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Updated: May 4, 2025
By means of a generous employment of free counterpoint, in other words a kind of polyphony in which the various voices use different melodies in harmonious combination, he gained a potent auxiliary in his cunning workmanship, and emphasized the folly of rejecting the contrapuntal experiences, of, for instance, a Sebastian Bach.
Harmony was generated by polyphony, and not vice versa; that is, men first tried fitting melodies together, not chords, and when they had learned to do this skilfully, so that they sounded well together, harmony came into being. It does not follow that the music was unrhythmic because it was unaccented, and because in writing it was not divided into bars.
It, too, has a memorable rhythm; and its majestic harmonies, far from presenting those novel or curious problems in polyphony of which Wagner still stands suspected by superstitious people, are just those three simple chords which festive students who vamp accompaniments to comic songs "by ear" soon find sufficient for nearly all the popular tunes in the world.
He was a fine master of polyphony, and as a genuine composer is second only to Byrde. William Byrde, however, stands high above him and all other composers of the time. He was born about 1538, and died in 1623. His later life would have been full of trouble, and the noose or the flames at the stake might have terminated it, if powerful patrons had not sheltered him.
This showed mainly two tendencies: first, one towards expression of poetic feeling and towards definiteness of that expression, the other towards the entirely new technique which was to supersede the contrapuntal technique of Byrde and Palestrina. This technique proved admirable for vocal polyphony how admirable we have all the Flemish and Italian and English contrapuntal music to show.
No music can be intelligible without rhythm. The rhythmic pulsations are there; they are distinctly felt by the hearer in the performance, and in modern editions the barring is always introduced; but it is less crude, less obvious, through not being enforced by strong accents. We have already seen how the Volkslied became fertilized by the polyphony of church-music.
Well defined is the middle episode in minor reared on a new theme of the clarinet with an almost fugal polyphony that departs from the main lyric mood. At the height all the voices fall into a united chorus on the original motto of the symphony. The first melodies of the Andante now return with big sweep and power, and quicker phrases from the episode.
Even in that era those characteristics which subsequently defined the racial and temperamental differences between the musical art of northern Europe and that of Italy were fully perceptible. The north moved steadily toward instrumental polyphony, Italy toward the individual utterance of the solo voice. That her first experiments were made in the popular madrigal form was to be expected.
Modern music has three main elements, which were fed from three sources: Rhythm Cantilene Polyphony. | | | The dance Volkslied Church music. It has been my endeavour in the preceding to show how these three intermingled with and reacted upon one another. The outcome of all three has been modern German orchestral music; for the distinctive music of modern Germany up to Beethoven is orchestral.
He boils down the classic form to one movement and, so it seemed to my hearing, he begins developing his idea as soon as it is announced. Such polyphony, such interweaving of voices eleven and twelve and fifteen are a matter of course as would make envious the old tonal weavers of the Netherlands!
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