In the Middle Ages instrumental music can scarcely be said to have
existed as an art. Musical instruments--"giterne and ribible"--were
known and played upon. "Fiddlers, players, cobblers, and other
debauched persons" tramped the country and appeared at festivals in
company with jugglers and mountebanks. Towards the beginning of the
sixteenth century, private orchestras were maintained by the noble and
the wealthy. Still the instrumental band held at best but a secondary
place beside the vocal choir. "Harping," says the ancient bard, "ken I
none, for song is chefe of myn-strelse." The music which it played
differed in no essential respect from that intended for singing;
indeed the part-song was often arranged without alteration for
instruments, and so instrumental technique grew out of vocal technique,
but--and this is important--retaining important rhythmic characteristics
from the dance. Exactly as all stone architecture--Gothic, Classic,
Saracenic--bears the features of its wooden parent, so does our modern
instrumental music reproduce the physiognomy of its origin, uniting the
flowing cantilene of the voice with the marked rhythm of the dance, and
we may notice in any modern instrumental composition how the two are
contrasted together, now the one feature predominating, now the other.

There remains yet another current in the stream of musical development
of at least equal importance with the growth of dance and song. I
cannot here enter fully into the history of ecclesiastical music. We
are only concerned with the influence exerted by Dutch and Italian
composers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries upon the
development of later German music.

While pope and prelate cared only for the outer logical shell of
Christian doctrine, which they could use as a weapon in their struggle
for power, art laid hold upon its vital essence. Those politicians who