Johann Nicolaus Forkel: The Beginning of Music Historiography

Vincent Duckles

Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 1, No. 3. (Spring, 1968), pp. 277-290.

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 Johann Nicolaus
Forkel
The Beginning of
Music Historiography
VINCENT DUCKLES

HrsTon1oCnm-w is a term that strikes one as a cumbersome

equivalent for the writing of history. But there is a sense in which
it adds a new dimension to the time-honored form of intellectual
activity that historians engage in. It is history writing that has
become conscious of its own ends and purposes. Historiography
carries the implication that the historian is not merely delving into
the past; he is, at the same time, engaged in fashioning a structure
of ideas to support his understanding of that past. It suggests the
kind of self-conscious reflection that Collingwood attributes to all
philosophical inquiry:
Philosophy is reflective. The philosophizing mind never simply thinks
about an object, it always, while thinking about that object, thinks also
about its own thought about that object. Philosophy may thus be called
thought of the second degree, thought about thought.=
In this sense historiography may be regarded as history of the second
degree, thought about history. It is history conceived within the
framework of a theory of culture and a theory of knowledge. Music
historians first began to regard their discipline in this light in the
late eighteenth century.
The philosophical approach to music history was one which en-
joyed favor throughout most of the nineteenth century. In our im-
mediate past, however, (ca. 1920-1960) anything that has savored
of speculative thinking, aesthetics, metaphysics, or even criticism,
has been suspect. History, we are told, should be concerned with
the facts, with what actually happened in the past. When art is the
subject of investigation, there are many who feel that history be-
comes almost irrelevant. Their assumption is that technical analysis
1 R. G . C~llingwood,The Idea of History (London, 1946), p. 1.
277
278 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES

is all that is required to tell one what really takes place within a work
of art, regardless of the particular niche it occupies in time, or any
consideration of its value. Within the last decade, however, specu-
lative thought has realigned itself to music with a vengeance. In 1959
an eminent musicologist had the temerity to ask, and attempt to
answer the question, "What is music?" and found himself completely
deluged with dissenting opinions.' One need only to look into any
issue of Perspectives of New Music, or the "Current Chronicle" in
the Musical Quarterly to see to what extent aesthetic theory has been
revived. We seem to have entered into a kind of neo-rationalistic
age in which artists have a profound need to explain themselves, as
if to justify what they are doing. Controversies are not confined to
contemporary composition alone; in the realm of music history,
philosophical issues are also at stake and discussion is no less heated.
The European musicologists Walter Wiora and Jacques Chailley
both have drafted new patterns for the investigation of the musical
past.s Joseph Kerman and Edward Lowinsky have disputed the role
of criticism in historical studies. We have had provocative state-
ments from Leonard B. Meyer and Paul Henry Lang concerning
the crisis in musical studies today.4
All this is preamble to a consideration of the work of a modest
eighteenth-century musician who was one of the first to think philo-
sophically about the problems of writing music history. Johann
Nicolaus Forkel ( 1749-18 18) was not the first music historian in
the modern sense. Among his eighteenth-century colleagues he
ranks chronologically in fifth place, after Martini, Burney, Hawkins,
and La Borde. But more than any of his predecessors, he felt called
upon to examine the roots of his beliefs as an historian. This is
not to say that earlier historical writers were lacking in a sub-
structure of ideas, or that it would not be profitable to investigate
what might be called the music historiography of the Renaissance,
2 Friedrich Blume, "Was ist Musik"? Musikalische Zeitfragen, V, (1959); also
printed in the author's Syntagma Musicologicum (1963) pp. 872-886. The March
1959 issue of the journal Melos is devoted to discussions of Blume's views.
3 See Wiora's The Four Ages o f Music (New York, 1965) and Chailley's
40,000 Years of Music (London, 1964).
4 Kerman's statement, "A Profile for American Musicology," is printed in the
Journal of the American Musicological Society, XVIII (1965), 61-69; Lowinsky's
reply, "Character and Purposes of American Musiwlogy," is in the same journal,
XVIII (1965), 222-234. See also Leonard Meyer, "The End of the Renaissance?"
Hudson Review, XVI (1963), 169-186, and Paul Henry Lang, "Musical Scholar-
ship at the Crossroads," Musical Quarterly, XXXI (1945), 371-380.
 JOHANN NICOLAUS FORKEL 279

