Purcell | Page 3

concerns. Byrde, to
worship as he thought fit, and to avoid the consequences of doing it,
had often to lie in hiding. But he got safely through, and composed a
large quantity of splendid Church music, besides some quite
unimportant secular music. His masses have a character of their own,
and in his motets one finds not only a high degree of technical skill,
power and sheer beauty, but also a positive white heat of passion
curiously kept from breaking out. There were many others of smaller or
greater importance, and the school of English religious composers,
properly so called--the men who wrote true devotional music--ended
with Orlando Gibbons in 1625. Since then we have had no religious
musicians. The Catholic Church brought them forth, and when that
Church suffered eclipse we got no more of them.
Not that music was at all eclipsed. The last great English musician was

not born till more than a hundred years after the Reformation. Between
Gibbons and Purcell came, amongst others, John Jenkins, Henry Lawes,
Matthew Locke, Pelham Humphries, Dr. Blow, Captain Cooke and the
madrigal writers. These last, however, mainly used contrivances
adapted from sacred music. Some really beautiful madrigals exist, but
Purcell could have done almost if not quite as well without them.
During this period the old style of polyphonic music went out and the
new came in. To understand the change, I beg the reader to refrain from
impatience under the infliction of a few technicalities; they are a
regrettable but inexorable necessity.
The old polyphonic music differed from the newer harmonic music in
three respects:
1. Form and Structure.--Nearly all the important old music, the music
that counts, was for voices--for chorus--with or without accompaniment.
"Forms," in the modern sense of the word--cyclical forms with
recurring themes arranged in regular sequence, and with development
passages, etc.--of these there were none. Some composers were groping
blindly after a something they wanted, but they did not hit on it.
Self-sustaining musical structures, independent of words, were poor
and flimsy. The form of the music that matters was determined by the
words. From beginning to end of each composition voice followed
voice, one singing, higher or lower, what had been sung by the others,
while those others added melodies that made correct harmony. Thus a
web of music was spun which has to be listened to, so to speak,
horizontally and vertically--horizontally for the melodies that are sung
simultaneously, and vertically for the chords that are produced by the
sounding together of the notes of those melodies. When the words were
used up the composition came to an end. Often the words were repeated,
and repeated often; but there should be reason in all things, and the
finest composers stopped when they had finished.
The tendency in the new music was to abandon the horizontal aspect.
Purcell, in his additions to Playford's "Brief Introduction to the Skill of
Musick," remarks on the fact that musicians now composed "to the
treble, when they make counterpoint or basses to tunes or songs."

Music became, broadly speaking, tunes with an accompaniment. The
fugue was no contradiction of this. Even in its heyday, though the parts
were ever so independent of one another, the mass of tone forms a great
melody, or melos, moving on a firm harmonic foundation in the lowest
part. The great choral fugues of Bach and Handel have often in the
accompaniment a bass moving independently of the bass voice part,
and this instrumental bass was figured so that the harmonies could be
filled in, on the organ.
2. Melody.--There was fine melody enough in the old music, but its
rhythm was very subtle, and there was no suggestion of catchiness in it.
Melody of a familiar folk-song or dance type now came in, divided into
regular periods with strongly-marked rhythms. This may be seen
clearly in, for example, Morley's "ballets"--part-songs that could be
danced to. Clear, easily understood, when once it came in it, never went
out again. Its shaping power may be felt in the fugue subjects of Bach
and Handel, as well as in their songs. This folk-song type of melody
was modified during the search after expressive declamation. The ideal
was to get tunes which were beautiful as tunes, and at the same time
did full justice to the composer's words, to preserve the accent and full
meaning of the poetry. Henry Lawes won Milton's approbation by his
success in doing this, and Milton wrote:
"Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured notes First taught our English
music how to span Words with just note and accent."
Lawes was not always successful: when his tunes do not disregard the
words they are apt to be angular.
3. Harmony.--- When a modern person first hears a piece of
accompanied plainsong sung, he