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strange piece, Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut, is a further
experiment in the kind of music of which La soirée is an example.
Here as there the music is fragmentary. Here as there there is but an
occasional touch of vividness against a background of misty night. In
both pieces pictures, words, almost sounds are only suggested to
the ear, not completely represented.

On the other hand, the Cloches à travers les feuilles, and the
Poissons d’or, respectively the first and last pieces in this second set
of Images, are what we might call consistently motivated throughout,
in the manner of the Reflets dans l’eau. There is always the rustling
of leaves and the faint jangle of bells in the former, always a quiver
of water and a darting, irregular movement in the latter; whereas in
neither La soirée nor in Et la lune is there the persistence of an idea
that is thus predominant and more or less clearly presented.

The last two series of Préludes show us his art yet more finely
polished and concentrated. In general these twenty-four pieces are
shorter and more concise than the Estampes and the Images,
certainly than the representative pieces in them—Pagodes, Les
jardins, and Reflets dans l’eau. Most of them, moreover, are in his
suggestive rather than his explicit manner. He accomplishes his end
with a few strokes, and usually in a short space. The placing of the
titles at the end rather than at the beginning of the pieces is an
interesting point, too; for one cannot believe that such a finished
artist as Debussy shows himself in these pieces to be would have
sent his work before the public without a consciousness of the
significance of such an arrangement. He does not, as it were,
announce to his auditors his purpose, saying, imagine now this
sound which you are about to hear as representing in music a
picture of gardens through a steadily falling rain. He rather draws a
line here upon his canvas and adds a point of color there, all in a
moment, and then, having shown you first this strange beauty of
combinations, says at the end you may now imagine a meaning in
the west wind, a church sunk beneath the surface of the sea, a
tribute to Mr. Pickwick, dead leaves, or what not in the way of
exquisite and incomplete ideas.
Many of these postscripts are significantly vague: Voiles, Les sons et
les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir, Des pas sur la neige (Alkan
called a piece of his Neige et lave), La terrasse des audiences du
clair de lune, etc.

Yet, however vague the subject or the suggestion, there is a sort of

epigrammatic clearness in the music. The rhythms are especially
lithe and endlessly varied, the phrase-building concise yet never
commonplace. There is a glitter of wit in nearly all, an unfailing sense
of light and proportion. This, not the strange harmonies nor the
imagery, seems to us the quality of his music that is typically French.
There is infinite grace and subtlety; sensuousness in color, too,
though it is spiritualized; but there is little that is sentimental.

The delicacy and yet the sharpness with which he has reproduced
qualities in outlandish music must be noticed. In earlier music he
gave proof of his insight into the essentials of other systems of music
than the French, or the German which has been considered the
international. The Suite Bergamasque has a local color. There is
Oriental stuff in Pagodes, Spanish and Moorish in La soirée dans
Grenade, Egyptian in Et la lune. Traces of Greek or of ecclesiastical
modes are abundant. Here, in the Préludes all this and more too has
he caught. Greece in Danseuses de Delphes, Italy in Les collines
d’Anacapri, the old church in La cathédrale, Spain in La puerta del
Vino, cake-walks in General Lavine, England in Pickwick, and Egypt
in Canope. There seems a touch of the North, too, in the exquisite
little pieces, La fille aux cheveux de lin. In this way alone Debussy
has rejuvenated music, doing more than others had done.

