARKE. 
 
 Philadelphia, Pa., 
 April 2^, 1901.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. Some Musical Myths 
 
 II. Some Facts in the Growth of 
 Music 
 
 III. Literary Men and Music 
 
 IV. Some Curiosities of Musical 
 
 History . , . . . 
 
 V. The Teutonic Element in 
 Music ..... 
 
 PAGE 
 I 
 
 30 
 78 
 
 VI. Modern Tendencies in Music . 125
 
 Highways and Byways 
 of Music. 
 
 I. 
 
 SOME MUSICAL MYTHS. 
 
 A STRIKING proof of the great an- 
 tiquity of music may be found in 
 the fact that so many myths have grown 
 up concerning its origin. That it has 
 always been held in the highest estima- 
 tion is proved by the fact that its in- 
 vention or discovery has always been 
 attributed to some beneficent divinity or 
 sage. Many of the oldest and most
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 widespread myths cluster around that 
 humblest of all musical instruments, the 
 drum, and its still humbler relatives, 
 the clapper and rattle. An early Greek 
 myth credits Rhea, the mother of the 
 gods, with the invention of the drum, for 
 the purpose of amusing the infant Jupiter. 
 A Latin myth tells us that the first 
 musical sounds heard in the world were 
 the strokes of the hammer on the anvil. 
 This must be a rather late myth, since it 
 ignores the ages of stone and bronze that 
 preceded the iron age. It also sounds 
 like an echo of the Biblical story of the 
 invention of music by Jubal, the son of 
 Tubal Cain, the first blacksmith, and of 
 that other story of Pythagoras's discovery 
 of the consonances by listening to the 
 sounds made on the anvil by hammers of 
 different weights. 
 
 There are many varieties of myths, 
 and the different varieties shade off into 
 a
 
 Some Musical Myths. 
 
 each other in so many ways that classifi- 
 cation is very difficult, if not impossible. 
 We are apt to make the mistake of credit- 
 ing them to the poetic insight of their 
 inventors, but it is now generally ad- 
 mitted that in their earliest, crudest forms 
 they are nothing but ignorant attempts 
 to explain natural phenomena in terms 
 that to the savage mind are flatly prosaic. 
 To our apprehension it sounds imagina- 
 tive and poetical to describe the retreat 
 of darkness before the sun as the death of 
 Typhon, struck through by the arrows of 
 " far-darting Apollo," but to the inven- 
 tors of the myth it was a literal explana- 
 tion of the fact. In South America there 
 is a tribe of Indians who have a drum 
 god, who speaks to them in the sound of 
 the drum. 
 
 To the simple mind of the savage, 
 everything, animate and inanimate, pos- 
 sesses a spirit and volition like his own ; 
 3
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 it is his theory of natural phenomena. 
 Therefore, when he beats his drum and 
 says that its spirit speaks to him, he is 
 not poetizing but giving what to him is a 
 scientific explanation of the fact. When, 
 after the lapse of time, the meaning of 
 this original explanation has been forgot- 
 ten, or a new explanation of the phenom- 
 enon has been grafted on the old, and an 
 attempt is made to explain the old myth, 
 the conscious stage of myth-making be- 
 gins. Thus the myth in which this same 
 tribe describes the invention of the drum 
 evidently originated in a later age, when 
 the facts had been forgotten. 
 
 According to this story, Arawanili, a 
 great chief of the olden time, somewhat 
 like Hiawatha, was walking one day by 
 the river-side, pondering sorrowfully on 
 the ills and afflictions of mankind, when 
 a beautiful nymph arose from the river, 
 and giving him a small branch which she 
 
 4
 
 Some Musical Myths. 
 
 carried, told him to plant it and after- 
 wards gather the fruit. He did so, and 
 the fruit turned out to be a large gourd, 
 and from this gourd they make the drum 
 called the maraca. Although the myth 
 stops here, the presumption is that all 
 the evils about which Arawanili was 
 pondering so sadly vanished at the first 
 beat of the drum, and mankind lived 
 happily ever after, 
 
 A myth of this kind is much more than 
 an attempt to explain a fact ; it tries to 
 give a circumstantial account of how this 
 fact came into existence. 
 
 It is quite possible that Arawanili may 
 have been a real person, a man of mark 
 in his day, and the invention of the drum 
 has been credited to him in virtue of that 
 strong tendency, not yet extinct by any 
 means, that makes mankind exalt their 
 heroes by fathering on them all unclaimed 
 waifs and strays of discovery and inven- 
 5
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 tion, just as Guido of Arezzo has been 
 credited with every musical discovery or 
 invention that existed in the eleventh 
 century. 
 
 There is a third class of myths, namely, 
 those which are invented long after, when 
 the force and meaning of the original 
 myths have been entirely forgotten, but 
 having been inherited as part of the an- 
 cestral belief, poets and philosophers at- 
 tempt to "spiritualize" them. The 
 Greeks were the great authors of myths 
 of this class, and their genius has woven 
 around them some of the loftiest and also 
 some of the worst teachings the world 
 possesses. 
 
 In the consideration of myths it is 
 necessary to keep these distinctions 
 always in mind, although it is never pos- 
 sible to say with exactness just how much 
 of the story belongs to one or to the 
 other class. The incongruous mixture of 
 6
 
 Some Musical Myths. 
 
 dissimilar subjects found in many myths 
 is an evidence that several older myths 
 have been fused together into one. 
 Thus, in a drum myth of some North 
 American Indians, when the waters of 
 the deluge began to subside they were 
 divided into four quarters and were 
 swallowed by four huge tortoises; and 
 the tortoises were of use, not only as 
 great reservoirs, but as great drums, be- 
 cause the first men beat on their backs 
 with drumsticks. Music and cosmogony 
 seem to have gotten into an inextricable 
 tangle in this story. Its crudeness is 
 proof of its great antiquity, whereas in 
 the following myth we have an example 
 of the third class, in which conscious 
 poetic invention is displayed. There 
 were twelve celestial maidens who came 
 down to the earth every day to dance in 
 a magic ring, accompanying themselves 
 on small drums. They were watched 
 7
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 one day by a young hunter, White 
 Hawk, who was rewarded by hearing the 
 most ravishing music that mortal ears 
 had ever heard. 
 
 One very curious fact is to be noted in 
 many of the musical myths coming from 
 widely separated parts of the world, 
 namely, that there is always some con- 
 nection between music and water. In the 
 first myth related it was a water nymph 
 who taught Arawanili the use of the 
 drum ; in the other the tortoises that 
 were used as the first drums were also the 
 reservoirs for the waters of the deluge. 
 
 In India, Sarasvati, the wife of Brahma, 
 is the inventor of music, and also the 
 goddess of streams. Again, in the 
 Egyptian myth of the invention of music 
 the same conjunction appears: Thoth 
 (the Egyptian Mercury), walking one 
 day on the banks of the Nile, chanced to 
 strike with his foot the shell of a tortoise
 
 Some Musical Myths. 
 
 which lay drying in the sun and wind. 
 Some of the ligaments of the tortoise 
 were still attached to the shell, drawn 
 tight by the heat, and they gave forth a 
 musical sound when struck by the foot of 
 the god. He, being of an observant turn 
 of mind, picked up the shell and twanged 
 the ligaments with his finger, and the 
 lyre was invented. The Greeks borrowed 
 this story from the Egyptians and im- 
 proved on it. According to their version, 
 Hermes, the wind god, who was born in 
 the morning one beautiful day in May, 
 was so precocious a child that by the 
 middle of the day he was out taking a 
 walk. When he found a tortoise he cap- 
 tured it and made a lyre out of its shell, 
 and at once began to play most ravish- 
 ingly. It is rather curious that the tor- 
 toise should appear in two musical myths 
 coming from places so widely separated 
 as Egypt and South America. 
 9
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 One of the most beautiful of the musi- 
 cal myths of the imaginative poetic class, 
 is the Greek story of the descent of 
 Orpheus to the lower regions to persuade 
 Pluto to restore his dead wife Euridice. 
 So great was his skill on the lyre that, in 
 Dryden's words, he " drew iron tears 
 down Pluto's cheek," and the gloomy 
 monarch consented to let Euridice return 
 from the under world to the earth. One 
 condition was exacted : Orpheus, while 
 pursuing the long, toilsome journey to 
 the upper world, was straitly charged not 
 to look behind him at the painfully- 
 following Euridice, He had almost 
 reached the sunlit world when, filled with 
 longing to see his beloved Euridice, he 
 turned, and with a sad cry she vanished 
 forever from his sight. 
 
 In the myths concerning the invention 
 of pipes or flutes, both water and wind 
 play a large part. The " great god Pan "
 
 Some Musical Myths. 
 
 was enamored of the nymph Syrinx, who 
 fled from him, and taking refuge in the 
 river was changed into a reed. Pan 
 rushed after her, and as he threw his arms 
 about the clump of reeds in which she 
 had taken refuge, a gust of wind blew 
 through them making a beautiful sound; 
 he was so charmed with it that he cut the 
 reeds and fashioned them into that oldest 
 and most universal of musical instru- 
 ments, the pandean pipe or syrinx. This 
 myth has been exquisitely done in verse 
 by Mrs. Browning with the omission of 
 that part relating to the nymph. 
 
 The Chinese have a very circumstantial 
 account of the invention of the pipe. In 
 the reign of the Emperor Hoang-ti, there 
 lived a great musician, Ling-lun. Al- 
 though music had been bestowed on the 
 Flowery Kingdom many years before by 
 a goddess, it was as yet nothing but a 
 confused mass of sounds without order or
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 system; so Hoang-ti commanded Ling- 
 lun to arrange the musical sounds in some 
 regular system. How to accomplish this 
 troubled Ling-lun sorely ; so he wandered 
 off in deep thought to the land where the 
 bamboo grows. Taking one of these 
 canes, he cut it off between the knots, 
 pressed out the pith and blew into it, 
 when it gave a beautiful sound. It hap- 
 pened that this sound was exactly that of 
 his own voice when he spoke, and also 
 that made by the murmur of the waters 
 of the river Hoang-ho, which ran near 
 by. " Behold!" he cried, " this is the 
 fundamental sound of nature, from which 
 all other sounds must be derived." Just 
 then the magic bird called Foung-hoang 
 settled, with his mate, on a tree near by 
 and began to sing; to Ling's delight, its 
 first note was that of the pipe he had 
 just made. Then all the winds were 
 hushed, and all the birds in the world
 
 Some Musical Myths. 
 
 ceased singing, that they might listen to 
 the magic bird and his mate. As they 
 sang, Ling-lun kept cutting off bamboos 
 and tuning them to the notes of their 
 songs, six to the notes of the male, six to 
 the notes of the female. When he had 
 finished he bound the canes together and 
 took them to the Emperor ; they be- 
 came the standard scale of China to this 
 day. 
 
 Leaving out the mythological part of 
 this story, it probably embodies the dis- 
 covery of some reformer of the scale. 
 Chinese vocal music is founded on the 
 pentatonic scale, the notes of the male 
 bird. Their instrumental music is 
 founded on the chromatic scale, a union 
 of the notes of the male and female birds. 
 In this story the water and the reeds 
 again make their appearance, but the 
 only part assigned lo the wind is total 
 silence. 
 
 13
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 Nareda, the inventor of the vina, a 
 kind of lyre pecuHar to India, was 
 called the " giver of water," and his 
 first instrument was made of the shell of 
 a tortoise. In many of the feats ascribed 
 to him he resembles the Hermes of 
 Greek, and Thoth of Egyptian mythol- 
 ogy. The persistence with which wind, 
 water, and tortoise reappear in the myths 
 of widely-separated peoples is a strong 
 argument for the community of origin of 
 the human family; but any attempt to 
 account for the existence of these myths 
 is necessarily very uncertain. Some 
 students of mythology incline to the 
 opinion that the drum, or back of the 
 tortoise, is the symbol of the sky, 
 the water-carrier; and that the wind 
 (Hermes-Thoth-Nareda), is the player, 
 and that there was a time when to say, 
 " Hermes sounds the lyre" or" Nareda 
 beats the drum," meant exactly what we 
 14
 
 Some Musical Myths. 
 
 mean when we say " the wind blows " or 
 it thunders"; and these phrases were 
 not a whit more poetical to the people 
 who used them than " it rains " or " it 
 blows " are to us. 
 
 From a very early period the flute was 
 rcf^Mrded as an inferior instrument to the 
 lyre. This superiority of the lyre, and 
 also the fact that the flute was the earlier 
 invention, is illustrated in several myths. 
 According to one Greek story, Minerva 
 used to play the flute, but threw it away 
 because Juno laughed at the faces she 
 made when playing, and took to the lyre 
 instead. The shepherd Marsyas found 
 tlie flute she threw away, and became 
 such a virtuoso on it that he challenged 
 Apollo to a trial of skill. Apollo, when a 
 shepherd keeping the flocks of Admetus, 
 had also played the flute, and he, too, had 
 discarded it for the lyre. The nine Muses 
 were chosen as a jury. As a matter of
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 course Apollo was victorious, and he was 
 ungenerous enough to revenge himself 
 on his adversary for challenging him by 
 skinning him. Perhaps this is only a 
 mythical way of setting forth the fate 
 meted out to a defeated candidate by 
 the musical critics of the time. 
 
 Plutarch tells a story that illustrates 
 this disparaging opinion of the flute. 
 Antisthenes, to whom some one spoke 
 in high terms of the performance of the 
 flute-player, Ismenias, replied : " He must 
 be but a wretched human being, other- 
 wise he could not be so excellent a 
 piper." 
 
 The old myths all tell strange stories 
 of the wonderful power of music. Or- 
 pheus tamed wild animals and " made 
 the mountain-tops that freeze " bow 
 themselves to listen to his lyre. Amphion 
 built the walls of Thebes by compelling 
 the stones to range themselves in order 
 i6
 
 Some Musical Myths. 
 
 at the sound of his music. Arion, who 
 failed to charm the sailors, so charmed a 
 dolphin by his lyre that when the sailors 
 threw him overboard the dolphin carried 
 him safely to the shore. 
 
 These Greek stories have a curious 
 analogue in far-off Finland, in the per- 
 son of the musician Waiiiamoinen. In 
 the Kakvala, the epic poem of Finland, 
 his performance is thus described: " He 
 raised his clear, limpid voice, and his 
 fingers danced over the strings, while 
 joy answered to joy and song to song. 
 Every beast of the forest and fowl of the 
 air came about him to listen to his sweet 
 voice and taste the music of his strains. 
 The wolf deserted the swamp, the bear 
 deserted his forest lair; they ascended 
 the hedge, and the hedge gave way ; then 
 they climbed the pine tree and sat in the 
 branches. The old black-bearded mon- 
 arch of the forest and all the hosts of 
 
 a 
 
 17
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 Tapio hastened to listen ; his wife, the 
 brave lady of Tapiola, put on her blue 
 socks and red laces and climbed on a hol- 
 low tree to listen. The eagle came down 
 from the cloud, the falcon dropped 
 through the air, the swan forsook the 
 limpid v/aves; the swift lark, the light 
 swallow, and the graceful finches perched 
 on the shoulders of the god. Even the 
 sun and moon stood still. The sun 
 dropped his golden shuttle and the moon 
 her silver comb, so ravished were all 
 things at the sound of the voice of Wain- 
 amoinen." 
 
