respects:

1. _Form and Structure_.--Nearly all the important old music, the music
that counts, was for voices--for chorus--with or without accompaniment.
"Forms," in the modern sense of the word--cyclical forms with recurring
themes arranged in regular sequence, and with development passages,
etc.--of these there were none. Some composers were groping blindly
after a something they wanted, but they did not hit on it.
Self-sustaining musical structures, independent of words, were poor and
flimsy. The form of the music that matters was determined by the words.
From beginning to end of each composition voice followed voice, one
singing, higher or lower, what had been sung by the others, while those
others added melodies that made correct harmony. Thus a web of music was
spun which has to be listened to, so to speak, horizontally and
vertically--horizontally for the melodies that are sung simultaneously,
and vertically for the chords that are produced by the sounding together
of the notes of those melodies. When the words were used up the
composition came to an end. Often the words were repeated, and repeated
often; but there should be reason in all things, and the finest
composers stopped when they had finished.

The tendency in the new music was to abandon the horizontal aspect.
Purcell, in his additions to Playford's "Brief Introduction to the
Skill of Musick," remarks on the fact that musicians now composed "to
the treble, when they make counterpoint or basses to tunes or songs."
Music became, broadly speaking, tunes with an accompaniment. The fugue
was no contradiction of this. Even in its heyday, though the parts were
ever so independent of one another, the mass of tone forms a great
melody, or _melos_, moving on a firm harmonic foundation in the lowest
part. The great choral fugues of Bach and Handel have often in the