Finally, it would be hard to find more essence of comedy and wit in

music than one finds in Debussy’s Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum in
the ‘Children’s Corner,’ with its ludicrous play on the erstwhile sacred
formulas of technical study. This alone should place him among the
wits of a century. The Sérénade interrompue and ‘Puck’s Dance’ are
both full of mockery. Then there is the eccentric General Lavine, and,
perhaps most laughable of all, the merry homage to Pickwick, made
up of ‘God Save the King’ and a jig in the English style.
No one can say what the future of his music will be, nor how it will be
related to the general development in music by students a hundred
years hence. Yet it is certain that it recommends itself to pianists at
present because it has expanded the technique of the instrument. It
is made up in part of effects which, as we have said, if they are not
new in principle, are newly applied and expanded. He has developed
resources in the instrument which had not before been more than
suggested. His pieces bring into striking prominence the qualities of
after-sound and sympathetic vibrations or overtones in the piano,
which are as much its possession and as uniquely so as the bell-like
qualities it had before been chiefly called upon to produce. Therefore
though his accomplishments in harmony and form, in the possibilities
of music in general, may be regarded with a changed eye in the
years to come, and though he may even some day appear in many
ways reactionary, because he has once more associated music with
ideas and weakened the independence of its life; yet as far as the
pianoforte is concerned he is the greatest innovator since Chopin
and Liszt.

VI
The pianoforte music of Maurice Ravel is in many ways similar to
that of his great contemporary. His conception of harmony is, like
Debussy’s, expanded. Sevenths and ninths are used as
consonances in his music as well; and consequently one finds there
the free use of the sustaining pedal, the playing with after-sounds
and overtones.

His works are not so numerous. The most representative are the
Miroirs, containing five pieces: Noctuelles, Oiseaux tristes, Une
barque sur l’océan, Alborado del gracioso and La vallée des cloches;
and a recent set, Gaspard de la nuit, containing Ondine, Scarbo, and
Le Gibet, three poems for the piano after Aloysius Bertrand. A set of
Valses nobles et sentimentales are only moderately interesting on
account of the harmonies. The rhythms are not unusually varied, and
the treatment of the pianoforte is relatively simple. There is a well-
known Pavane pour une infante défunte of great charm, and a
concert piece of great brilliance called Jeux d’eau.

Though Ravel, like Debussy, makes use of a misty background, his

music is on the whole more brilliant and more clear-cut. One is
likelier to find in it passages that are sensational as well as effective.
His effects, too, are more broadly planned, more salient and less
suggestive. The Jeux d’eau is a very good example, with its regular
progressions and unvaried style, its sustained use of high registers
rather than an occasional flash into them, its repetitions of rather
conventional figures.
Famous Pianists. From top left to bottom right:
Ferruccio Busoni, Ignace Paderewski, Ossip
Gabrilowitch, Eugen d’Albert.
Yet it is not in technical treatment of the piano that Ravel is most
clearly to be differentiated from Debussy, but rather in the matter of
structure. Most of his pieces are relatively long, and few of them are
written in the fragmentary, suggestive way characteristic of Debussy,
but are consistently sustained and developed. This in general. In
particular one will notice not only a regularity in the structure of
phrases but a frequent repetition of phrases in the well-balanced
manner we associate with his predecessors, sequences that except
in harmony are quite classical. The Jeux d’eau will offer numerous
examples; and the same regularity is noticeable in the Ondine and
Le Gibet. The phrases are long and smooth. They have not the
epigrammatic terseness of Debussy, who, even in passages of
melodious character, always avoids an obvious symmetry. Nor is
Ravel’s music so parti-colored as Debussy’s. It does not touch upon
such exotic or such foreign scales and harmonies. Ravel shows
himself a lover of the Oriental in his string quartet, especially of the
Oriental mannerism of repetition; but one does not find in his
pianoforte music, as in Debussy’s, hints of ancient Greece, of Italy, of
North America, of England. Even the Alborada del gracioso, for all its
length and brilliance, is not Spanish as Debussy’s Soirée dans
Grenade or Puerta del Vino. The impressions one receives from
hearing works of the two men performed one after the other are
really not similar. Debussy’s music is subtle and instantaneous, so to
speak; Ravel’s is rather deliberate and prolonged.

Other French composers have hardly made themselves felt with

such distinctness as these two men. The most prominent of them is
Florent Schmitt whose Pièces romantiques, Humoresques, and Nuits
romaines are worthy of study. Within the last year or two several sets
of pieces by Eric Satie have appeared which must give one pause.
These are almost as simple as Mozart; indeed many of them are
written in but two parts. They are not lacking in charm, whether or
not one may take them seriously. Satie shows himself in many of
them a parodist. He plays strains from the Funeral March in Chopin’s
sonata, twisting them out of shape, and writes slyly over the music
that they are from a well-known mazurka of Schubert’s. He parodies
Chabrier’s España and Puccini’s operas.