 This belief in the magic power of music 
 persisted even during the most notable pe- 
 riod of Greek culture. Plato, the greatest 
 of philosophers, in his Republic, a work de- 
 signed to set forth an ideal body politic, 
 says: " Such power resides in music that 
 the invention of a new kind of song is 
 fraught with danger to the state, for 
 i8
 
 Some Musical Myths. 
 
 when the music changes, the laws of the 
 state always change with it." For this 
 reason he considered music a very im- 
 portant branch of education, but insisted 
 that the Dorian and Phrygian modes, 
 which were considered by the Greeks to 
 be the " manly " modes, fit for warriors 
 to sing, should be the only modes taught. 
 He decreed that the lyre should not have 
 more than eight strings; and also that if 
 any musician in his model state should 
 compose a new tune, he should be re- 
 warded for his ingenuity, then peremp- 
 torily banished on pain of death if he 
 returned. It is rather strange that he 
 singles out the Ionian scale especially for 
 his strictures, disparaging it for its ex- 
 pression of softness and indolence, when 
 this Ionian scale corresponds exactly with 
 our modern major scale; still stranger is 
 the fact that centuries after, when that 
 modification of the Greek system known
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 as the ecclesiastical system of music was 
 in vogue, the Church censured the Ionian 
 scale for the very same reasons, calling it 
 the " lascivious tone," 
 
 It seems inexplicable to the modern 
 mind that such opinions could be held by 
 one of the greatest thinkers the world 
 has ever known, hence no surprise need 
 be felt that simple-minded barbarians 
 should attribute such potent effects to 
 music. 
 
 Some of the strangest of these myths 
 concerning the power of music come, as 
 might be expected, from the far East. 
 In India there is a belief that certain 
 kinds of music are appropriate to certain 
 seasons of the year, and that fatal effects 
 will follow the performance of a piece of 
 music at an inappropriate season. There 
 is a story of a certain musician who was 
 famed for his skill in playing the winter 
 music. In the course of his wanderings 
 20
 
 Some Musical Myths. 
 
 he arrived at the court of a king who, 
 knowing of his skill and being very de- 
 sirous of hearing this winter music, com- 
 manded him to play it, although it was 
 midsummer. The poor musician pro- 
 tested, but the king insisted, hinting that 
 if the player did not comply he would 
 relieve him of his head. The unhappy 
 musician, before beginning to play, 
 waded into the Ganges until he was sub- 
 merged to the neck, but the precaution 
 was vain, for no sooner had he begun 
 than flames burst from his head, and he 
 was burnt to ashes, to the great delight 
 of the gentle monarch. 
 
 There is a Chinese story about a great 
 musician of ancient times, who made a 
 tune into which he put such wonderful 
 expression that he declared that if ever 
 in after ages a musician should arise who 
 could play it just as it ought to be played, 
 he would not only understand what the 
 
 21
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 tune meant, but would be able to conjure 
 up the very voice and appearance of the 
 author. Some thousands of years after 
 his death, there lived a far-famed musi- 
 cian who spent all his time in practicing 
 this wonderful tune, in the hope that this 
 vision might be vouchsafed to him, but it 
 never came. One day a young man came 
 to him and after prostrating himself and 
 knocking three times on the ground with 
 his forehead, said, " O Father of music, 
 teach me to play on the kin " (the lute of 
 scholars). The old man began to ques- 
 tion the youth, to discover what know- 
 ledge of music he possessed. At last he 
 asked him if he knew this wonderful tune 
 of the ancient musician. The young 
 man replied, " Yes, and whenever I play 
 it I see a venerable old man, who smiles 
 on me and commends my performance in 
 a soft, sweet voice." On hearing this 
 the master rose up, prostrated himself, 
 
 22
 
 Some Musical Myths. 
 
 and knocked six times on the ground 
 with his forehead, and said, " Thou art 
 the master and I am the pupil. For 
 many years have I studied this tune, but 
 never yet has the vision been granted to 
 me." 
 
 There must surely have been some 
 strange power in these old tunes that is 
 not possessed by any modern tune, ex- 
 cept that mysterious one that nobody 
 knows, that is said to have caused the 
 death of the old cow. 
 
 The making of myths was not confined 
 to the ancient world or to barbarians. 
 The intellectual darkness of the Middle 
 Ages furnished a prolific soil for the 
 growth of myths as strange as any that 
 the simplest-minded savage could invent. 
 In their ignorance of history and chronol- 
 ogy, and of the simplest scientific know- 
 ledge, the authors of those days jumbled 
 together facts and fictions, sacred and 
 23
 
 Highways and By way. s of Music. 
 
 profane history, Greeks and antediluvians, 
 with delightful unconsciousness of the 
 resulting absurdities. One grave author 
 asserts that Pythagoras, who is claimed 
 by the Greeks as the discoverer of the 
 consonances, made his discovery in the 
 following way: he was taking a walk and 
 happened to pass the smithy where Tubal 
 Cain was at work, and observed that the 
 hammers he was using gave sounds that 
 differed in pitch according to the ratios 
 of their weights. It is curious that for 
 centuries it was accepted as a fundamen- 
 tal tenet of musical faith, that Pythagoras 
 did discover the ratios of sounds in this 
 way, when some scoffer arose and repeated 
 the experiment and proved that the belief 
 was all wrong. 
 
 Another author denies that Pythagoras 
 
 discovered the consonances, and gives a 
 
 circumstantial account of their discovery 
 
 by Tubal Cain himself, in the following 
 
 24
 
 Some Musical Myths. 
 
 words: " The Master of History (Moses) 
 says that Tubal was the father of those 
 that play on the cithara and other instru- 
 ments; not that he was the inventor of 
 these instruments, for they were invented 
 long afterward, but he was the inventor 
 of music, that is, of the consonances. 
 As the pastoral life was rendered delight- 
 ful by his brother, so he, working in the 
 smith's art and delighted with the sound 
 of the hammers, by means of their 
 weights carefully investigated the pro- 
 portions and consonances arising from 
 them ; and because he had heard that 
 Adam prophesied of the two tokens, he, 
 lest this art which he had invented should 
 be lost, wrote and engraved the whole of 
 it on two pillars, one of which was made 
 of marble that it might not be washed 
 away by the deluge, and the other of 
 brick, that it might not be dissolved by 
 fire. And Josephus saith that the marble 
 25
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 pillar is still extant in the land of Syria." 
 This minute account certainly disposes 
 forever of the claim of the Greeks that 
 Pythagoras was the original discoverer. 
 
 I cannot forbear a quotation from 
 another ponderous writer which, while 
 not strictly a myth, illustrates the kind 
 of reasoning that piles up these monstrous 
 fabrications on the slenderest founda- 
 tions. This writer gives a very luminous 
 account of the cure of Saul's madness by 
 David's harping. Taking as his text the 
 words, " And it came to pass, when the 
 evil spirit from God was upon Saul that 
 David took a harp and played, so Saul 
 was refreshed and the evil spirit departed 
 from him," he discourses as follows: 
 " But we assert that David freed Saul by 
 the sole force and efficacy of music, in 
 order to demonstrate which, let it be ob- 
 served that those applications which 
 unlock the pores, remove obstructions, 
 26
 
 Some Musical Myths. 
 
 dispel vapors, and cheer the heart, are 
 best calculated to cure madness and allay 
 the fury of the mind. Now, music pro- 
 duces these effects, for as it consists in 
 sounds generated by the motion of the 
 air, it follows that it will attenuate the 
 spirits, which by that motion are rendered 
 warmer and more quick in their action, 
 and so dissipate at length the melancholy 
 humor. On the contrary, where it is neces- 
 sary to relax the spirits and prevent the 
 wounding or affecting of the membranes 
 of the brain, in this case it is proper to 
 use slow progressions of sounds, that 
 those spirits, and the biting vapors which 
 ascend thither from the stomach, spleen, 
 and hypochondria may be quietly dis- 
 missed. Therefore, the music of David 
 might appease Saul in either of these two 
 ways of attenuation, or dismission; by 
 the one he might have expelled the mel- 
 ancholy from the cells of the brain, or by 
 27
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 the other he might have dissolved it, and 
 sent it off in thin vapors by insensible 
 perspiration." And so on, through a long 
 chapter. 
 
 The myth-making tendency seems to 
 be perennial. It crops out at all times 
 and in the most unexpected places; no 
 sooner does an individual become famous 
 or notorious, but the inventive faculty of 
 his fellow-men sets to work to weave all 
 sorts of strange stories about him. One 
 of the best known of modern myths, one 
 that has been repeated and believed by 
 many, is the story of the violinist Pag- 
 anini having learned to play wonder- 
 fully on one string, through his having 
 been imprisoned for many years and 
 having obtained a violin with only 
 one string. Stories of like nature have 
 grown up about many men who have, in 
 virtue of their abilities, or even their 
 crimes, become the objects of the wonder, 
 28
 
 Some Musical Myths. 
 
 or envy, or admiration of their fellows. 
 They serve to illustrate that insatiable 
 desire for the marvelous that is inherent 
 in humanity, which is ever ready to seek 
 in the supernatural the explanation or 
 origin of that which is new or unfamiliar. 
 
 
 29
 
 II. 
 
 SOME FACTS IN THE GROWTH OF MUSIC. 
 
 HAVING treated in my first essay 
 of some of the mythical accounts 
 given by various people concerning the 
 origin of music, I will in this essay at- 
 tempt to sketch what seems to be the 
 order in which the various advances in 
 the art of music were made, from its 
 crude beginnings to its present luxuriant 
 condition. 
 
 In the investigation of ethnical phe- 
 nomena it has often been found that 
 more trustworthy results may be obtained 
 by studying the actual condition of races 
 now living, in various stages of barbarism, 
 30
 
 Some Facts in the Growth of Music. 
 
 their customs, arts, and beliefs, than 
 by weaving elaborate hypotheses about 
 the scanty remains of races that have 
 forever passed away. For example, if 
 we find a tribe which still uses stone or 
 horn implements, we gain more accurate 
 and more complete knowledge from ob- 
 serving how they make and use these im- 
 plements than we can get from volumes 
 of ingenious speculation written in the 
 best appointed museums. And then, 
 without actual observation there is always 
 an underlying suspicion that the most 
 plausible hypothesis may, after all, be 
 totally erroneous. 
 
 It rarely happens that the attempt 
 to reconstruct a forgotten art meets 
 the signal success that attended one of 
 which I had the good fortune to be a 
 witness. The celebrated student of In- 
 dian life, and martyr to his scientific ardor. 
 Colonel Gushing, after much laborious
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 study discovered the ancient Peruvian 
 art of weaving by which were produced 
 such curious fabrics. He illustrated his 
 discourse by weaving a small piece of this 
 cloth. At the close of the lecture, a 
 gentleman came forward and said that he 
 had just returned from South America, 
 where he had visited some hitherto un- 
 known Indian tribes, and confirmed the 
 accuracy of Colonel Cushing's rediscovery 
 with the words: " I have seen the South 
 American Indian women hundreds of 
 times weaving cloth in just that way." 
 
 As to music, we have only the vaguest 
 and most unsatisfactory accounts of its 
 condition, even among the highly civil- 
 ized nations of antiquity; and to obtain 
 any trustworthy knowledge of the growth 
 of the art, we must turn our attention to 
 the condition in which it exists among 
 savage and semi-civilized people at the 
 present time. 
 
 32
 
 Some Facts in the Growth of Music. 
 
 To get into the right attitude towards 
 primitive music, we must first divest our- 
 selves of nearly every trait that we look 
 upon as essential to music; scale, key, 
 melody, even rhythm must be given up, 
 so that nothing remains but the succession 
 of sounds of different but indefinite pitch. 
 
 Rowbotham, in his history of music, 
 gives numerous examples of songs of 
 South American Indians that consist of 
 the constant iteration of two sounds, 
 approximately a whole tone apart. Other 
 examples take in three sounds ; still others 
 take in a fourth sound, but, strangely 
 enough, it is not the next succeeding 
 sound to the third, but is the fifth above 
 the first sound, thus making a beginning 
 of the pentatonic, or five-note scale, a 
 scale that exists in as widely separated 
 parts of the world as China, Japan, North 
 America, Scotland, and Ireland. 
 
 It is necessary to guard against the 
 
 33
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 error of making too wide generalizations 
 from isolated instances. Hence it would 
 be unsafe to say that the course of musi- 
 cal development has followed the same 
 path in every case, or to say that wherever 
 we find a people at any given point on 
 the road towards civilization, we shall find 
 all the arts, or any one of them, at the 
 same stage of development which they 
 have reached among another race that 
 has reached the same point on that long 
 uphill path. For example, the African 
 bushmen are about on the same plane of 
 civilization, or lack of it, as the aborigines 
 of this country (that is, those out of contact 
 with the white race). Yet the bushmen 
 have a scale progressing by quarter-tones, 
 and can make instruments upon which 
 this scale may be played. A traveler relates 
 that he amused some of these savages by 
 playing an air on his flute ; their comment 
 was that " it jumped about too much." 
 34
 
 Some Facts in the Growth of Music. 
 
 The existence of a quarter-tone scale 
 among a people so barbarous may be 
 an unique case, but it should make us 
 cautious about being over-confident in 
 our speculations on the development of 
 music. Still, we are warranted in draw- 
 ing certain conclusions as to the main 
 characteristics of primitive music. 
 
 First, the idea of key or tonality is en- 
 tirely wanting. The idea of key is an 
 outgrowth of harmony, and the art or 
 science of harmony is only about two 
 centuries old. 
 
 Second, it is often, or generally, want- 
 ing in rhythm. Savages possess the sense 
 of rhythm, but their feeling for it is satis- 
 fied by the rhythmic beating of a drum or 
 the shaking of a rattle. It is said by some 
 observers that three Indians will beat each 
 one a different rhythm on his drum, while 
 the rest sing a song that is quite inde- 
 pendent of any of these three rhythms; 
 35
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 and they have founded a theory of 
 the exquisite rhythmic sensibility of the 
 red man on this observation. To the 
 writer it seems to prove just the reverse, 
 a view that has been confirmed by a 
 close, well-trained observer, who has made 
 an exhaustive study of Indian music in 
 Canada. 
 
 Third, the relative pitch of the sounds 
 in savage music setting aside such re- 
 markable cases as the scale of the bush- 
 men is very indefinite. Savage singers 
 always slide from one sound to another, 
 and are not by any means certain to slide 
 the right distance every time. The late 
 John C. Filmore told me that in one song, 
 in which there was a leap of an octave, 
 the singer was just as likely to make it a 
 seventh or a ninth as an octave, and then 
 to continue quite contentedly in the new 
 key that would result from this error. 
 