the Middle Ages, or the ancient world. Although the documents

we have from these periods do not conform to modern views of what
historical writing should be, we can study their methodology and
attempt to reconstruct the world views on which these pre-historio-
graphical efforts were based. Forkel's unique contribution is that
he provides the cognitive structure for us. He was conscious of his
responsibility as an historian to place his views in the context of a
philosophical system. Before he could write a history of music
he had to frame a "metaphysik der Tonkunst."
Eighteenth-century thought envisaged three levels of musical in-
volvement. At the first level was the "Liebhaber," the music-lover,
or, as we would call him, the musical amateur. His response to
music was immediate but unreliable, subject as it was to the whims
of personal taste. At a second, higher, level, traditionally coupled
with the first, was the "Kenner," the knowledgable or informed
musician, the professionally trained performer, the "Kapellmeister"
well versed in the technical knowledge of his craft. As the century
progressed, a third level came more and more into prominence. This
was the "Gelehrter," the learned musician, the man who was in
command not merely of the techniques but also of the rationale
of his art in the widest sense. We find this philosophically-oriented
musical scholar foreshadowed in Jacob Adlung's Anleitung zur
musikalischen Gelehrtheit ( 1758 ) and exemplified in the almost
legendary figures of Padre Giambattist Martini of Bologna and
Martin Gerbert, Abbot of St. Blasien. If the French created the
image of the man of the Enlightenment, it was the Germans who
gave him authority in the realm of music. It was a German, for
example, John Christopher Pepusch, who provided the model for
the learned musician in England. The historian, Sir John Hawkins,
was his direct disciple. In Leipzig a little group under the leader-
ship of Lorenz Mizler founded one of the first musicological so-
cieties, the Societat der musikalischen Wissenschaften ( 173 8 )
whose purpose it was to study the laws of music theory and
composition.
The fundamental question propounded by these musical men of
learning was this: Is music founded on firm and certain principles
of knowledge, capable of sustaining rigorous thought? Is it entitled
to be called a science as well as an art? These questions were asked
and re-asked in a variety of forms throughout the eighteenth century.
280 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES

I n a sense the questions were as old as the Greeks, but the musicians
of the Enlightenment gave them a new emphasis. As early as 1695
the composer Agostino Steffani published in Amsterdam a little
pamphlet addressed to the question: Quanta certezza habbia da
suoi principii la musica? It was translated by Werkrneister in 1700
and according to Burney went through eight printings in Germany.
Steffani was seeking in behalf of music the same kind of clear and
distinct ideas that Descartes postulated as the basis of all true
knowledge. He tried to demonstrate that music was entitled to a
place among the sciences, but all he could find to support his posi-
tion was a set of familiar clichQ based on classical or biblical
authority.
The quest for certainty and precision as a basis for musical
knowledge was the leitmotif of Forkel's career. It can be en-
countered in his earliest publication, a syllabus written in 1777
under the title Uber die Theorie der Musik for a course of public
lectures given at the University of Gottingen.
In no science or art is the necessity for clear rules and prescriptions so
much disputed as in music. It is still believed that Nature alone is the
best guide, and that through her beneficence which endows most men
with a certain facility in the practice of the art all rules and prescriptions
may be dispensed with. But although that same Nature is equally
generous in a thousand other ways, it is not assumed that we should
therefore neglect to perfect her gifts and arts through industry in order
to extend her powers and effects, to attain more precision, and, so far as
is possible, refine and elevate her endowments.
Nature is the ultimate source of all knowledge and experience, but
Nature unassisted is crude and untamed, and must submit to rules
before she can be controlled. This is a view which Forkel shared
with Alexander Pope, and we find these familiar lines from the
poet's Essay on Criticism entered on a page in the musician's
notebook:
These Rules of old discovered, not divis'd,

Are Nature still, but Nature methodiz'd.

Nature, like Monarchy, is but restrain'd

By the same Laws which first herself ordain'd.

The instincts of the pedagogue were never absent from Forkel's

writings, and, as we shall see, were a source of some confusion in
his aims. One of his favorite approaches to the instruction of the
 JOHANN NICOLAUS FORKEL 28 1

