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Course of Study on the Development of Symphonic Music
Course of Study on the Development of Symphonic Music Author:Thomas Whitney Surette Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: able to distinguish plainly between these two beginnings. Furthermore the union of folk-melody with scholastic music did not take place for several centuries aft... more »er the latter began, so that it is possible, up to a certain period, to deal with each separately. This is the plan we propose to follow in the first three chapters of this book. Chapters I and II deal with the music of the schools. Chapter III deals with the song. We ought to say, however, that the distinction we make is not absolute; that a certain amount of influence was exerted by each on the other, as was inevitable since they were living, so to speak, side by side. But since the art of composition in its early stages was fostered and practiced in the church, this interchange was slow in exerting itself and only becomes strong after composers had begun to turn their attention to secular forms. One word is significant of the music of the early composers; a word that should be blazoned forth wherever and whenever any music study, technical or untechnical, goes on. That word is Counterpoint. Let us first see what its technical meaning is. The plain chant of the Roman Catholicchurch was a simple succession of notes with but slight variation in pitch (up or down), unharmonized and (in a musical sense) unrhythmical. It was, in short, a rude sort of melody whose primary object was to give added force and sonority to the text, to which it was submissive. The emphasis of the words controlled it; one of its notes, for example, would be prolonged in order to contain a certain number of words. It was not therefore divided up, as were folk-songs into definite phrases with well defined rhythmic figures. Let the student examine: (1) any so called, 2Gregorian chant; (2) any very ancient hymn, and, (3) any purely secular folk- tune...« less