 It is quite likely that music existed for 
 36
 
 Some Facts in the Growth of Music. 
 
 a long time and made many advances 
 under these primitive conditions. There 
 is a wide difference in complexity be- 
 tween the two-note songs of the South 
 American Indians and the extremely in- 
 teresting examples collected by Miss 
 Fletcher among the Omahas, But music, 
 like language, cannot grow beyond a cer- 
 tain point until some means has been 
 devised to make a permanent record of it. 
 The greatest advance possible without a 
 means of recording is the adoption of a 
 scale by selecting some sounds and reject- 
 ing others. When, or by whom, this was 
 first done, and what was the nature of 
 the scale we may never know. The wide 
 diffusion of the pentatonic scale has led 
 many to believe that it was the first scale 
 to be adopted. But there are certain 
 facts which appear to make it probable 
 that the major scale is of equal antiquity 
 and universality. The slowness with 
 37
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 which changes are made in the East is 
 proverbial. The Burmese possess an in- 
 strument made of a series of bronze 
 bowls. A specimen in the museum of 
 the University of Pennsylvania gives the 
 scale of A major. A dulcimer, the plates 
 of which are of bronze, gives the scale of 
 D major. In the same collection two 
 marimbas (a sort of xylophone) from 
 Africa give, one the scale of A, the other 
 of D major. A number of Indian flutes, 
 lately added to the museum by the direc- 
 tor, are all pierced with six holes, and 
 all give major scales, with slight allowance 
 for defective piercing. These three ex- 
 amples, taken from such widely separated 
 localities as Asia, Africa, and North 
 America, all used by races that have 
 probably used them from time immemo- 
 rial, go far to prove that the major scale 
 may be quite as old and as widespread as 
 the pentatonic. 
 
 38
 
 Some Facts in the Growth of Music. 
 
 With our perfected system of notation 
 it is such an easy matter to reduce the 
 elusive material, sound, to order, that we 
 are unable to appreciate the difficulties 
 that had to be overcome by the first 
 genius who undertook to make a record 
 of these sounds. In my first essay I 
 gave some account of the way in which 
 the Chinese did it, by means of tubes of 
 standard lengths. In Greece the same 
 end was reached by the device of the 
 monochord, a string of standard length 
 put in a state of tension by a standard 
 weight, and divided in aliquot parts by 
 means of bridges. 
 
 The next step is of prime importance : 
 having determined the series of sounds, it 
 is then necessary to devise a graphic repre- 
 sentation of them. Many curious contri- 
 vances have been, and are, used for this 
 purpose, but the only one of especial in- 
 terest to us is the plan invented by the 
 39
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 Greeks, as it has, in many particulars, sur- 
 vived to the present day in our musical sys- 
 tem. To them we owe the adoption of the 
 first seven letters of the alphabet to indi- 
 cate the seven sounds of the diatonic scale. 
 It is because they began their series of 
 sounds on A (first space in bass staff), that 
 we call that sound A, with the unfortu- 
 nate result that our natural scale does not 
 begin, as it ought, on A, but on C. We 
 are indebted to them for many of our 
 musical terms, such as Tone, Semi-tone, 
 Chromatic, Diapason, Symphony, Orches- 
 tra ; though many have changed somewhat 
 in their meaning. 
 
 There were some complications in the 
 Greek system of notation that have never 
 been successfully unraveled, and as there 
 is none of their music in existence, we 
 are quite in the dark as to what it may 
 have been. 
 
 The Greek philosophers, nearly all of 
 40
 
 Some Facts in the Growth of Music. 
 
 whom seem to have been in some sense 
 musicians, have so beclouded the subject 
 with misty, mathematical, arithmetical, 
 and transcendental speculations that it is 
 impossible to determine even the nature 
 of their scale. One thing seems certain : 
 that is, that music for centuries was 
 simply melodic, as it is yet among by far 
 the greatest majority of peoples. What- 
 ever may have been the Greek system of 
 notation, it seems to have soon disap- 
 peared entirely, its sole surviving frag- 
 ment being the application of the seven 
 letters to the diatonic scale. 
 
 During the early centuries of the Chris- 
 tian era the art of music languished, and 
 had it not been that the Church adopted 
 it, and that a long series of devout 
 churchmen devoted their lives to its 
 study, it might have died out, except in 
 the form of ballads and dance tunes; or, 
 of a surety, its development into its 
 
 41
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 wondrous modern forms might have been 
 delayed for centuries. 
 
 Music as a great art is preeminently the 
 Christian art. These early churchmen, 
 whose labors were devoted solely to the 
 task of making music a fit adjunct to the 
 service of the Church, little thought that 
 they were laying the foundations of a 
 new art. 
 
 The process was long and slow. It 
 seems strange that in their first attempts 
 to make a record of melody they hit on 
 the clumsy expedient of the neumes, 
 when they already had the sounds in- 
 dicated by letters, and might have simply 
 placed the appropriate letter over the 
 syllable or word to which it was to be 
 sung. The most that the neumes could 
 accomplish was to indicate ivlicn the 
 voice must ascend or descend, without 
 telling how far it should do so. This 
 was improved upon by the adoption of a
 
 Some Facts in the Growth of Music. 
 
 line, on, above, or below which the 
 neumes were written ; a further improve- 
 ment' was the discarding of the neumes 
 and the substitution of square signs, like 
 a modern w^hole rest. 
 
 Another system was the use of a staff 
 of any number of lines, each space in 
 which represented a degree, the words or 
 syllables being written in these spaces. 
 This system appears to have met with 
 little favor, as a return was made to the 
 neumes; but greater precision was given 
 by using a staff, one of the lines of which 
 was red and represented the sound of C; 
 or one was green or yellow and repre- 
 sented the sound of F. Then, by a 
 stroke of genius, some one discovered 
 that it served the same purpose and was 
 less troublesome to write C or F on the 
 line (long afterwards G was also used), 
 and we have the origin of our clefs, 
 which are merely slightly modified and 
 43
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 ornamented forms of the letters C, F, 
 and G. 
 
 Notation was now capable of indicating 
 pitch, but not duration. So long as 
 music was only melodic, the necessity for 
 indicating the duration of sounds was not 
 felt, especially as church music, as then 
 practiced, was unrhythmic, a mode of 
 performance that still survives in the 
 singing of Gregorian chants and plain 
 song. 
 
 But when musicians began to experi- 
 ment in putting sounds together, the 
 necessity became apparent, and notes 
 were invented to meet it. Unfortu- 
 nately, their use was complicated by 
 various clumsy expedients, such as pro- 
 lation, to regulate their relative values. 
 These were all swept away by the ex- 
 pedient of putting a dot after a note to 
 increase its value, and by the invention 
 of bars. 
 
 44
 
 Some Facts In the Growth of Music. 
 
 The machinery of notation was now 
 complete; Httle has been added to it, 
 and it is found adequate to the expres- 
 sion of every conceivable variety of 
 rhythm, accent, pitch, and duration with 
 perfect ease and precision. 
 
 While this system of notation was 
 slowly getting itself into form, the ques- 
 tion of scales was still far from settled. 
 
 While the ecclesiastical or untempered 
 scales served the purposes of melody well 
 enough, it was gradually discovered that 
 they were unsuited for the purposes of 
 harmony, except to a very limited ex- 
 tent; and, as keyed instruments were 
 gradually brought nearer perfection, it 
 was found to be impossible so to con- 
 struct them that they would sound in 
 tune except in a very few keys. The 
 problem resolved itself into this: what 
 series of sounds may be used that will, 
 without being too numerous, make it 
 43
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 possible to begin a scale on every sound 
 of the series; that will, with its chords, 
 be near enough to perfect tune to satisfy 
 the ear ? The problem was impossible of 
 solution scientifically, but it was solved 
 empirically by dividing the octave into 
 twelve equal parts. An Italian mathema- 
 tician and musician, Zarlino, has generally 
 been credited with this discovery, but 
 later researches indicate that he was antici- 
 pated by a German, Andreas Werkmeister. 
 This discovery proved to be the key- 
 stone of the musical fabric. It was at once 
 followed by an outburst of musical pro- 
 ductiveness that made the eighteenth and 
 nineteenth centuries the golden age of 
 music. This golden age began with Each 
 and Handel, and ended with Schumann 
 and Mendelssohn. The life of one man, 
 Clementi, covered the whole period ; he 
 was a youth of eighteen when Handel died, 
 and he outlived Beethoven four years. 
 46
 
 Some Facts in the Growth of Music. 
 
 Such, in brief, has been the course of 
 musical development from the earliest 
 times of which we have any trustworthy 
 records to the present time. There have 
 been times when this growth seems to 
 have been completely arrested, followed 
 by times when its progress was very 
 rapid. Improvements in notation and in 
 the construction of musical instruments 
 have always been followed by rapid ad- 
 vances in the art of composition. 
 
 During the first three Christian cen- 
 turies there are very few references to 
 music to be found. Pliny, in the second 
 century, mentions casually that it was 
 the custom of the Christians to sing 
 antiphonally. The first definite notice 
 we have belongs to the fourth century, 
 viz., the founding of schools for the 
 study of church music. What was the 
 nature of the music taught we have no 
 means of knowing. A little more light 
 47
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 was let in a few years later when Am- 
 brose of Milan established the four scales, 
 since known as the authentic scales, viz., 
 those of D, called Dorian (after the Greek 
 system); E, Phrygian; F, Lydian (the 
 Greek Lydian began on F ^); and G, 
 Mixo Lydian. 
 
 Three centuries now passed without 
 any record. Then Pope Gregory came. 
 He added four more scales, each begin- 
 ning a fourth below one of the authentic 
 scales; these were called plagal, or bor- 
 rowed, scales. Two centuries after Greg- 
 ory, Charlemagne gave a great impulse to 
 the study of music, by founding schools 
 all over Europe for the study of Gregorian 
 music. Up to this time music seems to 
 have been melodic only, but shortly after 
 the death of Charlemagne a monk named 
 Hucbald appears to have made the first 
 recorded attempt at the combination of 
 sounds. He was followed by another 
 48
 
 Some Facts in the Growth of Music. 
 
 monk, Guido. The world owes a great 
 debt to the studious monks of old. 
 Guido is in many respects one of the 
 most interesting figures we meet in the 
 history of music. His contributions to 
 the art were numerous and important. 
 He is credited with many improvements 
 in notation, with the invention of the 
 hexachord scale system, and with the ap- 
 plication of the syllables, still in use, to 
 the notes of the scale. 
 
 The twelfth century was reached before 
 notes were invented by Franco of Co- 
 logne, another monk. A short time after 
 Franco, Marchettus of Padua wrote the 
 first treatise in which rules were laid 
 down for the combination of sounds. 
 From this time the rate of musical de- 
 velopment was constantly accelerated. 
 Foremost in the race came the Nether- 
 landers. What is known as the Belgian 
 school began with Du Vixy and ended 
 4./
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 two centuries later with Lassus, At his 
 death the scepter of musical supremacy 
 passed over to Italy, where the old classi- 
 cal school culminated in Palestrina. 
 Further progress was not possible under 
 the old conditions. The new condition 
 presented itself in the discovery of the 
 tempered scale. Then the scepter of 
 supremacy passed over to Germany, and 
 the great period of modern music began. 
 
 When we consider the wonderful com- 
 plexity of a modern symphony, or oratorio, 
 or opera, it seems almost incredible that 
 it has taken barely two centuries to de- 
 velop these forms; still more strange does 
 it seem that in the barbarous diaphony 
 of the tenth century there lay the germ 
 of modern harmony, and in the simple 
 ballads and dance tunes, well called folk- 
 songs, there was latent the stately sym- 
 phony. 
 
 The history of music is an excellent 
 50
 
 Some Facts in the Growth of Music. 
 
 illustration of Spencer's dictum that " all 
 progress is from indefinite homogeneity 
 to definite heterogeneity." Folk-tune 
 and church chant have grown and differ- 
 entiated into countless styles, which are 
 being constantly added to, as new com- 
 posers of ability arise. 
 
 In conclusion, the musician should 
 never forget that it was the tempered scale 
 that made Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mo- 
 zart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner 
 possible. It was the want of the tem- 
 pered scale that retarded the development 
 of music for so many centuries. The 
 musician who is familiar with the history 
 of his art is in no danger of being misled 
 by the schemes of enthusiastic seekers 
 after absolute tuning. 
 
 The adoption of any of these systems 
 would be the utter destruction of all the 
 music that we now look upon as the great- 
 est possible expression of the art. 
 51
 
 III. 
 
 LITERARY MEN AND MUSIC. 
 
 IT may be laid down as an all but uni- 
 versal rule that poets and literary 
 people in general are not only ignorant 
 of music but singularly wanting in a due 
 appreciation of its position among the 
 arts, and this in spite of the fact that 
 they so often indulge in enthusiastic 
 laudation of music, an enthusiasm all 
 too devoid of knowledge. 
 
 One of the commonest mistakes arises 
 from the confusing of " agreeable sounds" 
 with " music." They write of the music 
 of birds, of winds, of waters; pleasant all 
 these things are, but they are not "music" 
 52
 
 Literary Men and Music. 
 
 except in a metaphorical sense. Sound, 
 no matter how agreeable, does not be- 
 come music until it is organized; definite 
 pitch, definite relations of various kinds, 
 and, above all, definite " forms " are the 
 essentials of music. 
 
 Another very common error is to con- 
 found the music with the poetry. Poets 
 and writers rarely refer to instrumental 
 music, and when they do it is generally to 
 its simplest forms, dances or marches. 
 When they write of music it is almost cer- 
 tain to be of song. This is probably a 
 survival from the time when the poet was 
 literally the singer; he is so called in 
 poetry yet. But the gradual separation 
 of these arts, that the growth of music as 
 a " great art " has caused, has separated 
 the two functions so widely that the poet 
 to-day generally knows even less about 
 music than the musician knows about 
 poetry. 
 
 53
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 One of the best illustrations of this 
 confusion may be found in an essay by 
 Catlyle. He was somehow persuaded to 
 attend a performance of Don Giovanni, 
 and he writes his impressions of Mozart's 
 masterpiece. Not a word does he say 
 about the music, but he falls foul of 
 Mozart for not following the example 
 of the Greek poet Tyrtaeus, who " sang" 
 patriotic songs that roused his country- 
 men to beat back their enemies. Thus 
 he condemns Mozart, the artist in music, 
 for not being like Tyrtaeus, the artist in 
 poetry. Then, with characteristically 
 grim humor, he seizes on the ballet, for 
 which Mozart was in no way responsible, 
 and compares the poor ballet-dancers to 
 
 so many frantically jumping scissors 
 with the point of one blade stuck in the 
 ground and bid to ' stand, in the devil's 
 name.* " And this is all that the greatest 
 literary man of the age could find to say 
 54
 
 Literary Men and Music. 
 
 about the greatest musical " art work" 
 of its kind in existence. 
 
