THE SALE-ROOM. No. XII.] SATURDAY, MARCH 22, 1817. A Periodical Paper, published weekly at No. 4, Hanover-Street, Edinburgh. THAT principle of our mental constitution, by which the introduction of one idea into the mind calls up a variety of others that are not immediately seen to be connected with it-in other words, the principle of association,-is of greater consequence, and of more extensive operation, than is always apparent. Custom, according to the old adage, is second nature; and what is custom, in the sense here attached to it, but that powerful association of things present with things past, which bestows on the former a degree of importance, which they only derive from their connection with the latter? But it is saying too little for the power of custom to pronounce it to be a second nature. It is frequently, perhaps generally, more powerful than those natural feelings which it supplants; and if it were allowable to run in the face of so venerable an adage, it might be said that Nature furnishes the clay, of which Custom is the potter; that Custom, with her plastic band, re-moulds, and almost re-creates, those powers and propensities which Nature has sown in the mind; and that these are often merely passive materials out of which the future character is reared, If it be argued that this proposition is too broad, if meant to extend the influence of custom over morality, to the exclusion of higher and nobler principles, it will hardly be denied that it is true, when limited to its authority over our habits and tastes. tastes. In these, it is to be regarded as a constant and dangerous encroacher, against whose assaults we ought to be much on our guard. It becomes the more dangerous, that its aspect is often regarded as that of a tried and venerable friend, whose counsels we adopt and cherish with little examination, because we love his person, esteem his integrity, and have implicit confidence in his attachment to ourselves. This species of feeling is spread over almost all our early recollections. The fields of our childhood are covered with a brighter green, and the stream that received our youthful limbs sparkles with a purer lustre, or flows with more placid tranquillity. The song that delighted our infancy long outlives in our hearts the ignorance that first gave it its charms. We love it, not because we now think it, but because we have once thought it, exhilarating, or pathetic, or inspiring;, nay, we will not part with our clinging | partiality, even although our more enlightened taste should convince us, that it is trivial, or even offensive and vulgar. These are a very few out of the numberless instances which might be given of the unseen or unacknowledged influence of this powerful principle; but a more attentive examination might point out to us many others, in which it has led to very serious errors. One of these, which is purely within the regions of taste, has given rise to the valuable communication, to which these remarks are introductory. To the Editor of the SALE-ROOM. SIR, ge THE necessity, if not of a total reformation, at least of a considerable improvement in our church music, seems to be nerally admitted. There is hardly any person who does not allow, that the performance of this music is highly exceptionable; and there are not a few who extend their objections to the music itself, and who are of opinion, that, unless music of a better kind is introduced, no attention that can be paid to its performance will, in any considerable degree, increase its effect as a part of divine worship. This opinion, though not so prevalent as the other, is, in my apprehension, equally well founded; and as there are several views of this subject which may be new, and perhaps not uninteresting, to many of your readers, I shall make no apology for submitting them very fully to your consideration. At the period of the Reformation, ecclesiastical music, through the successive la bours of many learned and skilful composers, had arrived at a high degree of cultivation. The study of music, in general, had, for several ages, been a chief part of the occupation of the clergy, among whom skill in this art was considered as an acquirement of the first necessity. The immense system, however, which they reared up, was not only complicated and artificial, but forced and unnatural. Possessed of all the learning of their time, they studied the principles of the science in what remained of the Greek writers on the subject; and endeavoured to make the obscure doctrines of those writers the foundation of their own musical systems. Their compositions, thus, in place of being drawn from that natural feeling which produces music, to a certain degree pleasing, even among the rudest nations, were attempts to reduce to prac tice the laboured and artificial systems which they had formed; and accordingly, their melodies, if such they can be called, were successions of notes utterly void of meaning, and altogether intolerable to cultivated taste. The invention of the organ, which happened nearly a thousand years ago, was a new era in the history of music. The opportunity then afforded of experiencing the agreeable effects of different notes, heard at the same time, gave the first idea of harmony; for it can hardly be