layman was through clarification of the precise definitions of musical

terms. His Genauere Bestimmung einiger musikalischen Begrifle,
another syllabus written in 1780, was a kind of demonstration of
how one might promote musical understanding by clarifying the
concepts on which it is based. He takes the reader systematically
through an analysis of the meanings of a selected group of terms
often encountered but frequently misunderstood: "Music," "Musi-
cus," "Direction einer Musik," and "Concert."
By far the most comprehensive statement of his rationale for
music as a learned discipline is found in the introduction to his
Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik (1788). This 68-page essay, an
expansion of his earlier discourse on music theory, expresses the
ideal of eighteenth-century musical scholarship more completely
than any other document of its kind. It is, in Forkel's own terms,
"a metaphysic of the tonal art." The views contained in the essay
were the product of what at first glance appears to be a highly cir-
cumscribed environment. Forkel's career ran its course within an
orbit that did not extend beyond the little university town of Gottin-
gen where he worked and taught for more than forty-five years.
In this respect he was a scholar like his contemporary Emanuel
Kant, who never left the environs of Konigsberg. Forkel matricu-
lated at Gottingen in 1769 as a twenty-year old student of law. The
following year he was appointed organist at the university church,
a post that he held for three years. In 1772 he began to give private
instruction in music theory, and by 1779 he had been designated as
Academic Music Director, a title more impressive in sound than it
was in fact. Part of his university responsibility, in addition to lec-
turing on theory, was to conduct weekly concerts during the winter
semester with an ensemble made up of local amateurs, students, and
faculty. This activity, along with his organ playing and composing
(he produced a considerable quantity of works) points to the fact
that his contact with music was not entirely literary or theoretical,
although he had to defend himself from time to time against charges
of pedantry. Friedrich Schlegel, after reading Forkel's history of
music, said: "this man understands less about the Greeks than a
eunuch does about love, and less of music than a Russian does of
humanity." Elsewhere the journalist, Cramer, speaks of him as "a
fool in folio, and a stranger to the most essential qualities of a com-
poser." But these comments do no more than demonstrate that the
28 2 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES

learned man is always fair game for the bon mot. In 1781 he mar-
ried Margareta Wedekind, the daughter of a Gottingen professor
of theology. The marriage was not a success and was dissolved after
twelve years. Thereafter the important events of his life were con-
fined to the academic sphere. He was awarded an honorary doctor-
ate by the university in 1787, a year before the first volume of his
Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik was published. His one effort to
leave the university environment, an application for the post vacated
by the death of C. P. E. Bach in Hamburg, was unsuccessful. In
1792 he issued his Allgemeine Literatur der Musik, the great bibli-
ography of writings on music that was perhaps his most enduring
contribution to musical scholarship. In 1801 the second volume of
the music history appeared, and in 1802 his last publication, the
biography of J. S. Bach, which set the stage for the Bach revival of
the nineteenth century. At his death in 1818 he left a projected
Denkmaler edition of early music and the beginnings of an or-
ganized bibliography of musical scores. The history, of course,
must be counted among his unfinished projects since its coverage
did not extend beyond the early sixteenth c e n t ~ r y . ~
Forkel was the prototype of the academic musician in a day
when such musicians were rare. We need not commiserate with him
for the limitations of his horizon, however, if we recognize that
Gottingen in the late eighteenth century was one of the most vital
centers of learning in Europe. Its Georg August University was
founded as late as 1734 by the Elector of Hanover who was also
George I1 of England. It developed rapidly in the creation of an
intellectual atmosphere that was both the culmination of the Enlight-
enment and the foreshadowing of a new approach to science and
philosophy. Out of its classrooms and seminars came the patterns
for most of the modern critical disciplines in the humanities. Par-
ticularly important was the view of history developed by a succes-
sion of "universal historians" led by Johann Christoph Gatterer,
J. C. Scholzer, and Johann von Miiller. For them history was not a
mere aggregate of national histories stressing political or military
events; it was the history of mankind revealed in all his arts and
institutions. Its purpose was to show how the earth and humanity
5 The basic facts on Forkel's career are conveniently summarized by Heinrich
Edelhoff in lohann Nikolaus Forkel; Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Musikwissen-
schaft (Gottingen, 1935).
 JOHANN NICOLAUS FORKEL 283