Finally he writes directions and indications over measures in the

score which cannot but be a malicious though delightful mockery of
modern music in general. Remembering Scriabin’s Avec une céleste
volupté, or une volupté radieuse, extatique or douloureuse, one is
not surprised to find Satie telling one to play sur du velours jaunie,
sec comme un coucou, léger comme un œuf, though at this last one
may well suspect a tongue in the cheek. But Satie goes much further
than this. There is among the Descriptions automatiques one on a
lantern, in which we are here told to withhold from lighting it, there to
light, there to blow it out, next to put our hands in our pockets. And
throughout the absurd, unless they be wholly ironical, pieces inspired
by Embryons désechés, there is almost a running text which cannot
but stir to hearty laughter. Think of being directed to play a certain
passage like a nightingale with the toothache—comme un rossignol
qui aurait mal aux dents; or of being reminded as you play that the
sun has gone out in the rain and may not come back again, or that
you have no tobacco but happily you do not smoke. Such are the
remarks which Satie intends shall illumine your comprehension of his
music; and his humor is the more delightful because as a matter of
fact Mozart’s first minuet is hardly more simple than this music to
dried-up sea-urchins. Such naughty playfulness may well offend the
conservatories; but even if it is only nonsense, surely it is a felicitous
sign in these days, when high foreheads and bald pates ponderously
try to further the gestation of a new art of music.

If we leave our study of pianoforte music with a laugh it is only

because we may be supremely happy in the possession of so much
music that need not be hidden before the raillery of any wit, no
matter how sacrilegious. Into the hands of Claude Debussy we give
the art of writing for the pianoforte. His is the wisest and most
sensitive touch to mold it since the day of Chopin. Whatever the
music he writes may be, it has conferred upon the instrument once
more the infinite blessing of a proper speech. He has once more
saved it from a confusion of thumps and roars.

Bach, Chopin, Debussy: it is a strange trio, set apart from other

composers because to them the pianoforte made audible its secret
voice, a voice of fading after-sounds. Let us not take Bach from
among them. It was after all the same voice that spoke to him from
his clavichord, more faint perhaps yet even more sensitive. Music
whispered to Mozart that she would sing sweetly for him through his
light pianoforte. The powers of destiny made themselves music at
the call of Beethoven, and they swept up the piano in their force.
Through Schubert the hand of a spirit touched the keys. For Weber
the keys danced together and made strange pantomimes of sound.
Schumann, as it were, spoke to his pianoforte apart, and it opened a
door for him into a fanciful world. To Brahms the keys were
colleagues, not friends, and Liszt drove them in a chariot race,
worthy of Rome and the emperors, or converted them like a
magician into a thousand shapes with a thousand spells. But to
Bach, Chopin and Debussy this instrument revealed itself and
showed a secret beauty that is all its own.
 CHAPTER XI
EARLY VIOLIN MUSIC AND THE
DEVELOPMENT OF VIOLIN
TECHNIQUE
The origin of stringed instruments; ancestors of the violin—
Perfection of the violin and advance in violin technique; use of the
violin in the sixteenth century; early violin compositions in the
vocal style; Florentino Maschera and Monteverdi—Beginnings of
violin music: Biagio Marini; Quagliati; Farina; Fontana and Mont’
Albano; Merula; Ucellino and Neri; Legrenzi; Walther and his
advance in technique, experiments in tone painting—Giov.
Battista Vitali; Tommaso Vitali and Torelli; Bassani; Veracini and
others—Biber and other Germans; English and French
composers for the violin; early publications of text-books and
collections.