doubted that the ancients were utterly ignorant of this branch of the art. The first attempts at harmony were of the rudest description, and cannot now be heard without setting the teeth on edge. This seems to have arisen from the same cause which vitiated melody. In place of drawing the rules of harmony from the effects of the different combinations of notes upon the ear, musicians proceeded to deduce them from arithmetical calculations, by means of which they proved, in the most satisfactory manner to their understandings, if not to their feelings, that fifths and fourths ought to be used in harmony, in preference to thirds and sixths, which latter chords were not even admitted to be consonances. While, therefore, thirds and sixths, of which the principal part of modern harmony consists, were carefully avoided, successions of fourths and fifths were used in profusion, producing effects so grinding and grating, that it is hardly possible to conceive how they could have been tolerated at any period, however barbarous. By degrees, however, the deformity of these combinations came to be perceived, and they were discarded to make way for those which were found by experience to be more agreeable; and so rapidly did the art advance, when it was found to yield pleasure to the senses, as well as to gratify mathematical and arithmetical curiosity, that, by the middle of the 16th century, the rules of counterpoint did not differ very materially from those at present in use. Indeed the works of the writers of that age exhibit as much ingenuity in the complicated arrange ment of many parts, and, in the laws of fugue and canon, as those of any succeeding period. Such was the state of music at the time of the Reformation. Harmony, as I have stated, had made very great progress; but Melody was yet, in a great measure, in its infancy. No music was cultivated but that of the church; and the compositions of the greatest masters, though quite destitute of grace, rhythm, or expression, were yet frequently stupendous efforts of genius, con sisting generally of a great number of dif ferent parts, combined with a degree of science and skill that has not been, and perhaps cannot be, surpassed. But in these compositions there was no Melody. The notes sung by any one voice were utterly unmeaning, unless taken in connexion with the whole composition of which they form. ed a part. As to secular music, there was nothing that deserved the name. Songs for single voices were almost unknown; and the few there were, consisted of successions of sounds as guiltless of any thing like feeling or imagination, as the melodies of the church services, from which they were derived. Even at a later period, after the introduction of dramatic music, the airs of the Italian opera consisted of psalm tunes; and the concluding pieces of these operas, corresponding to the gay choruses and rondeaus of modern times, were ditties more dismal than any idea we can form of the most lugubrious psalmody, because unaided by that association, which alone preserves to the prevailing psalmody its influence, or even reception. The Reformers made the existing music one of the first subjects of attack. The complicated singing in parts, or "the tossing about the psalms from side to side," as it was called, was abolished by Luther, as well as Calvin, and metrical psalmody substituted in its place. It was a necessary consequence of the state of music at that time, that the psalmody, introduced by these reformers, should consist of the only kind of melody then known,-a succession of sounds, to wit, without either expres sion, rhythm, or even accent; and it was, if possible, still more completely guarded against these profane qualities, by being made to consist in a series of notes all of equal length. The reason assigned for this innovation was, that the words of the psalms would thus be rendered more intelligible than in the complicated and " curious singing" which was abolished; but this reason is obviously a bad one, for no manner of singing can be more eminently calculated for rendering words unintelligible, and for depriving them of all meaning, than the mode of dwelling upon every syllable, accented or not, as long as the lungs of the singer will admit of it. with his body, had he not been mentioned in some document of the period as the composer of those dirges. Though Calvin him, self allowed no harmony to be added to these tunes, yet they were set in parts by two French composers, Goudimel and Le Jeune, and sung in France by the protestants; and indeed the Calvinistic churches. have gradually abated in their rigid adherence to unisonous singing. Psalmody, of course, came into England with the Reformation. The psalm tunes now in use there, appear, from the oldest collections of them, to have been selected from the different psalmodies on the continent, with the addition of many others, composed by English masters. The psalmody of Scotland appears to have been originally brought from Geneva; though, of course, many of the original tunes have given way to others subsequently imported from England. When Charles I. attempted to introduce the liturgy into Scotland, a number of the English psalm tunes were introduced along with it, which, to conciliate the people, received new