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Form in the Instrumental Music of the Seventeenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Ernst Hermann Meyer
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Extract

There are periods in the history of music when the problems of musical form seem to have been solved once and for all. At such times, there are fixed formal schemes, there are species each of which has its average length, and with each of which the musical world of the particular time can associate something definite, familiar and often apparently unchangeable that has always been and always will be. With a perfectly safe tradition behind them, the composers of such a period see no need to strive for new and ever new forms, and are content to demand a certain amount of freedom or variety within the established tradition. Such a time was, for instance, the age of Mozart, Beethoven and the Romantics, which had its Sonata form with three or four movements each of which was a type that meant something more or less well known to everybody, which had also the Rondo form, Aria form, Opera and Lied form, and so on.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Musical Association , Volume 65 , 1938 , pp. 45 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1938

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References

1 Several interesting examples of chain-canzones about 1600 may be found in J. v. Wasielewski's Instrumentalsätze (2nd edition, 1905) and in L. Torchi's L'arte musicale in Italia.Google Scholar

2 Two Fantasias à 4 (Stainer & Bell, London, ed. E. H. Fellowes) and Seven Fantasias d 3 (two ed. by E. H. Meyer; Bärenreiter, Kassel), all with double bass.Google Scholar

3 Bärenreiter, Kassel; ed. E. H. Meyer.Google Scholar

4 Ed. by F. E. Schmidt; Vieweg, Berlin.Google Scholar

5 Ed. by J. v. Wasielewski.Google Scholar

6 E.g., in the Suites of Schein and Peuerl; also the free introductions to German and Italian Suites from Merula to Erlebach and Corelli.Google Scholar

7 Printed in 1686: Brit. Mus., printed music, g. 52.Google Scholar

8 The scholarly section were fettered by restrictions to a twelve-note keyboard and by the staff notation and the crudities it represented. There is another section, the early history of which, as it depends on natural presumptions and inferences from many facts, has yet to be written.Google Scholar