 The very rarity of literary men who 
 write knowingly of music is of the na- 
 ture of those exceptions that are said to 
 prove the rule. Foremost among these 
 exceptional ones stands Shakespeare; he 
 is full of references to music, of such a 
 kind as make it evident that he was fa- 
 miliar with the " art music " of his time. 
 One might almost construct a primer 
 of seventeenth century music from his 
 allusions. He writes knowingly of the 
 hexachord, of part music, of various 
 instruments, plain song, descant, qua- 
 trible, and quinible singing, in fact, 
 in music, as in everything else, he seems 
 in some way to have absorbed all the 
 knowledge of his time. 
 
 The next great exception was Milton. 
 He was the son of one of the best madri- 
 galists who contributed to the Triumphs 
 55
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 of Oi'eana ; he was trained in the art, 
 counting among his many accompHsh- 
 ments that of playing the organ. Conse- 
 quently, all his references to music are 
 intelligible and correct. Counterpoint 
 was never so beautifully defined as in 
 the oft-quoted lines in L Allegro : 
 
 " In notes with many a winding bout 
 Of linked sweetness long drawn out, 
 With wanton heed and giddy cunning, 
 The melting voice through mazes running, 
 Untwisting all the chains that tie 
 The hidden soul of Harmony." 
 
 Nor a cathedral service, as in the lines 
 from the contrasted poem, 11 Pcnscroso : 
 
 " Then let the pealing organ blow 
 To the full-voiced choir below. 
 In service high and anthems clear. 
 As may with sweetness through mine ear 
 Dissolve me into extasies, 
 And bring all Heaven before mine eyes." 
 
 Among poets of the first rank there is 
 
 56
 
 Literary Men and Music. 
 
 only one other exception ; for the n:iusi- 
 cian, the most important of the three, 
 Robert Browning, He had the advan- 
 tage of thorough musical training and 
 thought seriously at one time of making 
 music his life-work. One result of this 
 training has been that he has treated 
 music with a fullness of knowledge and 
 sympathy far beyond that of any other 
 literary man. Four of his poems are 
 devoted exclusively to music, and they 
 display a profoundness of insight, and a 
 practical and theoretical knowledge that 
 make these poems worthy of the careful 
 study of every thoughtful musician. In 
 Master Hugucs of Saxc-Gotha we find a 
 statement of the inadequacy of the purely 
 mechanical, soulless, old contrapuntal style 
 to express the emotion that ought to be the 
 aim of music. In a Toccata by Gabippi'\?,2, 
 statement that music is a reflection of the 
 life and thought of the period that gave it 
 57
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 birth. In Abt Vogler is set forth the fact 
 that music is, in a pecuHar degree, an 
 evolution from the inner consciousness, 
 and therefore at the same time the most 
 human and divine of the arts. 
 
 Parlcyings with Cliarlcs Avisofi is a pro- 
 found investigation into the reasons of 
 the power of music to express emotion, 
 and why the music that at one period 
 seems the most perfect expression of an 
 emotion should at a later period seem 
 utterly dead, as if its emotion had evapo- 
 rated like the perfume of a withered 
 flower. 
 
 After Milton the next poet of any 
 eminence was Dryden, but he treated the 
 subject in the conventional Greek fash- 
 ion, attributing certain wonderful effects 
 to " modes," which effects, if ever pro- 
 duced, were due to the poetry rather 
 than to the music. 
 
 There was at the beginning of the 
 58
 
 Literary Men and Music. 
 
 eighteenth century a sort of sham en- 
 thusiasm for Greek " culture," which is 
 well exemplified in an ode by Collins, 
 called TJic Passions. He pathetically 
 calls on musicians to " revive the just 
 designs of Greece," or, in other words, 
 to give up melody, harmony, and coun- 
 terpoint, and also all the rapidly improv- 
 ing musical instruments, and return to 
 the monotonous chant, accompanied by 
 an eight-stringed lyre and a flute made 
 from the leg-bone of a crane. Of course 
 this view had its origin in that confusion 
 of the poet with the musician that misled 
 Collins as it did Carlyle. One of the 
 foremost advocates of these imaginary 
 " just designs of Greece " was Sir Wil- 
 liam Temple. He, according to Haw- 
 kins, while contending earnestly for the 
 superiority of Greek music, frankly con- 
 fessed his " utter incapacity to judge 
 about it." His views may be judged of 
 59
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 by the following delicious piece of ab- 
 surdity from his Essay on Ayicient and 
 Modern Learning : 
 
 What are become of the charms of 
 music, by which men and beasts, fishes, 
 fowls, and serpents were so frequently 
 enchanted, and their very nature changed ; 
 by which the passions of men are raised 
 to the greatest height and violence, and 
 then so suddenly appeased, so as they 
 might be justly said to be turned into 
 lions or lambs, into wolves or into harts, 
 by the powers and charms of this admir- 
 able art ? 'T is agreed of all the learned 
 that the science of music so admired by 
 the ancients is wholly lost in the world, 
 and that what we have now is made up 
 of certain notes that fell into the fancy or 
 observation of a poor friar in chanting his 
 matins: so as those two divine excel- 
 lencies of music and poetry are grown in 
 a manner to be little more but the one 
 60
 
 Literary Men and Music. 
 
 fiddling and the other rhynaing, and are 
 indeed very worthy the ignorance of the 
 friar and the barbarousness of the Goths 
 that introduced them among us." 
 
 The great literary arbiter of the eigh- 
 teenth century, Dr. Johnson, found 
 nothing more to say about music than 
 that it was " a less unpleasant kind of 
 noise," although Boswell, to be sure, tells 
 a story of his being very much affected 
 by a quartet of horns which he heard 
 at a funeral. Possibly the occasion had 
 more to do with it than the music. 
 
 It is rather remarkable that a fine 
 rhythmic sense may exist without the 
 least melodic sense. Many poets whose 
 lyrics have proved inspirations to genera- 
 tions of song writers have been utterly 
 unmusical themselves. Walter Scott is 
 a shining example; the rhythmic " lilt " 
 of his lyrics is irresistible, yet he con- 
 fessed his inability to distinguish one tune 
 6i
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 from another, and said he got more pleas- 
 ure from Hstening to a bagpipe than from 
 any other kind of music. 
 
 In striking contrast to Browning's in- 
 terest in music is the almost entire 
 absence of allusion to it in Tennyson. 
 His allusions are always vague, and give 
 the impression that he knew very little 
 and cared less about it. There is but 
 one case in which he makes a definite 
 allusion to music, in Maud; but he 
 makes the " flute, violin, and bassoon " 
 do duty for the whole orchestra (perhaps 
 synecdochically), and the dancers are 
 made to "dance in tune,''' by what 
 figure of speech it would be difficult to 
 say. 
 
 A very striking book has been pub- 
 lished of late, called Riiskin on Mnsic. 
 This book was not written by Ruskin, 
 but is a compilation from his writings, of 
 references to music. Its interest lies in 
 62
 
 Literary Men and Music. 
 
 the fact that it indicates a continually 
 growing interest in music as a " great 
 art " that culminates in enthusiastic ad- 
 miration. This is an example of rare 
 open-mindedness on the part of a literary 
 man, forming a strong contrast to the 
 half-supercilious, patronizing way in which 
 they generally treat this subject, like the 
 great Goethe's condescending patronage 
 of " our Felix," and his " eying ask- 
 ance " of Beethoven, whom it was im- 
 possible to patronize. 
 
 A certain famous English poet and 
 man of letters who visited America some 
 years ago, met at a reception given in his 
 honor by a prominent Philadelphian, a 
 well-known musical amateur who had set 
 to music one of the poet's lyrics very 
 successfully. The poet praised the set- 
 ting, but said it was not his idea of what 
 the right kind of melody for these words 
 ought to be, adding, " Come, let us find 
 63
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 a quiet corner and I will give you my 
 idea." They did so, and the poet 
 growled through his poem on two or 
 three notes " below the bass clef," with- 
 out either time or tune, and wound up 
 with, " Now, tJiat 's the kind of melody 
 these words ought to have." 
 
 This poet's idea of melody was on a 
 par with a certain worthy, learned, west- 
 ern bishop's idea of " choral." When 
 about to officiate in a city church, he 
 sent a message to the organist to come 
 to the vestry, and then and there im- 
 pressed on the " music man " that, for 
 that day at least, the service must be 
 " choral, purely choral." He repeated 
 the word so often that it struck the 
 organist that it would be well to ascertain 
 just what he meant by " choral." In 
 reply to the organist's question, the 
 bishop, with a look- of infinite surprise 
 and pity for his ignorance, said, " Why! 
 64
 
 Literary Men and Music. 
 
 music that everybody knows, of course, 
 like Brattle Street or RathbunS' 
 
 As a set-off to these unmusical literary 
 men, the following story of an unpoetical 
 musician may be related. Henry Lawes, 
 the friend of Milton and the composer 
 of the music to Comics, was so little im- 
 pressed with the beauty of the final 
 couplet of the Echo Song, 
 
 " So may'st thou be transplanted to the skies 
 And lend new grace to all Heaven's har- 
 monies," 
 
 that with dull musical pedantry he 
 changed it to 
 
 " So may'st thou be transplanted to the skies 
 And /lo/d a counterpoint to all Heaven's 
 harmonies." 
 
 The story can hardly be true, else surely 
 
 Milton, God-fearing man of peace and 
 
 Puritan though he was, would have risen 
 
 65
 
 Highways and Byways of Music, 
 
 up and smitten him as Samuel smote 
 Agag. 
 
 Turning from the poets to the novel- 
 ists, the three great names of Thackeray, 
 Dickens, and George Eliot naturally pre- 
 sent themselves. George Eliot was an 
 accomplished musician, and all the refer- 
 ences to music in her writings display her 
 knowledge and appreciation of the art. 
 But we may search in vain for the least 
 indication of either knowledge of or 
 sympathy with music in the works of 
 Dickens or Thackeray. Allusions in 
 plenty there are, but they are either of 
 the ordinary literary type, or else half 
 or wholly satirical, indicaiions of the 
 ordinary attitude of cultivated people 
 that is, literary people towards music; 
 that is, that ignorance of it is a thing on 
 which to pride one's self, and that those 
 who profess enthusiasm for its higher 
 forms, especially the symphonic, are 
 66
 
 Literary Men and Music. 
 
 amiable idiots, to be tolerated and 
 laughed at by those of superior intelli- 
 gence. 
 
 As to Dickens, the humor of some of 
 his musical vaticinations is irresistible; 
 witness the following description of an 
 amateur, from Donibey and Son : 
 
 " After knocking once at the door atid 
 getting no response, this gentleman sat 
 down on a bench in the little porch to 
 wait. A certain skilful action of his 
 fingers as he hummed some bars and beat 
 time on the seat beside him seemed to 
 denote the musician, and the extraordin- 
 ary satisfaction he derived from humming 
 something very long and very slow, 
 which had no recognizable tune, seemed 
 to denote that he was a scientific one." 
 (With the laity, scientific music always 
 means music they do not like.) " The 
 gentleman was still twirling a theme 
 which seemed to go round, and round, 
 67
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 and round, and in, and in, and in, and to 
 involve itself like a corkscrew twirled 
 upon a table without getting any nearer 
 to anything, when the door opened," 
 etc. On another occasion this same 
 gentleman is described as " whistling ac- 
 curately through the whole of Beethoven's 
 Sonata in i?." Very amusing, but hardly 
 just towards the " art of music " ; still, a 
 perfect picture of the attitude of the 
 generality of literary men towards 
 " scientific music." 
 
 In Martin Chuzzleivit there is an ac- 
 count of a serenade which, in addition to 
 its humor, is doubtless a true picture of 
 many similar attempts to make music. 
 When " Todgcrs's boarding-house rises 
 to the occasion," to do honor to the 
 arrival of the Misses Pecksniff, " one 
 gentleman took the tenor, another gentle- 
 man took the bass, and the rest took what 
 they could get." The extemporaneous 
 68
 
 Literary Men and Music. 
 
 efforts of amateurs at part-singing could 
 not be more aptly described. 
 
 In the writings of the gentle satirist, 
 Thackeray, there are several allusions to 
 music, or rather to musicians, in which 
 he exposes the humbug and pretension 
 that characterize too many of the pro- 
 fessors of the art, or makes merry over 
 the inanities of the " words " of popular 
 songs or operas. One of his short stories, 
 The Raveiisiving, is devoted to the history 
 of a singer, and incidentally to that of the 
 various teachers and impresarios into 
 whose clutches she fell. There is an in- 
 imitable description of a teacher named 
 Baroski, vain, greedy, lying, villainous 
 in every way, yet a master of the art of 
 singing. The portrait is so true to nature 
 that some well-known London teacher 
 must unconsciously have sat for it. 
 
 Baroski's school and his pupils are 
 photographed as follows : " Benjamin 
 69
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 Baroski was one of the chief ornaments 
 of the musical profession in London ; he 
 charged a guinea for a lesson of three 
 quarters of an hour, abroad, and had 
 furthermore a school at his own resi- 
 dence, where pupils assembled in con- 
 siderable numbers, and of that curious 
 mixed kind which those may see who fre- 
 quent these places of instruction. There 
 were very innocent young ladies with 
 their mammas, who would hurry them 
 off trembling to the farther corner of the 
 room when certain doubtful professional 
 characters made their appearance. There 
 was Miss Grigg, who sang at the Found- 
 ling; Mr. Johnson, who sang at the Eagle 
 Tavern; Miss Froravanti, who sang no- 
 where, but was always just coming out 
 at the Italian opera; Lord Simpetor, a 
 tenor; Captain Guzzard of the Guards, a 
 bass; Mr, Bulger the dentist, who was 
 neglecting his gold plates and fillings for 
 70
 
 Literary Men and Music. 
 
 his voice, as every unfortunate individual 
 will do who is bitten by the music mania; 
 pale governesses and professionals in 
 shabby clothes, who were parting with 
 their hard-earned little stock of guineas 
 that they might say they were pupils of 
 the great Baroski." 
 
 From Baroski the "Ravenswing" goes 
 to another teacher who is the antipodes of 
 Baroski, Sir George Thrum. This worthy 
 is an incarnation of the most odious form 
 of intense respectability, with a large and 
 awful wife who is a dragon of virtue and 
 propriety, who kept watch over the mas- 
 ter and his pupils, and who was " the 
 strictest guardian of female virtue on or 
 off the stage." 
 