I
The origin of string instruments of the violin family is involved in
much obscurity and it would be impossible to discuss here the
various theories concerning it which have been stated with more or
less plausibility by musical historians.[42] A preponderance of
authoritative opinion seems to favor the theory that the direct
ancestor of the violin was the Welsh crwth, a sort of harp, which
seems to have been played with a bow. Venantius Fortunatus (570
A.D.) mentions this instrument in the much quoted lines:
Romanusque lyra plaudit tibi, barbara harpa, Græcus Achillaica,
chrotta Britana canat. (‘The Roman praises thee with the lyre, the
barbarian sings to thee with the harp, the Greek with the cither, the
Briton with the crwth.’) The fact that the old English name for the
fiddle was crowd furnishes an etymological argument in favor of the
crwth. It is, of course, possible that the idea of using a bow with the
small harp was first suggested by some instrument already in
existence. The Arabs and other peoples had instruments roughly
approximating the violin type. One is inclined, however, to the
assumption that the violin was not developed directly from any
particular instrument, but came into being rather through the
evolution of an idea with which various races experimented
independently and simultaneously.
 Ignace Paderewski.

After a photo from life (1915).

The immediate forerunner of the violin seems to have been the
rebec, of which there is a drawing in an extant manuscript of the
ninth century. The Benedictine monk Ofried, in his Liber
Evangeliorum of about the same period, mentions the fidula as one
of the two bowed instruments then in use, though to what extent the
fidula differed from the rebec we are unable to ascertain. In the
psalm-book of Notker (d. 1022) there is also a figure of a rebec and
a bow. Drawings, written references and bas-reliefs enable us to
follow the development of the violin clearly enough from this time on.
In the abbey of St. Georges de Boscherville, Normandy, there is
preserved a bas-relief which shows a girl dancing on her head to the
accompaniment of a band which includes two instruments of the
violin type, played with the bow. The Nibelungen Lied speaks of a
fiddler who ‘wielded a fiddle-bow, broad and long like a sword,’ and
although this epic was completed in the twelfth century it is probably
safe to antedate the reference considerably. There is in the cathedral
of Notre Dame in Paris a crowned figure with a four-stringed violin,
and in the Abbey of St. Germain des Près there is a similar relic
showing a man with a five-stringed violin and a bow. Both date from
the eleventh century. From these and similar evidences it is plain
that a violin of a rudimentary type was used extensively in the
eleventh century. Its musical possibilities must have been very slight,
and probably it was used chiefly to accompany the song or the
dance.

As we may deduce from many contemporary references, the

troubadours, jongleurs, and minnesingers[43] of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries played a very important part in the development
of the violin type of instrument. There is extant, for instance, a
manuscript of the period, containing an illustration of a jongleur
playing upon a three-stringed instrument very nearly resembling the
modern violin. Jerome of Moravia, a Dominican monk of Paris in the
thirteenth century, informs us in his Speculum Musices that the two
strings of the violin then in use were tuned as follows: . His
Speculum, which is probably the earliest approach to an instruction
book for the violin, also contains this very definite indication of the
fingering:

Under the influence of the troubadours and minnesingers the

popularity of the violin spread rapidly both among professionals and
amateur musicians. It was especially popular as an accompaniment
to dances. In the Brunswick Chronicle (1203) we read of a
clergyman who had his arm struck by lightning while playing for
dancers. We may infer from this that it was considered quite a
respectable recreation. The Chronicle has the words veddelte
(fiddled) and Veddelbogen (fiddle-bow) without any comment, so that
they must have been quite familiar terms. A stained glass window, a
Parisian manuscript and a miniature painting from a manuscript
called Mater Verborum (1202-12) show that the instrument then in
use resembled in shape the modern violin. In Ulrich von
Lichtenstein’s Frauendienst we read of an orchestra which included
two fiddles and which played a lively walking-tune or march for the
purpose of charming away the fatigues of the journey. We may
gather some idea of the vogue of violin playing during this period
from the character of a decree, issued in the year 1261 and now in
the archives of Bologna, which forbade the playing of the viol at night
in the streets of that city. Despite its great popularity it held a place
beside the harp as an instrument worthy of the dignity of a minstrel,
as we may gather from an allusion of a French poet about the year
1230:

‘When the cloth was ta’en away

Minstrels strait began to play,
And while harps and viols join
Raptured bards in strains divine,
 Loud the trembling arches rung
With the noble deed we sung.’

