Purcell | Page 4

is generally bewildered. The
beginning may trouble him and the middle worry him--the ending
invariably confounds him. The thing ends in no key recognised by the
modern ear. In the old days there were no keys, but modes, each with
its dominant, its tonic, and proper and appropriate ending. Until
comparatively recent times musicians understood this quite well; to
Purcell, and to composers much later than him, the old endings were
perfectly satisfactory. This, for instance, left no sense of the unfinished:

[Illustration]
Gradually two keys swamped and swept away the modes--our major
and minor; then our modern feeling for key relationships was born.
Here is the major scale of C with a satisfactory harmonic ending:
[Illustration]
It will be noticed that the top note of the chord marked with a star, the
last note but one of the scale, is a semitone below the last note of the
scale and rises to the last note. That is a proper ending or full close;
what was called a half-close was:
[Illustration]
As a termination to a piece of music made up of the notes of the scale
of C, and therefore said to be in the key of C, this was not satisfactory.
To set the ear and the mind at ease, to get a feeling that the music has
settled down on a secure resting-place, the first chord had to be
repeated. And in these chords
[Illustration]
lies the germ of the whole of the later music. Only two more steps were
needed. By adding an F, or writing an F instead of the upper G in the
middle chord, the chord of the dominant seventh was obtained:
[Illustration]
And anyone can try for himself on a piano, and find out that this chord
makes the longing for the tonic chord--the chord of C--more imperious
and the feeling of rest satisfying in proportion when the last chord is
reached. That was one step: the next was to convert the dominant, G, of
the key of C into a tonic for the time being, to get a sense of having
reached the key of G. That was done by regarding G as a tonic, and on
its dominant, D, writing a chord, either a dominant seventh or a simple
major common chord, leading to a chord of G--thus:

[Illustration]
But if after this a seventh on the dominant is played, followed by the
original key-chord
[Illustration]
then we are home once more in the original key. If the reader will
imagine, instead of a few simple chords, a passage of music in the key
of C, followed by a passage in the dominant key of G, and ending with
a passage in the key of C, he will perceive that here is the deep
underlying principle of modern music: that after a certain length of
time spent in one key the ear wearies, and the modulation to the new
key is grateful; but after a time the ear craves for the original key again,
so after getting to that, and spending a certain time there, a piece closes
with perfectly satisfying effect. Haydn was the first to get that principle
in an iron grasp and use it, with numberless other devices, to get unity
in variety. Not till nearly a hundred years after Purcell's day did that
come to pass; but the music of Purcell and of others in his period,
showing a sense of key relationships and key values, is a vast step from
the music written in the old modes. Let me beg everyone not to be so
foolish as to believe the nonsense of the academic text-books when
they speak of the new type and structure of the newer music as an
"improvement" on the old. The older were perfect for the things that
had to be expressed; the newer became necessary only when other
things had to be expressed. By the substitution of the two scales, the
major and the minor, with the dominant always on the same degree of
the scale, the fifth, and the order of the tones and semitones fixed
immovably, for the numerous modes with the dominants and the order
of the tones and semitones here, there and everywhere, the problems of
harmony could be grappled with, and its resources exploited in a
methodical way that had been impossible. But melodically the loss was
enormous. We of this generation have by study to win back some small
sense of the value and beauty of the intervals of the ancient scales,
varying in each scale, a sense that was once free and common to
everyone who knew anything of music at all.
Purcell and his immediate predecessors and contemporaries came into

what Hullah rightly called the "transition period." Purcell is now to be
considered, and of