 Thackeray must have observed closely 
 the manners of singing teachers, as he 
 makes Sir George say to the " Ravens- 
 wing " that the first thing to be done is 
 " to unlearn all that Baroski has taucrht
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 her." A good deal of the story is taken 
 up with an account of the devices made 
 use of by managers and teachers when 
 about to bring out a new opera or a new 
 singer. It is all very amusing, but, un- 
 fortunately, too true as a revelation of 
 the seamy side of the musical profession. 
 In this same story he has a fling at the 
 words " of songs and operas that does 
 not in the least exaggerate the absurdi- 
 ties of these poetical effusions. Here are 
 the words of a song, the copyright of 
 which, he says in a footnote, is for sale 
 for twopence halfpenny: 
 
 " Come to the greenwood tree, 
 Come where the dark woods be, 
 Dearest, O come with me! 
 Let us rove, O my love! " 
 
 And so on for four verses. 
 Here is an operatic gem : 
 
 " Tink-a-tink, tink-a-tink. 
 By the light of the star, 
 
 72
 
 Literary Men and Music. 
 
 On the blue river's brink, 
 
 I heard a guitar 
 On the blue waters clear, 
 
 And knew by its music 
 That Selim was near." 
 
 Some fifty years ago, one of the most 
 popular forms of piano music was the 
 " air with variations." In one of his 
 novels Thackeray satirizes this fashion- 
 able style of music in a very amusing 
 way. At an evening party the governess 
 is requested to play for the entertain- 
 ment of the guests. She " performs " a 
 set of variations on the air of a song that 
 was very popular some half a century 
 ago, entitled Sick a Gittiii Up-stairs. She 
 begins by"gittin' up-stairs" in a leisurely 
 manner; then she gets up with a run, two 
 steps at a time; then she crawls up-stairs 
 on all fours, and tumbles down to the 
 bottom; then begins again to get up 
 furiously, stopping to execute a pirouette 
 73
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 on every step ; then dances lightly down, 
 and after lingering for a while at the 
 bottom, clears the stairs at a bound, 
 executes a wild war-dance on the top 
 step, ending with a sudden crash from 
 top to bottom, where she lies exhausted. 
 It is a pity that the wit that was keen 
 enough to seize on the absurdities that 
 belittle the art was not sufficiently en- 
 lightened to understand and appreciate 
 all that lies beyond and above. 
 
 It is a singular circumstance that music 
 is the only art of which people, while 
 rather pluming themselves on their ignor- 
 ance, will speak in the most dogmatic 
 way. What musician has not heard 
 some sweeping assertion about music pre- 
 faced v/ith some such remark as this: " I 
 don't know anything at all about music, 
 but I know what good music is, and I 
 think so-and-so " ? It is greatly to be 
 desired that the literary world might be 
 74
 
 Literary Men and Music. 
 
 brought to understand that there is as 
 great an art in music as in poetry, or 
 fiction, or any other department of litera- 
 ture, one that makes as large demands on 
 the intellect; and that hard thinking is 
 as necessary an element in composing a 
 great symphony as in writing a poem or 
 a novel. 
 
 The people at large should be taught 
 that there are as many grades in musician- 
 ship as in any other profession; above 
 all, that a distinction should be made 
 between the " performer " and the com- 
 poser. The " performer " bears the 
 same relation to the composer that the 
 actor bears to the dramatist. True, in 
 music the two are often united, but not 
 necessarily so by any means. Unfortu- 
 nately, the publicity of the great perform- 
 ers and their vagaries too often childish 
 and absurd have given the prevailing 
 tone to the general opinion regarding 
 75
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 music and musicians. This opinion is 
 further strengthened by the trashy senti- 
 mentalities written about music and musi- 
 cians, and by the impossible creatures 
 delineated as musicians in such novels as 
 Consiielo or CJiarles Auchester. There is 
 only one great novel with a flesh-and- 
 blood musician in it, Y^\ Qsmtr \n Daniel 
 Deronda. The result is that a Mozart or a 
 Mendelssohn are put in the same category 
 with some piano gymnast, who helps his 
 notoriety by letting his hair grow, like 
 Absalom, or by playing such antics be- 
 fore an audience as suggest the simian 
 companion of the street musician. 
 
 In conclusion, I would warn musicians 
 not to follow the example of the literary 
 world towards music, by adopting a like 
 attitude towards literature. Especially 
 should the musician study poetry, not 
 merely read it, but study its laws of form 
 and construction. He will get many 
 76
 
 Literary Men and Music. 
 
 unexpected lights on his own art, and learn 
 the secret of how " good music " should 
 be "married to immortal verse." Above 
 all, if he reads intelligently, he will find 
 in the infinite variety of literary " forms " 
 many pregnant hints that will help him 
 in the development of his own art. 
 Beethoven is reported to have said that 
 he never composed without having some 
 great poem in mind. 
 
 77
 
 IV. 
 
 SOME CURIOSITIES OF MUSICAL HISTORY. 
 
 HAVING treated in another essay of 
 some of the problems of musical 
 history, I will in this one cull, with occa- 
 sional comment, some of the curiosities 
 that this history offers. The chief diffi- 
 culty is to decide when and where to be- 
 gin, there is such an embarrassment of 
 riches. But as it always gives an air of 
 learning to a discourse to begin with the 
 Greeks and Romans, I cannot do better 
 than follow this time-honored precedent. 
 These " curiosities" are not only enter- 
 taining, but much instruction may be 
 gathered from them as to the progress of 
 78
 
 Some Curiosities of Musical History. 
 
 the art and the estimation in which it 
 and its practitioners were held. Of 
 Greek music we know absolutely nothing, 
 except that it was chiefly vocal, and most 
 likely some sort of a chant. Of instru- 
 mental music they must have known 
 next to nothing, if we may base an 
 opinion on the representations of their 
 instruments, which seem to have been 
 few in number and of feeble powers. 
 The most important was the lyre, the 
 strings of which varied from four to 
 fifteen, although eight was the usual 
 number. The lyre furnishes us with one 
 curious story. A certain poet (remem- 
 ber that the poet and musician were 
 always one and the same person in 
 Greece) named Eunomus was challenged 
 to a trial of skill by another poet, Aris- 
 tonus. While Eunomus was performing, 
 a string of his lyre broke, and immedi- 
 ately a grasshopper which had been 
 79
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 listening in rapt attention flew up and 
 perched upon the lyre, and every time the 
 poet required the note of the broken 
 string, this inspired grasshopper emitted 
 a " skreigh " of exactly the right pitch. 
 The foolish jury awarded Eunomus the 
 prize, evidently unfairly, since poet versus 
 poet plus grasshopper was no part of the 
 original challenge. Several things may 
 be learned from this story : first, that the 
 Greeks did not always tell the truth; 
 next, that their taste in musical sounds 
 must have been rather peculiar. That 
 the ancients did take pleasure in the 
 sound of this little insect we have ample 
 confirmation in the well-known fact that 
 they kept cicalas a kind of grasshopper 
 in cages, and enjoyed the noise they 
 made. 
 
 The flute was held in great estimation 
 at one time, and contests in flute-playing 
 were held at the Olympic and other 
 80
 
 Some Curiosities of Musical History. 
 
 games. The contestants were compelled 
 by law to wear a sort of leather muzzle 
 called a capistrum. The passing of this 
 law was occasioned, so the story goes, 
 by the following circumstance: a favorite 
 flute-player, who had won the prize 
 several times, was determined to outdo 
 all his previous efforts, and he blew r,o 
 hard he burst a hole in his cheek. The 
 law was meant to prevent the recurrence 
 of such a distressing accident. Evidently 
 Greek taste thought loudness an element 
 of musical beauty. 
 
 Of the music of ancient Rome little is 
 known except that it was borrowed from 
 Greece, and so little esteemed was the 
 profession of music that it was practiced 
 only by slaves and freedmen. There 
 existed a school of flute-players (called 
 tibiccnists, from /il?n7, the shin-bone), the 
 object of which was to train flute-players 
 for the public festivals, but alas for the 
 
 6 
 
 8x
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 credit of musicians! these flutists were 
 notoiious, even in the worst period of 
 Roman history, for their drunkenness and 
 excesses of every kind. 
 
 These flute-players once went on a 
 strike because they had been forbidden 
 to carry on their carouses in the temple 
 of Jupiter; so they left Rome in a body 
 and went to the neighboring town of 
 Tibur, just before some great festival was 
 to be celebrated. The Roman ofificials 
 tried in vain to persuade them to return, 
 when the magistrates of Tibur came to 
 their assistance with a cunning stratagem. 
 Thev gave a great feast to which they 
 invited the flute-players. Then they 
 plied them with wine until they were 
 completely stupefied, when they were 
 loaded into wagons, taken back to Rome, 
 and shut up safely in the temple of 
 Jupiter to sleep themselves sober again. 
 They were so furious at the trick played 
 82
 
 Some Curiosities of Musical History. 
 
 on them, that to placate them the 
 authorities not only gave them permis- 
 sion to feast at will in the temple, but 
 gave them the additional privilege of 
 celebrating their return, annually, by a 
 tremendous " spree." 
 
 Passing on into Christian times, the 
 first utterances we meet concerning in- 
 strumental music are fierce, oft-repeated 
 denunciations from the Christian fathers. 
 Tertullian, Lactantius, and Chrysostom 
 denounced the flute, harp, and cymbals 
 as instruments of deceit that seduced the 
 hearers to idolatry, intemperance, and all 
 manner of evils. While we may be in- 
 clined to smile at the severity of these 
 denunciations of what to us seems a very 
 harmless amusement, we must not forget 
 that there were excellent reasons for 
 them, as the use of these instruments was 
 inclissolubly associated with all the ex- 
 cesses and enormities of heathenism, 
 83
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 which in this, the time of its decadence, 
 resorted to every device that might at- 
 tract the senses and aid it in its death 
 struggle with Christianity. 
 
 The power of music as an aid to re- 
 h'gion was soon recognized by the new 
 reh'gion, and the work of reducing it to a 
 system received the careful attention of 
 a long succession of able churchmen. 
 For many years this music was exclu- 
 sively vocal, hence it was that vocal 
 music developed a high degree of excel- 
 lence, while instrumental music led a 
 vagabond existence in the persons of 
 wandering minstrels, who played on 
 various strange instruments now become 
 obsolete. In the course of time the con- 
 dition of these minstrels improved some- 
 what, and they were received with delight 
 in the noble's castle as well as in tlie 
 farinhouse or humble hostel. Even the 
 monasteries did not disdain to shelter 
 84
 
 Some Curiosities of Musical History. 
 
 them, a.hd to enjoy in return their per- 
 formance of the popular music of the day. 
 So popular did minstrelsy become that it 
 was a common occurrence for wanderers 
 to claim food and shelter on the plea 
 that they were minstrels. Two mendi- 
 cant friars came to grief on an occasion 
 from this cause. They applied for a 
 night's lodging at a Benedictine monas- 
 tery, were well entertained by the monks, 
 and were requested, after supper, to re- 
 ward their entertainers with some music. 
 Being obliged to confess their inability, 
 the monks were so angry that they beat 
 the poor friars nearly to death, and thrust 
 them out of the house. 
 
 In England the palmy days of min- 
 strelsy were at the end of the thirteenth 
 and the beginning of the fourteenth 
 centuries. At the marriage of Queen 
 Eleanor's daughter to the Earl of Glouces- 
 ter, four hundred and twenty-six minstrels 
 85
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 were employed, and a sum equal 'to about 
 six thousand dollars was distributed among 
 them. The minstrels were associated in 
 guilds; the chief officer of the guild was 
 called the king. At a grand court cere- 
 mony held by Edward before his ex- 
 pedition to Scotland that resulted so 
 disastrously at Bannockburn, there were 
 six of these minstrel kings present, and so 
 many minstrels that about twelve thou- 
 sand dollars were required to pay them. 
 
 The number of these wanderers in- 
 creased so rapidly that it became neces- 
 sary to pass a law that not more than 
 three or four should apply on the same 
 day at the houses of " prelates, earls, 
 and barons " for " meate and drinke. " 
 
 Among the numerous instruments of 
 this time, a small bagpipe, called a 
 
 cornemuse," was a great favorite, espe- 
 cially with pilgrims, as may be seen in the 
 Canterbury Tales. A curious reason for 
 86
 
 Some Curiosities of Musical History. 
 
 this partiality of the pilgrims for this 
 instrument is set forth in an old state 
 paper, as follows: " If one of the pilgrims 
 goeth barefoot and striketh his foot and 
 hurteth it that it bleed, it is well that his 
 fellow play his bagpipe to cheer him and 
 drive away the thought of his hurt." 
 
 Minstrelsy declined rapidly from the 
 fourteenth century, yet as late as the six- 
 teenth the minstrel was a more important 
 personage than the traveling preacher. 
 At a meeting of the Stationers' Com- 
 pany in 1560, they employed a preacher 
 to whom they gave six shillings and two- 
 pence, and a minstrel to whom they gave 
 twelve shillings. Whether it be that the 
 minstrels have wondrously improved or 
 that preachers have deteriorated in these 
 latter days, certain it is that many a 
 " minstrel " gets more for a single even- 
 ing's performance than many a preacher 
 for a year's hard work. 
 87
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 The large sums paid to great singers 
 now are in striking contrast to the pit- 
 tances received by their remote predeces- 
 sors, as may be seen by the following 
 entries in the privy purse accounts of 
 Henry VII. : " To a woman that singcth 
 with a fiddell, two shillings." " To the 
 woman that sange before the king and 
 queen, six shillings and threepence." 
 Fancy Eames or Melba singing before 
 royalty for two shillings, or even six 
 shillings and threepence! 
 
 During the reign of Henry VIII., him- 
 self a musician of no small skill, the culti- 
 vation of instrumental music began to 
 grow rapidly. The lute, recorder, vir- 
 ginal, and the viols became the amuse- 
 ment of people of the highest rank, with 
 the natural result that minstrelsy rapidly 
 declined until it became almost extinct, 
 to be revived in the present century in 
 the pestilent form of the hand-organ and
 
 Some Curiosities of Musical History. 
 
 street-piano. So widespread became the 
 practice of instrumental music, that every 
 trade had not only its special songs, but 
 its special instruments. A man who 
 tried to pass himself off as a shoemaker 
 was detected because he could not play 
 either the flute or trumpet, nor could he 
 reckon up his tools in rhyme. In a book 
 published in 1622, called The Compleat 
 Gentleman, the author says: " Though I 
 will not go so far as the Italian proverb 
 that says, ' Whom God loves not, that 
 man loves not music,' yet I am verily 
 persuaded that they are by nature very 
 evil disposed, and of such a brutish 
 stupidity that scarce anything else that is 
 good and savoreth of virtue is to be 
 found in them," a sort of prose version 
 of the oft-quoted lines about the man 
 who is not moved by concord of sweet 
 sounds " being fit for " treason, strat- 
 agem, and spoils."
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 We get many curious glimpses into the 
 domestic life of our ancestors in old ac- 
 count books, such as were kept by the 
 stewards of great men. There is such an 
 account book extant that was kept by 
 the steward of the fifth Earl of Northum- 
 berland in the sixteenth century. This 
 earl maintained a large force of singers to 
 perform his daily chapel service ; this 
 force consisted of a dean, an organist, 
 and a number of men called gentlemen 
 of the chapel, and boys called children of 
 the chapel. The dean received four 
 pounds a year, the gentlemen of the 
 chapel from four to six, and the children 
 of the chapel twenty-five shillings each. 
 Their bill of fare was very plain and 
 coarse: for breakfast, a loaf of bread, a 
 piece of boiled beef, and a gallon of ale; 
 occasionally salt fish was substituted for 
 the beef. For supper, bread, a " pot- 
 tell " of beer (/. e., two quarts), butter, 
 90
 
 Some Curiosities of Musical History. 
 
 and salt fish. Poor and monotonous as 
 this bill of fare was, their master, the 
 powerful earl, did not fare much better. 
 His breakfast was the same, with the 
 addition of a quart of wine, and occasion- 
 ally some fresh herrings or sprats; and 
 for dinner some boiled mutton bones or a 
 chicken were added. 
 