names, such as Dundee, Dunfermline, and Glasgow. Other tunes appear in our collections with both English and Scotch names. The introduction of the English service threw the whole nation into a flame; and it was interrupt Though Luther, as well as Calvin, assisted in endeavouring to extinguish any glimmerings of melody which might be begin. ning to appear in church music, yet he did not go the length of Calvin, who entirely deprived it of its harmony, by ordering the psalms to be sung in unison. Luther, on the contrary, contented himself with abolishing the florid and complicated harmony which had prevailed, while he not only permitted, but recommended, that his new psalms should be sung in parts, the har mony being plain and simple. This reformer, besides being a passionate lover of music, was also a very skilful composer; and some of the psalm tunes of his composition are made use of at this day. One of these is the 100th psalm, which, though it wants those qualities which, in every other kind of music, are felt by every-ed, whenever it was attempted to be per body to be essential to good melody, yet, when well sung in full harmony, is grave and dignified, and, aided by association, is even sublime in its character. The Lutheran psalms were composed, not only by Luther, but by several of the greatest musicians of his time. Those of Calvin, it ap pears, were composed by an obscure musician of Geneva, of the name of Guilleaume Franc, whose name would have perished formed, by the execrations and frequently still greater outrages of the congregations. Charles, finding conciliatory measures in effectual, had recourse to military force, which had no other effect than that of uniting and strengthening the presbyterians, and producing the famous Solemn League and Covenant, to which, ultimately, Charles himself was obliged to accede. Many of these psalm tunes, therefore, now looked upon with such veneration by the descend- | musicians began now to look; and it was ants of the Covenanters, were probably first sung in Scotland amidst the outcries and curses of their forefathers; a circumstance which should deprive those tunes, in the eyes of rigid presbyterians, of a great deal of their adventitious sanctity; for it is hardly to be imagined that much associated reverence should be attached to any thing derived from the polluted source of episcopal tyranny and oppression. We have also several of the Lutheran tunes of Germany; and not a small proportion of those sung in our churches consist of the productions of our own parish-clerks or precentors, composed in imitation of the older tunes, from which it is not, indeed, very easy to distinguish them. Thus, church music in Scotland has, since the Reformation, undergone almost as little change as if it had originated and continued in China; yet, unlike what would have happened in China, it alone has remained stationary, while every thing else has been improved. In the progress of musical taste, the principles of melody came by degrees to be understood. It was felt, that melody, and not harmony, was the most essential branch of the art; and that the laws of melody were not to be sought among abstract theories, cyphers, or diagrams, but were to be drawn from those natural feelings of the beauty of sounds, which are common to all mankind. It was found, that, in almost every country, there was a species of music, formerly thought unworthy of notice, the airs in common use among the people, which, though of very different degrees of beauty in different nations, had, in general, a character of similarity which marked them to be the off. spring of nature. To these airs, therefore, immediately perceived, that they derived their power of giving pleasure, and of exciting feeling, still more from their rhythm or movement, than from the mere arrangement of sounds. It was found that rhythm or movement, even of itself, could produce a considerable musical effect, and that a tabor or a drum, skilfully beat, could rouse the spirit, or animate the gaiety of the listeners; while, on the other hand, it was acknowledged, that, without rhythm, the mere succession of musical sounds was insipid and unmeaning. The composers of Italy now began to form their opera airs on the sweet and expressive popular melodies of Naples and Venice; and it is by a gradual extension and refinement of the principles derived from these models, that they have formed, that school of melody which" enchants the world." The best airs of other countries were employed in the same manner. The subjects of the finest movements were formed upon the national songs and dances of the time, and were called romances, minuets, sarabands, or corantos; and, at a later period, these subjects consisted often of the most beautiful Polish, Russian, or Scottish airs. The composers of other countries have imitated the Italians in this attention to melody; to which harmony is now considered in its true light, that of a subordinate, though very important acces sory. These great improvements have not been confined to secular music. The compositions for the church, by the great modern masters of Germany and Italy, are constructed upon the same pure principles of taste which have been adopted in every other species of music. This is not the |