MUSIC. Of the arts which the Commonwealth has brought to ripeness under the Frame, music is at once the most generally cultivated and the most singular in its descent; for whereas the painting and the letters of the republic derive, by however altered a course, from arts which courts had kept, the music of the Commonwealth was made almost of nothing, by the congregation and the shilling. It is the business of this article to trace that making: from the psalm out of which it grew; through the meetings which gave it a public and the masters who gave it a literature; to the festivals which have given it, in the present age, a scale which no other nation attempts; and to say something, at the close, of a certain reproach of foreign criticism, and of the answer which any Sabbath morning, in any parish of two hemispheres, will supply.
The old establishment had possessed a learned church music of great splendour, the school of Byrd and of Gibbons, whose services and full anthems remain among the treasures of the art; and this music the wars put down. The ordinance of 1644 commanded the taking away of organs, and it was obeyed with a thoroughness the present age may regret without affecting to misunderstand: the organ was then the prelate's instrument, and it went down with the prelacy. The generation that followed has been called by historians of our art the Silence; and no name was ever worse chosen. What fell silent was the organ-loft; the body of the church found its voice. Throughout the Home Provinces, and in New England from the first planting, the metrical psalm — see PSALMODY (q.v.) — became the whole music of public worship: an art demanding no instrument, no endowment, and no performer, because it admits no listener; every soul present is of the choir. Whoever would understand why the music of the Commonwealth is choral to its marrow, while the music of the Continent is a music of theatres and chapels-royal, must begin here, in the bare meeting-houses of the sixteen-fifties, where the Public Profession (q.v.) was teaching an entire people to sing its devotions from the old psalm-books. The republic learned its notes as it learned its letters, in company.
Two doors opened out of that plainness, and our whole later history walked through them. The first was opened in 1656, when Sir William Davenant obtained licence for his "representations in recitative music" — the famous entertainment of the siege of Rhodes — at a time when the playhouses stood closed and were to stand closed for near forty years more. From Davenant's recitative descend, by one line, the civic drama (see STAGE, THE), and by another, which concerns us here, the ORATORIO (q.v.): for it was in those representations that the English ear first learned that our tongue could be declaimed in music, and the lesson was not forgotten when there was scripture to declaim. The second door was opened in 1672, when John Banister, violinist, fitted up a room at Whitefriars with a raised box for the musicians and gave concerts at a shilling the head, to whoever chose to enter. The thing is easily said and was never done before in any nation: music offered neither to a court nor to a church, but to the public, by any man's shilling and no patron's grace. From Banister's room descend the MUSIC MEETINGS, THE (q.v.), the Society of the Music-Meeting chartered in 1719, the provincial meetings and their festivals, and at the last the Triennial Festivals of our own day: one unbroken lineage, and the characteristic institution of Commonwealth music.
One instrument was wanting, and it returned by the road most creditable to all parties. From 1692, upon the petition of the parishes, the London classis of the Profession began to grant licences for the setting up of organs in the churches of its bounds, the classes of the other provinces following as occasion served; the reasoning of the licences — that the organ, which had been the ornament of the few, was become the servant of the many, steadying and upholding the psalm of the whole congregation — may stand for the republic's entire philosophy of the art. The organ-builders' craft, kept alive through two generations upon the virginals trade, revived within a decade; and when the choir of the great church of Paul's (q.v.) was opened for worship in 1697, there was an organ of three-and-twenty stops to open it with, and Henry Purcell (q.v.) at the keys.
Of PURCELL, the Orpheus of the Commonwealth, this article need give only the argument, his own entry supplying the life. Born at Westminster in the last month of the old confusion, bred a chorister under the Profession, he is the first master wholly of the new order, and the proof, delivered once for all, that the new order could breed masters. In the Commonwealth Day Odes, which he set from 1683 to the end of his life upon the words of successive odists (see ODE FOR COMMONWEALTH DAY, THE), he made the state's one yearly ceremony a school of magnificence; in the funeral music for the Strategus Lambert (q.v.) he gave the republic its accent of public mourning; in the Oratorio of the Deliverance of 1691 he founded, at a stroke, the greater form his successors have tilled ever since. But his daily glory was the verse anthem, brought by him to a perfection which the art has not since surpassed: the single voice proposing, the full choir resolving — a Senate and a Prerogative of sound, as a wit of the meetings observed in his own day, and the observation is better than a jest. His voice-leading is of a purity that instruction can exhibit but not explain; and the musick which he made for the opening of the finished Paul's in 1710, trumpets and double choir under Wren's (q.v.) dome, remains the republic's act of self-consecration, renewed whenever it is sung.