By this time professional instrumentalists had become a strong class

and in various cities had begun the formation of fraternities which did
not differ much in essence from our modern musical unions. The first
of these, as far as we can discover, was the St. Nicholas
Brüderschaft which existed in Vienna as early as 1288.

The many and varied forms and sizes of viols illustrated in

manuscripts and elsewhere suggest that the instrument was used in
the music of the church. Certainly instruments of some kind (apart
from the organ) must have been taken into the church service, else
Thomas Aquinas would not have argued against their employment.
The church was not very sympathetic toward musicians and its
attitude was reflected to a great extent by the world at large. Synods
and councils frequently issued decrees against wandering minstrels
and in the city of Worms they were even refused the privilege of
lodging in or frequenting public houses.

The fourteenth century brought much greater recognition for

instrumental art, which grew in popularity and in the favor and
patronage of those in high places. When the French jongleurs united
in 1321 into the Confrérie de St. Julien des Ménestriers they
obtained a charter which called their leaders Rois des ménestriers
(later Rois des violins). The same charter alludes to ‘high and low’
instruments, apparently treble and bass rebecs or viols which were
played in octaves to each other or perhaps in a primitive sort of
counterpoint. Technique must have been very inferior, for musicians
in Alsace were required to study only one or two years before taking
up music as a profession. Their incomes, on the other hand, were
probably substantial, as it is recorded that they were obliged to pay
taxes. It is interesting to note at this early period that the city of Basle
employed a violinist to play in a public place for the entertainment of
the citizens.
So far we have endeavored to trace the progress of violin music
through paintings, monuments and fugitive references in
manuscripts, decrees and other documents. These references are
not on the whole very clear and the nomenclature of early
instruments of the violin family is very loose and confused. We know
practically nothing about the music composed for these instruments.
Their imperfect shape does not suggest music of an advanced kind,
nor does it mean that the technique of the time was equal to very
exacting demands. The famous blind organist, Conrad Paumann
(1410-73), who could play on every instrument, including the violin,
has left us in his Orgelbuch several transcriptions of songs which he
may have played on the violin as well as on other instruments, and
the dances and other pieces of free invention composed for other
instruments may also have served as musical material for violinists.
But all this is mere surmise.
Relatives of the Violin. Top: Viola de braccia, Pochette, Viola
bastarda.
Bottom: Viola da gamba, Violone, Viola d’amore.
Regarding the combination of the violin with other instruments we
know that at the end of the fifteenth century there existed in Louvain
an ‘orchestra’ composed of a harp, a flute, a viol, and a trumpet.
There is recorded an account of another ‘orchestra’ belonging to
Duke Hercules in Ferrara, who employed a great number of
musicians. It included flutes, trumpets, lutes, trombones, harps, viols
and rebecs. We should not assume, however, that all of these
instruments were played simultaneously. Each class of instrument
had its own part and if all of them played together they must have
made noise rather than music. We are also informed that previous to
the year 1450 popes and princes employed ‘orchestras’ which
combined ‘the voices, organ, and other instruments into the loveliest
harmony.’ In spite of the almost entire lack of music for the violin we
know that it was a favorite instrument and consequently that the
players must have produced on it pleasing music of some kind.
Indication of its popularity is found in the works of Fra Angelico
(1387-1455), whose famous angel holds a viol in her hands, and in
Boccaccio’s novels, where we learn that violin music formed a
considerable part of the entertainment of all classes.

II
The sixteenth century brought the violin to a perfection that was still
far in advance of the technique of the players. At the same time there
was a distinct advancement in the recognition of instrumental music,
although vocal music continued to maintain its preeminence. This
was due partly to the limited technique of the instrumentalists and
partly to the greater appeal of music wedded to words. Violin players
then knew nothing about changing of positions and therefore could
play only in the first position.[44] Thus the tone register of the violin
was small. Some players, however, attempted to reach higher tones
on the first string through the stretching of the fourth finger. Simple
melodic phrases or figures were lacking in even quality of tone, in
smoothness and in fluency. The art of legato playing was unknown