Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth Century

Extract

Having occasion recently to study the early history of instrumental music, I was struck by the different course that those first developments took in the chief countries of Europe. I found that it was impossible to deal with the whole subject in one gulp. Each country had to be taken separately and approached from a different point of view, for in each what I might term the vital stream took a different course. To illustrate my meaning, the backbone of German music in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the deep-rooted tradition of amateur music-making, which has lasted up to the present day in Germany as in no other country. The professional musicians of that period were largely foreigners, and although the exotic influences that they brought with them undoubtedly left their mark, it was the comparatively simple and essentially German music, written for the amateur, that bore the germ from which the great classical period sprang.