 Some of the greatest musical curiosities 
 are to be found in the writings of musi- 
 cians themselves, beginning with Pytha- 
 goras and his dream of the " music of 
 the spheres," a fancy that has exercised 
 a singular fascination on the minds of 
 poets ever since. For centuries musicians 
 wrangled over the nature of intervals, 
 their arithmetical ratios, and their geo- 
 metric analogies, finding strange mysteries 
 in the facts that the proportions of one to 
 two, or four to five, or of any number 
 to any other number, were the' same, 
 whether the subject were sounds, or 
 91
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 numbers, or geometric figures, or Solo- 
 mon's temple, or the solar system. One 
 genius even found a strange relation be- 
 tween the ratios of the consonances and 
 the measurements of Noah's Ark. He 
 communicated his wonderful discovery 
 to Sir Isaac Newton, whose reply was a 
 masterly example of the non-committal. 
 
 The echoes of this wrangle have not 
 yet quite died away, as every now and 
 again some enthusiast proposes a " sys- 
 tem " or a " key-board " which he fondly 
 believes will realize that impossibility, 
 exact intonation. The writer, while ex- 
 amining one of these key-boards, played 
 some ordinary modulations, such as are 
 used universally. Their effect on this 
 instrument was literally " fiendish." The 
 comment of the inventor was: " Music 
 has no business to go out of one key. 
 Musicians are too fond of getting into 
 keys away from the one they begin in, 
 92
 
 Some Curiosities of Musical History. 
 
 a good psalm tunc never does." I could 
 only reply that, according to present in- 
 dications, there was little likelihood that 
 the " music of the future " would be 
 modeled on " good psalm tunes." 
 
 The great father of musical darkness in 
 the Middle Ages was Boethius. Lucidity 
 of style was seldom a characteristic of 
 mediaeval writers; like Shelley's Dem- 
 ogorgon, they " rayed darkness visible." 
 Boethius knew nothing about music, but 
 did not think himself thereby disqualified 
 to write about it. The result was a pon- 
 derous, pedantic work that has done more 
 to befog the subject than the combined 
 w^orks of all his successors. Here is a 
 nice, simple explanation of the ratios of 
 intervals: " There are five kinds of pro- 
 portions of inequality, as, multiplex, 
 superparticular, su[)crpartient, multiplex- 
 supcrparticular and multiplex-superpar- 
 tient. Superpartient relations are divided 
 93
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 into sesquialtera, sesquitertra, sesqui- 
 quarta, " etc. All of which is nothing 
 but a cumbrous way of stating by how 
 much one number exceeds another, for 
 example: thirteen is three times and 
 one fourth greater than four. In this 
 mediaeval language they would say, the 
 proportion between thirteen and four is 
 multiplex-superparticular, triple sesqui- 
 quarta. Boethius was a thoroughgoing 
 Pythagorean ; he says that " the theoretic 
 branch of every science is more honorable 
 than the practical. He is the only true 
 musician who professes music, not in the 
 slavery of execution, but in the authority 
 of speculation." In these latter days the 
 "authority of speculation" has been rather 
 set at naught in musical and other matters. 
 The pedantic discussions of these 
 mediaeval authors often took the form 
 of labored allegories. A writer named 
 Claude Sebastian wrote one to set forth 
 
 94
 
 Some Curiosities of Musical History. 
 
 the relative merits and demerits of plain 
 song, i. e., music without time or rhythm, 
 and what was known as mensurate music, 
 i. e., music with time. He figured it as 
 a war between two kings, brothers, who 
 reigned over the adjacent territories of 
 plain song and mensurate music. " The 
 allies of the king of plain song were the 
 pope, the cardinals," and, strange to say, 
 
 the Lutheran ministers." " Those of 
 the rival king were mode, time, and pro- 
 lation." Prolation was a complicated 
 system for regulating the relative values 
 of notes. " Each army was composed 
 of notes, and the shock of war was so 
 great that some of the notes received 
 black eyes," an allusion to the introduc- 
 tion of. black notes in place of the old 
 open notes called " evacuatai." 
 
 Another wiseacre discourses thus on 
 the difference between the v/hole and 
 half tone: " The tone and half tone may 
 95
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 be very aptly compared to Rachel and 
 Leah, of whom it is related in the book 
 of Genesis that they built up the house of 
 Israel, for as Jacob was first joined in 
 marriage to Leah, thus sound, the ele- 
 ment of music, first produces a tone and 
 then a semi-tone, and is in some sense 
 married to them. The semi-tone, from 
 which the symphony of all music is prin- 
 cipally generated, as it tempers the rigor 
 and asperity of the tones, may be aptly 
 assigned to Rachel, who chiefly captivated 
 the heart of Jacob, as she had a beautiful 
 face and graceful aspect. The tone ren- 
 dering a rigid, harsh sound, but frequently 
 presenting itself, agrees with Leah, who 
 was bicar-cyed, and was married to Jacob 
 against his will"; and so on with page 
 after page of this wearisome stuff; and 
 this was a text-book. Truly the "Gradus 
 ad Parnassum " was beset with thorns in 
 those days. 
 
 96
 
 Some Curiosities of Musical History. 
 
 A French author of great repute begins 
 his Introduction to Universal Harmony 
 with an astrological discussion of what 
 should be the horoscope of the perfect 
 musician. He casts the nativity of such 
 a person calculated for the latitude of 
 Paris, and discovers that the unfortunate 
 musician would enjoy a short life and 
 meet with a violent death. This amazing 
 Harmonie Universelle ends a treatise on 
 instruments of percussion with a versifica- 
 tion of the Athanasian Creed ! and the 
 book ends with an essay on the moral 
 lessons to be drawn from pure mathe- 
 matics. The author of this Harmonie, 
 Mersenne, was a friend of the celebrated 
 philosopher Descartes. Descartes con- 
 tributed to the book a discussion of the 
 mathematical proportions of musical in- 
 tervals. This treatise was translated and 
 published separately in England by a 
 Lord Brouncker, with the following queer 
 97
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 title : Renatiis Descartes Excellent Com- 
 pendium of Music ; With Necessary a7id 
 yudicions Animadversions thereupon, By a 
 Person of Ho7iour. 
 
 A favorite form of instruction-book 
 was one in which various personified 
 qualities or conceptions were introduced 
 as interlocutors. " Ignorance," " Hu- 
 manity," " Studious Desire," are fre- 
 quently made to discourse together, 
 sometimes in doggerel rhyme, like the 
 following specimen : 
 
 Humanity : 
 
 " Prick-song (/. e., written music) may not 
 be despised, 
 For therewith God is well plesed, 
 Honored, praised, and served 
 In the church oft-times among." 
 
 Ignorance makes a reply that shows he 
 is not quite prepared to accept this as 
 true, and, by the way, furnishes the 
 98
 
 Some Curiosities of Musical History. 
 
 original of the story of the sailor's defini- 
 tion of a " Hanthem." 
 
 " Is God well plesed, trowest thou, thereby ? 
 Nay, nay, for there is no reason why, 
 For is it not as good to say playnly 
 
 ' Give me a spade,' 
 As ' Give me a spa- ve- va- ve- vade ' ? 
 But if thou wilt have a song that is good, 
 I have one of Robin Hood, 
 
 The best that ever was made." 
 
 Humanity asks him to sing it, and 
 then, craftily making it his text, leads 
 Ignorance gently to the feet of Studious 
 Desire, who begins his enlightenment. 
 
 Even a musician like Morley, one of 
 the great madrigal writers of Elizabeth's 
 reign, begins an instruction-book with a 
 long, weary dialogue between Polymathes 
 and Philomathes, in which the least 
 amount of information is conveyed in the 
 greatest number of words. We have im- 
 proved on the " good old times " a little, 
 99
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 at least we do not now write our in- 
 struction-books in that way. 
 
 A very shrewd summing up of the 
 vocal characteristics of various European 
 nationalities is given by a writer of the 
 sixteenth century, who called himself 
 Ornithoparcus, his name being Vogel- 
 sang. One of the forms that pedantry 
 took was the Latinizing of proper names, 
 translating them when possible, if not, 
 giving them at least a Latin ending. His 
 verdict was that " The English do carol, 
 the French sing, the Italians that dwell 
 about the courts do caper with their 
 voices, the others bark, but the Germans 
 which I am ashamed to utter do howl 
 like wolves." Some excellent advice to 
 singers may be found in his writings as 
 to the pronunciation of vowels, and the 
 proper manner of emphasizing their 
 words. He was evidently a keen, shrewd 
 observer, who kept his eyes and ears 
 
 lOO
 
 Some Curiosities of Musical History. 
 
 open and " took notes" and " printed 
 them." 
 
 A musical folly not even yet quite 
 extinct is the composition of pieces of 
 instrumental music meant to describe 
 actions or events, or other things that lie 
 entirely outside of the province of music. 
 An excellent German composer wrote an 
 allemande to describe how Prince Thurm 
 crossed the Rhine, in which the dangers 
 he escaped are depicted so says the 
 author by "twenty-six cataracts of 
 notes." Another composer, Kuhnau, 
 wrote the Combat of David and Goliath ; 
 another, Buxteliude, wrote a set of sonatas 
 to describe the nature of the planets; 
 and countless others have illustrated, or 
 imitated, or described things in heaven 
 and earth and under the earth. Even 
 I^eethoven wrote a pastoral symphony, 
 with a cuckoo and a thunderstorm. Ap- 
 propriate to all such imitative music is 
 
 lOI
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 the reply of King Agesilaus of Sparta to 
 one who asked him to hear a singer who 
 could imitate the nightingale: " I have 
 heard the nightingale herself." 
 
 One might go on indefinitely citing 
 these musical curiosities, for the supply is 
 almost as inexhaustible as are the foibles 
 of the professors of the art. 
 
 Like every other history, that of music 
 is the story of chance discoveries, willful 
 blindness, and owlish blundering. It is 
 almost inconceivable why it should have 
 taken centuries to discover or invent a 
 thing so simple as musical notation. 
 Even after the invention of the staff they 
 blundered in adapting the notes to it; 
 after they got the notes, it took years to 
 discover the simple plan of making each 
 one in the series half the value of the pre- 
 ceding note. He was a genius indeed who 
 first put a dot after a note, and did away 
 with the cumbrous system of prolation 
 
 102
 
 Some Curiosities of Musical History. 
 
 and tempus perfectus and imperfectiis. 
 Authority has ever been the foe to pro- 
 gress. Pythagoras, in the persons of his 
 expounders, Ptolemy, EucHd, Boethius, 
 aim multus aliis, hung Hke a dead weight 
 on the car of musical progress for cen- 
 turies. It was the birth of the modern 
 spirit of free inquiry that accelerated the 
 development of music, as of all the other 
 arts and sciences. In our time all the 
 possibilities of the art have been explored, 
 not without furnishing some notable con- 
 tributions to its curiosities. 
 
 103
 
 V. 
 
 THE TEUTONIC ELEMENT IN MUSIC. 
 
 THE question, To what is the " na- 
 tional " character of music owing ? 
 is as difficult to answer as it is interesting. 
 This " nationalism " is easily recognized, 
 but the moment we attempt to describe 
 it, it eludes our grasp. Nor is this to be 
 wondered at, for no art may be defined in 
 the terms of another art. In our blunder- 
 ing fashion we often attempt this impos- 
 sible feat, but always fail in the attempt. 
 We speak of the " poetry " of a symphony 
 or the " music " of a poem, some even 
 call a painting a " symphony in color " ; 
 but these terms convey only the vaguest 
 104
 
 The Teutonic Element In Music. 
 
 metaphorical meanings, if any; hence we 
 may well despair 'of finding any words 
 which will enable us to say why we 
 recognize one melodic and rhythmic suc- 
 cession of sounds as German, another as 
 Italian, another as French, and so on. 
 
 The difficulty is increased when we find 
 that during the period of the old classical 
 school the " art music " exhibited none 
 of these national traits; a madrigal, or a 
 motet, or a fugue by an Italian composer 
 differed in no respect from a like com- 
 position by a German or Englishman or 
 Fleming. This nationalism, upon which 
 so much of the character of modern music 
 depends, seems to have suddenly made 
 its way into the " art music," and em- 
 phasized its presence so strongly that 
 henceforth German, Italian, French, and 
 English music were to differ as widely as, 
 or even more widely than, the manners 
 and customs of these several peoples. 
 105
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 In searching for the origin of this 
 nationalism we must turn to the " folk 
 music " of the various peoples, the popu- 
 lar songs and dance tunes, natural 
 growths, innocent of musical learning. 
 These may furnish some hints that may 
 aid us in answering the question. Folk 
 music exists in great abundance among 
 nearly all peoples who have lived un- 
 mixed long enough to have become homo- 
 geneous, and thus to have developed what 
 may be called a national temperament. 
 The universality of this folk music gives 
 rise to two very interesting questions: 
 the first, already hinted at, is, Is there 
 any genetic connection between the folk 
 music and the art music of a people who 
 have developed one ? Secondly, why 
 should an art music develop among one 
 people and not among another, when 
 both possess an equally copious and 
 beautiful stock of folk music ? The first 
 1 06
 
 The Teutonic Element in Music. 
 
 question is generally answered in the 
 affirmative, but the well-known fact 
 stated in the second question makes this 
 affirmation at least doubtful. The object 
 of this essay is to find, if possible, an 
 answer that will satisfy the conditions of 
 both questions. 
 
 It is universally admitted that music 
 gives a more direct revelation of emotion 
 than any other art, especially in the 
 natural, unsophisticated forms it assumes 
 in folk music; hence, if we can determine 
 the temperament of a people, that is, 
 the blending of moral, intellectual, and 
 emotional qualities that we recognize as 
 national or racial, we may get an inkling 
 of the reasons why one race develops an 
 art music and another does not. We will 
 try to point out the most striking charac- 
 teristics of the popular music of several 
 peoples. It hardly needs to be said that 
 these characterizations must be taken 
 107
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 with the limitations to which all sweeping 
 generalizations are subject. To begin 
 with the Italian, the popular music of 
 Italy is characterized by smooth, grace- 
 ful melody, by intense passion, or its 
 opposite extreme, languor. It indicates 
 a temperament in which quick, strong 
 passion is combined with a keen sense of, 
 and admiration for, sensuous beauty, but 
 when not moved by passion it is too lan- 
 guid for sustained effort. This tempera- 
 ment presents just the right conditions to 
 make Italy the cradle of dramatic music, 
 with its rapid variations of mood, its pas- 
 sion and action, all kept within the limits 
 of the beautiful by the ever-flowing stream 
 of exquisite melody. 
 