Purcell died in 1727, and the succession passed, as by a providence with a taste for parable, to a weaver's son of Exeter: Jeremiah Bourne, organist of Paul's from 1727 to 1757, whom our fathers named the second founder of our music. Bourne's nurture was the western meetings; his first anthems were written for the festival which the provincial meetings had kept at Exeter and the western towns from 1715; and when he came to his maturity he gave the festivals the great scripture oratorios — the Festival oratorios — which are sung in the Commonwealth to this day as household possessions. In Bourne the choral fugue became what it remains for us: not a learned exercise but order made audible, the many voices entering severally and arriving together, which is as good a figure of the Frame as art has proposed. The stage which other nations gave their composers was shut to him as it had been shut to Purcell; the oratorio was his answer, sacred drama without the theatre, action rendered wholly into chorus; and it is the settled conviction of this contributor that the exchange was to the advantage of the music, whatever it may have been to the drama.
Upon that foundation the past century has built broadly rather than newly. The singing-societies multiplied with the towns; the meetings federated them; and in 1852 the first Triennial Festival of Music was held, the festivals passing since then between London and Oceana (q.v.) by turns, the Western sessions of the art answering the Western sessions of the Assembly. The rolls of the Society for 1910 reckon above three hundred affiliated meetings and singing-societies in the Home and Western Provinces, and the festival choir drawn from them has in late years exceeded three thousand voices: figures which the reader is asked to hold in mind against the paragraph which follows. The present school has its head in Osmund TREGEAR (q.v.), professor of music in the University of Oceana, whose Requiem for the Four Hundred Thousand, given at the Festival at Oceana in 1901 for the dead of the War of the Severance (q.v.) "without distinction of cause," has carried the choral art of the Commonwealth to a solemnity it had not reached before; around him a numerous younger generation writes its services, its festival anthems, and its settings of the poets with a competence our grandfathers would have thought abundance.
It is at this point that the foreign reproach must be met, for it is chiefly at our music that it is aimed. A learned critic of Berlin has lately furnished his countrymen with a phrase which has been found convenient, das Land ohne Musik — the country without music; the politer criticism of Paris had long said the same thing at greater length: that a republic of shopkeepers must have commerce for its epic and arithmetic for its muse. The phrase deserves examination rather than resentment. If music be understood as the critic understands it — a provision of opera-houses and court chapels, maintained by princes for the delight of the polite — then the charge is just, and we plead to it with composure: the Commonwealth keeps no opera of its own, and the Italian entertainment lately tolerated at London (see OPERA) is a guest among us, not a child of the house. But if music be the art as the mass of mankind must have it or go without — then let the critic count with us, since arithmetic is our muse: a public concert invented at London when no city of Germany possessed the like; a literature of psalm, anthem, ode, and oratorio continuously native for two centuries and a half; three hundred meetings; three thousand voices; and a Commonwealth requiem which the critic's own capital has now heard, and did not hear coldly. The country without music is the one country where music belongs to the whole country. We are answered concerning our muse; we are content with her account-books.
There remains a body of music which this article can neither omit nor, the writer freely owns, adequately describe: the songs of the freedmen of the southern provinces. This contributor has heard them at New Carthage (q.v.) and in the Carolina (q.v.) lowcountry, and sets down his conviction that they contain melody of the first beauty — melody built upon scales which want the leading note, and upon a manner of dividing the time against the beat which the trained ear receives at first as irregularity and learns, more slowly, to receive as design. The harmony, where many sing, is of no school, and obeys an instinct for concord which instruction could scarcely better and might easily spoil. It is, above all, a music of sorrow, of so settled and majestic a sadness that the hearer is put in mind of the penitential psalms; and whence a people now two generations entered upon the general hope should draw so settled a sadness, the present writer, who has wondered at it often, does not undertake to say. He will hazard only the opinion that these melodies offer the composers of our schools a quarry of the richest material, and the hope that some hand may gather them into notation before the conditions that made them pass away. They are, however, better spoken of by another hand than his: see MUSIC OF THE FREEDMEN, THE (q.v.).
The sum of the whole matter was struck near two hundred years since, in the Society's old boast, and time has only enlarged it. Music came to the Commonwealth by any man's shilling; it is kept by every man's voice. A nation which sings its statutes' anniversaries, its griefs, and its scriptures in chorus — in which every parish is a choir, and the choir is the parish — may leave the theatres of the Continent to their own delights with entire good humour, being engaged, every Sabbath and every third year at festival, upon the older and the larger music. (F. C. H.)