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It has been pointed out by Liliencron that what appears at first sight to be rhythmic chaos in the polyphonic Volkslied is really a highly artistic and effective device for bringing the canto fermo the ancient tune into prominence; whilst the other voices are generally in tempus imperfectum or square time, the tenor is in some other contrasting rhythm.
For if there is one thing certain about the advance of poetry in America, it is that the advance is a general one along the whole line of composition from free verse and polyphonic prose on the extreme left to sonnets and quatrains on the extreme right. Edgar Lee Masters was born in Kansas, on the twenty-third of August, 1869. The family moved to Illinois the next year.
The ironclad dreadnaughts of the academic world, the reactionary artists, the dry-as-dust lecturers are constantly ignoring the most vital, the most real, the most important artists while they sing polyphonic, antiphonal, Palestrinian motets in praise of men who have learned to imitate comfortably and efficiently the work of their predecessors.
Simple melodies with or without accompanying chords are monophonic; many melodies woven together, as in the Bach piece which we have looked over, are polyphonic. In the history of music two men surpassed all others in what they accomplished in counterpoint that is, in polyphonic writing. The one was Palestrina, an Italian; the other was Bach, a German.
For instance, I have long felt that the mental technic that the study of Bach's inventions and fugues afford could not be supplied by any other means. The peculiar polyphonic character of these works trains the mind to recognize the separate themes so ingeniously and beautifully interwoven and at the same time the fingers receive a kind of discipline which hardly any other study can secure.
Here and there, a composer such as Bizet and M. Saint-Saëns, or M. d'Indy and his disciples will build up symphonies and rhapsodies and very difficult pieces for the piano on the popular airs of Auvergne, Provence, or the Cevennes; but that is only a whim of theirs, a little ingenious pastime for clever artists, such as the Flemish masters of the fifteenth century indulged in when they decorated popular airs with polyphonic elaborations.
He did not succeed, however, in satisfying the Academicians with his attempt to grasp the medium between speech and song, and his choruses were thought tedious because of their employment of the intricate polyphonic style. Further reform was desired. This came through Jacopo Peri, maestro at the Medician court, and after 1601 at the court of Ferrara.
The methods are those of Tristan; we have the themes used as leit-motifs, and also long passages woven out of them and new matter; we have the harmonic freedom of Tristan, the same gorgeous orchestration, and even more than the same marvellous polyphonic writing. But, broadly speaking, the drama counts for comparatively little, and the opera consists of a series of enchanting songs and scenes.
This ornamented prose, elaborated by Greek and Roman rhetoricians, and constantly apparent in the pages of Cicero, heightened its rhythm by various devices of alliteration, assonance, tone-color, cadence, phrase and period. Greek oratory even employed rhyme in highly colored passages, precisely as Miss Amy Lowell uses rhyme in her polyphonic or "many-voiced" prose. Oxford, 1913.
The art music of the time was polyphonic, that is, constructed by so interweaving melodies that harmonies resulted. Of solos in our modern sense nothing was known beyond the folk-songs, instinctive outpourings of the human heart, and these learned composers had merely used as pegs on which to hang their counterpoint.
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