Читать книгу A Complete History of Music for Schools, Clubs, and Private Reading - W. J. Baltzell - Страница 20

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The Dominance of the Netherlands.—The most important asset of a nation is its commercial activity, for upon that depends its art life. The fine arts are to an extent luxuries, and until a nation has, by commercial activity, acquired wealth, they cannot be earnestly cultivated, for all arts require from the artist his entire time and life, and until there is money and inclination enough among the people to support an artist in his commercially non-productive state, there can be no art; hence we see a shifting of art centres in the Middle Ages, just as the commercial centres changed.

The Netherlands were preëminently fitted to carry on great commercial pursuits by virtue of their geographical situation and long combat and association with the sea. Possessing the natural outlet to a great part of Europe, it was reasonable that the Netherlands should play an important part in the Hanseatic League, and that her fleets should trade on every sea and her coffers be enriched by barter in the produce of every clime. It was a golden age for the Lowlands, from 1350 to 1625, for their trade made them one of the wealthiest and most important nations in the world. Their situation between the trading countries of the South and the North made them, as it were, the commercial exchange of Europe. The consequent wealth could not lie dormant, therefore much of it was used in building notable architectural structures, encouraging Painting, and developing the then infant art of Music. It is unnecessary to mention the famous structures which were the result of this period, and it is but necessary to name Hubert Van Eyck, Rubens, Van Dyck, to understand the prominence given to the art of Painting by the acquisition of this enormous wealth. And it is largely due to this commercial activity that the school of the Netherlands attained such an undying fame.

One other influence, and that dependent on commercial activity, produced great results. Art is not sectional, it is universal; and great art works are produced not by local influences but by association, or contact, with the world. For this reason, the intercourse with the entire world generated by the great commercial activity of the times produced the first great world School of Music. Intercourse developed emotion and produced broader and less localized view-points of life: it brought into close association the art life of different nations and infused a unity of emotion wherever it occurred. In short, Music, by being brought into contact with the ideas of the world instead of a local association, took on a universal form and feeling never before felt and never to be relinquished. For this reason, Music unconsciously advanced from Paris to the Netherlands, toward the greater sphere of influence, stopping for only a short period with the Gallo-Belgic school, where it was prepared technically for its new growth as a world form.

The Gallo-Belgic and the Netherlands Schools Compared.—The Gallo-Belgic school, in the control of churchmen, was isolated from any influence tending to develop a broad emotional scheme. And it is doubtful whether it could have caused any change in musical evolution, for the technical forms were not ready. And so the Gallo-Belgic school, in its retirement from the great world activities, confined itself to attaining the power to manipulate notes, for the sake of mere technical effects, leaving emotional development entirely out of consideration. With such a school, while its work was important, no real art feeling could be gained; and so the school of the Netherlands marks the departure into a new romantic school governed, to a great extent, by the emotional. The Netherlands, because of their more comprehensive view of the musical activities of the past and their constant intercourse, commercially and artistically, with all nations, acquired a more human sense of the beauty of music, and ceased to manipulate musical material for technical ends, producing instead of cold, lifeless forms, music pulsing with vigor, life and emotion. With this primary change of view-point came a direct growth of form, the Canon being perfected and immediately giving birth to the Fugue; the Madrigal and Canzona and many other lesser forms sprang into being, all capable of emotional development, and almost immediately producing great results. For the first time music was free from consecutive fourths, fifths and octaves because composers created from the standpoint of emotional beauty and not that of technical utility. The result was a musical technic capable of development, and refined beyond need of further reformation.

The Organ and its Influence.—The organ was the third great reformative power in this epoch. All music was vocal and no other conception could be had, for effective instruments and instrumental music were not yet in existence. The organ, because its tones were suited to accompanying the human voice and because its tone color was closely identical with that of the voice, was readily adapted to the vocal forms then in use. This gave a greater resource, for what was often technically impossible with the human voice became easy with the organ. The mechanical improvement of this instrument immediately gave greater freedom and range of technic, and it proved so well suited to polyphonic development that it aided the evolution more than any other one agency. The use of the organ must not be accounted as the beginning of instrumental music, for the organ used only adapted voice-forms, such as the Canon, Fugue, Madrigal, etc.; for this reason it is to be doubted if it aided in emotional development except by making technical resources much less restricted. In this sense, then, the technic of this school was freed from most of its former rules, and Music, previously cramped by narrow vocal restrictions, passed into the comparative freedom of the polyphonic style of the organ.

The Men of this School are hardly to be separated from the men of the Gallo-Belgic school. The work passes from one school to the next with little or no perceptible pause, and the first men of the later school are pupils or disciples of the last men of the Gallo-Belgic period. Another noteworthy fact is, that so great was the musical growth, of this school and the skill and learning of its followers that the composers of the Netherlands expatriated themselves and settled in all parts of Europe, founding famous schools in Paris, Madrid, Naples, Venice, Munich and Rome; the celebrated Italian school is really an offshoot of that of the Netherlands. It is this overflow which marks this school as the greatest of the early polyphonic schools and shows why and how it acquired its emotional supremacy. Jean de Okeghem (1430-1512), pupil of Binchois, was the first prominent worker. It is difficult to class him as a composer of the Belgian or Netherlands school, for he has the earmarks of both. He lived during the supremacy of the Netherlands, but worked with the material of the Belgians. He developed the Canon to its highest technical point and took the first step toward the originating of the Fugue. To him is due the credit of introducing the use of retrograde, inverted, diminished and augmented imitation in the Canon. Much of his work was done in France. The tendency of his teaching was toward artificiality, as he delighted in puzzle canons and other exhibitions of ingenuity.

Antonius Brumel (1460-1520), a pupil of Okeghem, is noteworthy because of a foreshadowing of the use of chords in real harmonic progressions.