 On the other hand, the Frenchman, 
 gifted with a keen appreciation of style, 
 always terse and delicate in his work, is 
 as epigrammatic in his music as in his 
 literature; and it is impossible that a 
 loS
 
 The Teutonic Element in Music. 
 
 style chiefly characterized by neatness 
 and terseness should ever develop into a 
 large art form. The grace and self-poised 
 perfectness that give such a charm to a 
 chanson ox 2i genre composition of Couperin 
 cannot be stretched to cover a symphony. 
 Even in opera, the indigenous French 
 form is a series of delicately cut and pol- 
 ished jewels, strung together like beads 
 on a necklace. 
 
 It is easier to characterize German folk 
 music by negatives than by positives. It 
 is entirely wanting in the strenuous pas- 
 sion and soft melodiousness of the Italian, 
 on the one hand, and the neat precision 
 and savoir-faire of the French on the 
 other. It is quiet and self-contained, 
 passion is tempered by reason, imagina- 
 tion is controlled by reflection. It is the 
 reflex of the temperament of a sedate, 
 thoughtful race, given to " high thinking 
 and plain living " ; a people to whom art 
 
 Iu9
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 is as serious a matter as right Hving, 
 German folk music is entirely lacking in 
 the " catchy " quality of the brilliant 
 French or sensuous Italian music, but 
 these superficial qualities are more than 
 compensated for by a purity and earnest- 
 ness that make it haunt the memory long 
 after the others have lost their charm. 
 
 The words of folk-songs give equally 
 strong indications of the temperament of 
 their authors; a very large proportion of 
 these songs are, as might be expected, 
 love-songs. But the differences in the 
 expression of this universal passion are 
 very striking in different races. In the 
 Italian love-song the expression alternates 
 between passionate intensity and ecstatic 
 languor. In the French it is gay, with 
 often a half-veiled cynicism. 
 
 The Italian is divoto ; he abandons 
 himself to his passion : the Frenchman is 
 galant; he never forgets his "good form." 
 no
 
 The Teutonic Element in Music. 
 
 The German folk-song, when treating 
 of this theme, is quiet and serious; the 
 expression of love based on esteem, the 
 love that has made wife, family, and 
 home the most dearly cherished treasures 
 of every branch of the Teutonic race. In 
 the old English love-songs a sort of mix- 
 ture of the French and German character- 
 istics is to be found; many have all the 
 purity of the German, added to which is 
 a poetic excellence rarely found in the 
 old German. Many are as decidedly 
 French in their half-cynical treatment of 
 the theme, and too many are disfigured 
 by a coarseness that is very rare in the 
 German folk-songs, a collection of nearly 
 two thousand, ranging from the twelfth 
 to the seventeenth century, furnishing 
 less than a dozen that have any sugges- 
 tion of coarseness. It may be pushing 
 our speculation too far to attribute the 
 character of these English songs to the 
 III
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 influence of the French admixture that 
 began with the Norman conquest in the 
 tenth century. 
 
 There is a class of old English songs 
 that has no counterpart in the German, 
 French, or Italian : songs of a broad, 
 good-humored joviality, often expressed 
 in very coarse fashion, but just as often 
 with a humor that may be sought for in 
 vain in the songs of any other people; 
 such, for example, as the Leather Battel 
 or Back and Side go Bare. 
 
 The most valuable plants are often those 
 of slowest growth. Belgium, Italy, and 
 England made great advances in the art of 
 music before Germany discovered that it 
 was her destiny to raise it to the highest 
 pinnacle it has attained, or ever will attain, 
 German composers were quite content for 
 years to follow the paths marked out by 
 the Italians. From Italy they got all the 
 forms which they were eventually to 
 
 112
 
 The Teutonic Element in Music. 
 
 make their own. Thus, the opera had its 
 birth in Italy, and the form given to it 
 there served as a model for two centuries; 
 but the stamp of serious meaning, deeper 
 far than mere pleasure-giving, was added 
 by Germany, notably by Gliick. Mozart 
 was satisfied with this form ; even Beet- 
 hoven was content to accept it, and by 
 the force of his transcendent genius make 
 it, in his solitary opera, the purest, lof- 
 tiest expression of conjugal love that 
 adorns the art of music, " the bright, 
 consummate flower " of those qualities 
 of which we spoke, as the most striking 
 characteristics of the German folk-song 
 when treating of the passion of love. 
 
 We turn now to instrumental forms, to 
 see if they will yield any support to our 
 argument. These forms began, as is well 
 known, as simple dance tunes; after a 
 while they were strung together in sets, 
 
 to which the name of " suite " was given. 
 
 s 
 
 "3
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 The only connection between the various 
 members of the suite was identity of key. 
 
 The dance tune being sharply defined 
 both as to rhythm and melody, we might 
 naturally expect the French genius to 
 excel in it. This expectation is met in 
 the works of Couperin ; the airy grace and 
 delicacy of his work has never been sur- 
 passed ; his suites served as models to the 
 infinitely greater Johann Sebastian Bach. 
 
 More elasticity was given to the suite 
 in Italy; the most illustrious among many 
 great writers who contributed to its en- 
 largement was Scarlatti. 
 
 The two great German contemporaries 
 of these men, Bach and Handel, took the 
 works of Couperin and Scarlatti as their 
 models. Handel, whose genius lay in 
 another direction, added little or nothing 
 to the " form," although his genius en- 
 abled him to leave many beautiful exam- 
 ples of it. But Bach, whose genius was 
 114
 
 The Teutonic Element in Music. 
 
 decidedly " instrumental " in its bent, 
 enlarged the " form " and gave a pro- 
 founder significance to the music, going 
 so far as to anticipate, in some degree, 
 the qualities that characterize the music 
 of Beethoven. 
 
 To Italy the world owes the invention 
 of the " sonata," the greatest of musical 
 forms. But Italy stopped far short of 
 developing its full capabilities. Germany 
 took it, and has distinctly made it her own, 
 through the works of Haydn, Mozart, 
 Beethoven, and a numerous band of worthy 
 successors to this supreme triumvirate. 
 
 It is proverbially easy to prophesy after 
 the event, but it almost seems that a phil- 
 osophical observer at the close of the last 
 century might have said that Germany 
 alone was fitted by natural endowment 
 to develoj) this form, for the following 
 reasons : An extended instrumental com- 
 position makes an equal demand on the 
 "5
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 intellectual and on the emotional "nature. 
 The most perfect balance must be main- 
 tained between them, else, on the one 
 hand, it will wither into dry pedantry 
 without emotion, or, on the other, fall 
 into a maudlin sentimentality without 
 the bracing effect of intellect. 
 
 Patience and self-restraint are essentials 
 to the construction of a symphony: pa- 
 tience to work out slowly the realization 
 of an ideal; self-restraint to avoid pro- 
 lixity and the temptation to seek for 
 effects rather than for ideas. There is 
 no more strongly pronounced German 
 trait than that patience which will plod 
 contentedly for years, sustained by the 
 hope of realizing some cherished ideal. 
 
 In the quiet, serious character of the 
 folk-songs we have an' indication of this 
 happy mingling of intellect and emo- 
 tion, patience and self-restraint, unswerv- 
 ing devotion to high ideals, that has 
 ii6
 
 The Teutonic Element In Music. 
 
 made the symphony the supreme expres- 
 sion in music of the Teutonic tempera- 
 ment. No doubt it was a surprise to 
 Madame de Stael to discover how much 
 in earnest the Germans were about music, 
 which drew from her her celebrated re- 
 mark that " the Germans treat music like 
 an affair of the state. " It is just here that 
 the reason for their superiority is found. 
 Italy treated painting as an " affair of the 
 state" in the fourteenth and fifteenth cen- 
 turies, with results that the world values 
 more and more with every passing year. 
 
 We are justified, if the foregoing 
 analysis is accepted, in saying that the 
 part played by the Teutonic element in 
 music is that it has raised it from the low 
 plane of sensuous pleasure and given it 
 an ethical signification. 
 
 It has been the privilege of one branch 
 of the Teutonic family to make known 
 the possibilities of this art, but their work 
 117
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 has become the possession of the whole 
 world. Modern conditions are making 
 the world more and more a sodality every 
 day. The culture of each people is be- 
 coming the culture of the whole race. 
 Art, in its highest manifestations, is be- 
 ginning to be recognized as not of any 
 nationality, but as based on principles 
 that are universal and unchangeable. 
 Hence, composers of every nationality 
 have learned the lesson that Germany 
 has taught, and are striving to follow the 
 same path to the same goal. Much has 
 been said of late about the founding of 
 national schools of music on the folk- 
 songs of a people, but there is surely 
 some error here. It is mistaking a symp- 
 tom for a cause. The symphony did not 
 grow out of the German folk-song, but 
 the German folk-song was an indication 
 of the temperament that was necessary to 
 the production of the symphony. 
 ii8
 
 The Teutonic Element in Music. 
 
 It is too late iti the history of the world 
 for any indigenous art of music to grow 
 up, unless it should take place among a 
 people shut out completely from the rest 
 of humanity and ignorant of all that has 
 been done in the art. Nor can any one 
 by " taking thought" build up a school 
 of music. All music from henceforth 
 must take into account what has already 
 been done in the art, and advance, if ad- 
 vance be possible, by building on it. The 
 folk-song has as little to do with the 
 noble melody of Mozart or Beethoven as 
 the pretty prattle of an intelligent child 
 with the weighty sayings of the same 
 child when grown into a world-wise poet. 
 
 If we turn our attention to the case of 
 those peoples who, though possessed of 
 an abundant and beautiful stock of folk- 
 songs, have never developed a great " art 
 music," we shall find further confirmation 
 of the theory that national temperament 
 119
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 is the chief factor in producing this result. 
 The two most notable instances are the 
 Celts and the lowland Scotch. Surprise 
 has often been expressed at the fact that 
 no Celtic people has developed an " art 
 music," although no people display a 
 more passionate fondness for music or 
 possess a more beautiful folk music. We 
 may find an explanation of this fact in 
 the impulsive, mercurial temperament of 
 the Celt, easily moved, but never long 
 constant to one emotion, and. utterly 
 wanting in the patience necessary for 
 long-continued effort. This is just the 
 temperament for the production of melo- 
 dies covering the widest range of emotion, 
 unmatchable for beauty, or pathos, or 
 gayety, or ardor, melodies on which the 
 .constraint of " form " would act like 
 frost on summer flowers. 
 
 Even more remarkable is the case of 
 the lowland Scotch. With a temperament 
 1 20
 
 The Teutonic Element in Music. 
 
 diametrically opposite to that of the 
 Celt, and a folk music quite equal to that 
 of the Celt, one would think that they 
 presented ideal conditions for the de- 
 velopment of " art music." 
 
 But the Scotch genius is essentially 
 lyric. The Scotch are a people of in- 
 tense feeling, but reticent and self- 
 restrained above all other peoples. When 
 intense feeling joined with intense self- 
 restraint must overflow, its natural outlet 
 is the short lyric, and the demand for an 
 outlet once met, the habitual reticence re- 
 asserts itself, putting a full stop to any de- 
 sire to continue at length the expression 
 of the emotion that caused the outburst. 
 
 It is probable that to this invincible 
 reticence is owing the half-enigmatic char- 
 acter of the words of many Scotch songs; 
 they hint obscurely at feelings and emo- 
 tions that no true-bred Scotchman would 
 for the world express openly.
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 These speculations may throw some 
 light on the question, much discussed of 
 late, concerning the coining into exist- 
 ence of an American school of music, 
 which must be based, according to one 
 high authority, on the " plantation melo- 
 dies." But the notorious fact that many 
 peoples have possessed a copious stock 
 of beautiful folk music for centuries, 
 yet have never developed an "art music," 
 is a convincing proof that the rise of the 
 " art " must be attributed to other causes. 
 The great German composers have shown 
 how themes must be treated to produce 
 great works of art; to these conditions all 
 great works must conform, until some 
 better form is discovered. 
 
 The themes of such a work may be 
 Slavic, or Scandinavian, or " plantation 
 melodies," the only result of which will 
 be to give a sort of quasi-local color to 
 the composition, a thing which is not 
 
 122
 
 The Teutonic Element in Music. 
 
 only non-essential, but which drags it 
 down to the " particular " instead of lift- 
 ing it into that high region, the home of 
 all great art, where all " particulars" and 
 " accidents " are merged in the universal. 
 The Tempest and the Fifth Symphony are 
 true to human nature always and every- 
 where. Pickzvick Papers and a Grieg 
 Norzvcgian Rhapsody (excellent things, 
 each in its own way) are true to but a 
 limited fraction of human nature, Dvor- 
 ak's American Symphony is in no sense a 
 development from indigenous American 
 music. It is a symphony constructed in 
 accord with the well-known plan that 
 owes its existence to the Teutonic ele- 
 ment in music. The only result attained 
 by the choice he has made of its themes 
 is that it sounds like the apotheosis of a 
 
 minstrel show." 
 
 In conclusion, Celt, Scot, Italian, 
 Frenchman, Englishman, have all learnt 
 123
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 the lesson that Germany has taught; and 
 all have done, and are doing, excellent 
 work in the highest branches of the art. 
 This excellence is in exact proportion to 
 the fidelity with which they follow the 
 lines laid down by the Teutonic genius 
 that first raised music to a position side 
 by side with the great sister arts of poetry 
 and painting. 
 
 124
 
 VI. 
 
 MODERN TENDENCIES IN MUSIC. 
 
 THAT law of constant change which 
 dominates all mundane affairs, keep- 
 ing them from stagnation, rules with 
 equal force in the realm of art, and has 
 been especially busy in the art of music 
 during the last hundred years. For six- 
 teen centuries the process of change was 
 very slow, but it has worked with ever- 
 increasing celerity since the establishment 
 of the modern major and minor keys and 
 the evolution of the laws of harmonic 
 combination and succession. The ap- 
 pearance of each new composer has been 
 the sienal for a chorus of dissent from 
 
 125
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 the purists of his day, loudly condemna- 
 tory of his innovations and disregard of 
 their rules. One of the earliest of these 
 innovators was he who first sounded the 
 seventh with the dominant chord, with- 
 out preparation, and roundly abused he 
 was for his temerity. When Gliick arose 
 and laid down what to us seem self-evi- 
 dent principles for the construction of 
 dramatic music, the best that the great 
 Handel could say of him was, " He 
 knows no more of counterpoint as does 
 mine cook." Strange to say, Handel's 
 operas are forgotten, but Gliick's are still 
 occasionally heard. Sarti, a musician un- 
 known except by name to modern ears, 
 proved to his own satisfaction at least 
 that Mozart could not write music; 
 and Zelter, the friend of Goethe, and 
 teacher of Mendelssohn, spoke of Beet- 
 hoven's music as " aberrations and ex- 
 travagancies." But genius, like wisdom, 
 
 X26
 
 Modern Tendencies in Music. 
 
 is " justified of her children." Among 
 wild, gregarious animals there exists an 
 instinct which makes them put to death 
 any member of the herd that is wounded. 
 Among civilized men a reverse instinct 
 prevails, which makes them attack with 
 ferocity any one who by natural force is 
 in any degree elevated above themselves. 
 Especially do these self-constituted cura- 
 tors of the " arts " resent any iconoclasm 
 towards the idols that they worship. 
 They are ever ready to cry, " Great is 
 Diana of the Ephesians! " unwitting that 
 the reign of Diana is at an end. 
 
 A great change in the art of music took 
 place in the last century, when the old 
 classic contrapuntal school gave way be- 
 fore the new, modern, harmonic school. 
 Signs of a coming change had appeared 
 in many places at various times, but the 
 rise of Bach and Handel may conveniently 
 be taken as the point of departure of 
 127
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 modern music. The term " romantic " 
 has been used to distinguish the modern 
 from the ancient music. It is a difficult 
 term to define; perhaps the nearest we 
 can come to a definition is that it is music 
 meant to vican something. 
 
 To the old contrapuntist, expression 
 was an unknown quantity. The ' ' words " 
 he set were merely an excuse for an 
 elaborate web of notes, in which imita- 
 tion, canon, inversion, and all the arti- 
 fices of counterpoint were the chief things 
 to be displayed. In these two great 
 landmarks between the old and the new 
 Bach and Handel we may naturally 
 expect to find both these kinds of music, 
 and we do. For example, in the opening 
 chorus in T/ie Messiah, " And the glory 
 of the Lord," the reiteration of one note 
 to the words, " For the mouth of the 
 Lord hath spoken it," while all the other 
 parts are in motion, produces a powerful 
 128
 
 Modern Tendencies in Music. 
 
 impression of the immutability of the 
 Divine word. The same effect, in even 
 greater degree, is produced in the " Hal- 
 lelujah chorus " by the sustained notes, 
 each a degree higher than the last, to the 
 words, " King of kings. Lord of lords," 
 soaring over the tumultuous repetitions 
 of " for ever and ever." 
 
 In music like this the imagination is 
 set on fire, and Handel himself said of 
 this chorus, " I seemed to see Heaven 
 open and hear the shouting of the great 
 multitude no man can number." This, 
 then, is the romantic quality. It appeals 
 to the imagination and quickens the emo- 
 tions, and the meaning of which music is 
 capable is brought home to us. 
 
 Turn now to the next chorus, " And 
 he shall purify the sons of Levi," a 
 masterly fugue, but we listen unmoved; 
 there is nothing in the words to make 
 any demand on the expressive power of 
 
 9 
 
 129
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 music, consequently the music never rises 
 to the height of touching the imagination. 
 
 Bach had little of the dramatic feeling 
 that is so strongly characteristic of Han- 
 del. Yet he occasionally flashes out with 
 startling effect. In his great Passion 
 according to St. Matthew there is a 
 striking example in the chorus that fol- 
 lows the betrayal of Christ. The indig- 
 nant wonder of the chorus is expressed 
 in the words, " Why are the thunders 
 and lightnings restrained in the clouds ? " 
 This ends on the chord of D major; then, 
 after a pause, the chorus begins again on 
 the chord of F* major, with the words, 
 " Throw open thy fiery deeps, O Hell, 
 and whelm in sudden wrath the betrayer." 
 The effect of this pause and change of 
 key is appalling. 
 
 The next great composer to arise was 
 Haydn. He gave a new direction to 
 musical expression by making it imitative. 
 130
 
 Modern Tendencies in Music. 
 
 Not satisfied by making it appeal to the 
 imagination, he made it appeal to that 
 lower faculty, the fancy, or, to put it in 
 another way, the appeal was not abstract, 
 but concrete. He would make you see the 
 sun rise; if his text mentions the bleat- 
 ing of flocks or the hum of insects, you 
 must hear the bleating and the humming. 
 True, Handel tried this trick long before, 
 but he did it clumsily, whereas Haydn 
 did it so deftly, and with such beautiful 
 music that, though one cannot forbear 
 smiling when listening, it is impossible to 
 wish it otherwise than as it is. That this 
 imitative music is a false light in the art 
 there can be no doubt. It bears the same 
 relation to genuine music that waxworks 
 bear to sculpture, or the biograph to a 
 great painting. 
 
 The next great master, Mozart, care- 
 fully avoided the puerilities that de- 
 lighted his predecessor, and sought for 
 131
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 purity and beauty, presided over by a 
 calmness like that of Olympus. These 
 qualities he never for a moment lost 
 sight of, even in the most intense dra- 
 matic situations. 
 
 The next and greatest of all, Beethoven, 
 threw aside as useless lumber everything 
 that could not help to the expression of 
 his profound musical thought. His is 
 the only music that seems to come direct 
 from a warm, passionate, human heart, 
 on fire with the noblest ideals. 
 
 It has been said that he had no regard 
 for, and little knowledge of, the contra- 
 puntal art. This may be true as to such of 
 its dry pedantries as Albrechtberger, his 
 teacher, delighted in. But if those who 
 make this charge will examine the first 
 movement of the great quartet in C * 
 minor, they will find that Beethoven 
 could be contrapuntal when it suited him 
 to use counterpoint as a means for the 
 132
 
 Modern Tendencies in Music. 
 
 expression of an idea. As the old classic 
 period culminated in Palestrina, so did 
 the modern classic in Beethoven. 
 
 The eminence of Haydn as a writer of 
 descriptive music justifies his being called 
 the typical writer of this class, while 
 Beethoven may be regarded as typical of 
 the ideal school. These two composers, 
 then, may be regarded as the sources 
 from which the modern schools of music 
 have sprung. 
 
 The simple, frankly imitative music of 
 Haj^dn has gradually broadened into the 
 
 program music" of to-day; the ideal 
 school of Beethoven into the mysterious, 
 formless, and generally cacophonous pro- 
 ductions of the extreme modern school, 
 which sets at defiance every rule as to 
 key, progression, and form. 
 
 As soon as the contrapuntal system 
 was abandoned, and music was con- 
 structed on the harmonic system, theorists 
 133
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 at once began to systematize the pos- 
 sible combinations and successions, and 
 thus the art of harmony was evolved, 
 still much hampered by the traditional 
 rules of the old school. But every new 
 composer of eminence extended the 
 boundaries of these combinations and 
 progressions, with the result that the 
 practice of composers has always been in 
 advance of the rules laid down by the 
 theorists. To such lengths has this 
 emancipation been carried that composers 
 now disregard such universally accepted 
 rules as tliose forbidding parallel fifths 
 and octaves, those governing the move- 
 ment of dissonances, and the use of 
 second inversions, claiming that only thus 
 can they express the wondrous depths of 
 their musical emotions. 
 
 Protest against such license is unavail- 
 ing, because the so-called laws of music 
 are simply laws of taste, and taste is one 
 134
 
 Modern Tendencies in Music. 
 
 of the most mutable things in the world. 
 The teacher of composition is often 
 driven to say, " Well, the laws of com- 
 position are so-and-so, but you may break 
 every one of them and find plenty of 
 authorities to support you." Thus we 
 may say that one of the most marked of 
 modern tendencies is harmonic freedom. 
 
 To the old classic school, melody was of 
 little or no importance, but with the rise 
 of the modern classic school there came 
 a wonderful outburst of noble, beautiful 
 melody that has not even yet quite died 
 away. Handel, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, 
 Beethoven, and lesser men have con- 
 tributed to this imperishable wealth of 
 melody. Foremost stands Beethoven, 
 who possessed some magic power over 
 the diatonic scale that made it yield such 
 melodies as no other composer has ex- 
 tracted from it. 
 
 But the modern tendency is to discard
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 melody; an ultra-modern composer has a 
 horror of making a " tune." His feel- 
 ings are so " intense" that nothing but 
 vague leaps, accompanied by dissonant 
 chords, may do them justice; there- 
 fore, another modern tendency is to be 
 unmelodious. 
 
 Among the discoveries made at the - 
 dawn of modern music, one of the most 
 important was that in long compositions 
 a certain order in the succession of keys 
 and themes was productive of a more 
 satisfying effect than any other. To this 
 order the name of " form " is given. 
 From Haydn to Mendelssohn these 
 ** forms " were found sufficient for the 
 expression of the most varied content. 
 But the new generation regards " form " 
 as bondage, and makes keys and themes 
 succeed one another in the most capri- 
 cious fashion, so that another modern 
 tendency is towards formlessness. 
 136
 
 Modern Tendencies in Music. 
 
 But, although we are losing some things 
 that many still think are essentials of 
 good music, it is not to be supposed that 
 there has been no gain to offset the loss. 
 The emancipation of harmony, despite 
 the extravagances into which some com- 
 posers have fallen, is a great gain, and it 
 is quite possible that from the present 
 formlessness some new and more beauti- 
 ful forms may be evolved. 
 
 The most marked of modern tendencies 
 is to be found in the opera. Opera has 
 passed rapidly through several well- 
 marked revolutions. It began with the 
 recitative, and originated in an attempt 
 to revive what was believed to be the 
 ancient Greek manner of performing a 
 play. This soon gave way to the intro- 
 duction of " airs " or songs, which, in 
 accordance with the taste of the time, 
 were wonders of elaborate floridity. 
 Little attention was given to the 
 137
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 " words," the same stories, ahvays taken 
 from classic history or mythology, being 
 used over and over again. The singer 
 and the music were everything. So little 
 attention was given to appropriate scenery 
 or costume that Caesar and Antony, 
 Alexander and Darius, used to appear on 
 the stage in the full-bottomed wigs and 
 broad-skirted coats of the seventeenth 
 century. Then Gliick came and laid 
 down the principle that it was the busi- 
 ness of the opera writer to express by 
 every means in his power the meaning of 
 the text and the dramatic situation. Of 
 course he had to fight for it, but victory 
 soon perched on his banners, and the old 
 Handelian opera was dead, never to be 
 revived again. But there grew out of it 
 another form, which the genius of Mozart 
 has made immortal, and which, in spite 
 of the modern school, still holds its place 
 on the stage, and is even yet capable of 
 138
 
 Modern Tendencies in Music. 
 
 producing works of great and permanent 
 interest, such, for example, as Gounod's 
 Faust, which is a slightly modified form 
 of Italian opera. 
 
 The principle enunciated by Gliick has 
 been adopted by the modern school and 
 pushed to its farthest limit ; the modern 
 writers have also reverted to the practice 
 of the pioneers of the opera, having dis- 
 carded melody and taken to continuous 
 recitative. They have also revived an 
 old artifice in the adoption of what might 
 be called musical catchwords, viz., the 
 
 leit motiv," to give it the name by 
 which it is best known. 
 
 The time has not yet come when we 
 can say that the modern opera is a dis- 
 tinct advance on its predecessor. Many 
 are convinced that it is. Many have 
 exactly the reverse conviction, and can 
 give some very sound reasons for it. We 
 may at least say that to give up melody 
 139
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 for recitative and form for vagueness, 
 looks more like atavism than progressive 
 evolution. 
 
 There has, without doubt, been a de- 
 terioration in musical taste in some re- 
 spects during the last fifty years, but, on 
 the other hand, there has also been a 
 widespread and ever-growing interest in 
 the cultivation of the best class of music. 
 This deterioration is owing, in great de- 
 gree, to the facility with which bad music 
 may be written on the harmonic basis. 
 Doubtless there were many writers of 
 bad music in the old contrapuntal times, 
 but as it is much more difficult to write 
 contrapuntally than harmonically they 
 were doubtless not so numerous as they 
 are at present, when every one who 
 can invent or " convey " a little melody, 
 and accompany it with the tonic, domin- 
 ant, and subdominant chords, is dubbed a 
 composer. 
 
 140
 
 Modern Tendencies in Music. 
 
 When the great art of modern music 
 came into existence it was a luxury within 
 the reach of the wealthy and cultivated 
 classes exclusively, but as time passed on 
 it spread gradually among the people at 
 large, who rapidly learned to appreciate 
 it, and who are its most interested patrons 
 at the present time. So that one of the 
 most striking of modern tendencies has 
 been the diffusion of good music among 
 the people, brought about by the forma- 
 tion of choral and other musical organiza- 
 tions, and in very great degree by the 
 generous liberality, in our country, of 
 men of large means, who have made it 
 possible for every one to hear the greatest 
 of instrumental compositions, performed 
 by orchestras of unsurpassable excellence. 
 
 But there are two factors of more im- 
 portance than any I have mentioned that 
 make for the spread of sound musical 
 culture in our times. Already productive 
 141
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 of great results, they give promise of 
 producing still more important results in 
 the immediate future. First of these I 
 place the teaching of music in the schools, 
 public and private, all over the land. To 
 those of us who are old enough to re- 
 member the crude, primitive methods 
 that were followed thirty or forty years 
 ago, and compare them with the well- 
 thought-out systems of the present day, 
 the change seems little short of mir- 
 aculous. The w^ork, for which the un- 
 taught " singing-school teacher " was 
 thought sufificient, has been taken up by 
 trained musicians and educators who 
 have devoted years of thought to the 
 elaboration of what seem to be nearly 
 perfect systems of instruction, w^iich 
 must result in laying deep, broad founda- 
 tions on which the musical future of 
 America will rest. Of equal importance 
 is the establishment, in all the principal 
 142
 
 Modern Tendencies in Music. 
 
 cities, of music schools and conservatories 
 for special training in the art. It is im- 
 possible to calculate the effect these have 
 had in elevating the standards of musical 
 taste. Being equipped with large corps of 
 trained teachers, following a thoroughly 
 systematized course of instruction, and 
 admitting only the highest grade of music 
 in their classrooms, there is no agency 
 doing more excellent work in spreading 
 genuine musical culture. 
 
 In conclusion, it would appear that 
 owing to the various agencies mentioned, 
 the most noticeable of the modern ten- 
 dencies is to a wider diffusion of music of 
 the highest class. Many thoughtful ob- 
 servers hold the opinion that the great 
 productive periods in all the arts have 
 passed, never to return ; consequently, 
 there remains for us who have fallen on 
 these latter days no new territory to 
 conquer, but only to occupy thoroughly 
 143
 
 Highways and Byways of Music. 
 
 the territories won by the giants of old, 
 and bequeathed to us as a precious legacy. 
 Fortunately, there is still room for us to 
 work, even though we cannot write music 
 like Mozart or Beethoven, or paint like 
 Angelo and Raphael, or write poetry like 
 Shakespeare and Milton. And no more 
 useful work can be found than that of the 
 teacher whose labors make the art that 
 was at one time the luxury of the wealthy 
 and high-placed the common property of 
 rich and poor alike. 
 
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