as a whole had developed. According to Herbert Butterfield, "such

history was not to be a mere burden on the memory; in fact it was
not addressed to the memory at all-it was philosophy, perpetually
connecting results with their causes."
Such was the atmosphere in which Forkel, the music historian,
developed his system. His range, like that of his colleagues, encom-
passed mankind as a whole, not merely in a chronological perspec-
tive but in its existing totality, embracing all peoples and cultures.
His initial frame of reference was the music of his own time, and he
would not have been a man of his time had he not regarded that
music as the culmination of a long process of development. His
purpose was to demonstrate how music had arrived at the state of
perfection in which it now existed, or had existed up to the time of
Johann Sebastian Bach, the composer whose work he placed at the
apex of the pyramid. His concept of progress, however, was more
sophisticated than that held by many of his contemporaries. He
recognized the sporadic nature of historical change. Long periods
might exist without much advancement. There could even be re-
gressions, and he regarded the music of his own day as one of them;
yet, by and large, history was a narrative of continuing growth and
refinement.
In order to explain historical change in the largest humanistic
terms, he adopted an approach akin to that of the anthropologist.
Change resulted from the gradually sharpening faculties of the
human mind in society. The key to its understanding was to be
found in an elaborate analogy between music and language-not
the first time such an analogy had been employed in eighteenth-
century thought. As speech is the expression of the intellect, so
music is the expression of the heart or feelings. Both of these modes
of expression, mental and emotional, had been hard-won over cen-
turies of gradual enlargement of man's cognitive and affective
capacities.
Forkel's emerging man passed through three stages of awakening
verbal and musical consciousness. The first of these extended far
into pre-history, to a time when men communicated in crude excla-
mations, when musical sound was identical with noise, when rhythm
6Herbert Butterfield, Man on His Past; the Study o f the History o f Historical
Scholarship (Cambridge, 1955), pp. 39-50.
284 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES

was the sole organizing component of musical structure. This was

not solely a chronological projection; it represented a state of society
in which many peoples of the world, including the "wild Americans,"
still found themselves. This was the childhood of the art. The sec-
ond age was marked by the beginnings of a sense of tonal relation-
ships, the specific identification of sounds with feelings, the employ-
ment of rudimentary scales, and the invention of simple melodic
patterns. The corresponding development in language led to the
recognition of the parts of speech, an awareness of the functions
and relationships of nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. At this level
Forkel placed the music of the Greeks and Romans and other high
cultures of antiquity. At one point he seems to verge toward the
viewpoint of the modern ethnomusicologist when he suggests that
"there are not a few who believe that music can be quite different
from ours in its structural features and yet be no less beautiful, per-
haps even more beautiful and more highly developed by its own
standards." But he is quick to disassociate himself from the beliefs
of that eccentric "few." There was no attraction for him, as there
was for Rousseau, in the primitive or the exotic, no charm in ar-
chaic simplicity. The second period of music was a period of adoles-
cence, and while one may grant that the musical responses of an ado-
lescent are vivid and exciting, at least to himself, they cannot
compare with the mature responses of an adult. If the insights that
might have led to an understanding of non-western music escaped
him, Forkel nevertheless created a framework that in later genera-
tions could be used to support more fruitful observations. Central
to his thought was the idea of the interrelatedness of all cultural
phenomena.
No single offspring of our culture develops alone. The coherence of
all the powers of the human mind and heart is too fundamental for any
single one to exist in isolation. And this unity of mental and emotional
powers accounts for the common bond that binds all arts and sciences
into one.
It follows that our understanding of the music of a remote culture
must not be based solely on the fragmentary reports of its historians;
it must take into account the society, the economic conditions, the
state of the other arts and sciences, and above all, the nature of
that music itself in so far as it can be recovered.
 JOHANN NICOLAUS FORKEL 285

In the last age in Forkel's three-fold periodization of history the

developed art of Western civilization comes into its own. The point
at which music crosses the threshhold into the Neuzeit is signaled by
the invention of harmony, and the resulting stabilization of the
modern system of tonality. These features characterize Western
music from the sixteenth century on. The analogy between lan-
guage and music is now expanded in great detail. Man's power of
discrimination in the realm of ideas and in that of feelings have
developed along parallel lines. Harmony is to the affective language
of tone what logic is to verbal discourse. Harmony is the element
that makes music intelligible and capable of conveying infinite
nuances of feelings. It provides the laws that give meaning to
melody. Forkel took sharp issue with writers such as Rousseau and
Arteaga who placed melody in the preeminent position in musical
design. He accused them of attempting to substitute "archaic
psalmody" for the richness and multiplicity of which modern music
is capable. Pure instrumental music, the sonata or the symphony,
has nothing to say to such critics. What Forkel means by harmony
in this context is best expressed by the term "tonality." There is
no contradiction when he asserts that the instrumental polyphony
of Bach is the highest expression of our harmony-oriented music.
Traditionally, the study of language is organized on two levels,
the level of grammar and the level of rhetoric. The difference be-
tween the two is largely a matter of scale. Grammar is concerned
with the smaller units of structure, beginning with the letters of the
alphabet, then the syllables, then individual words combined to
make simple sentences. Rhetoric continues the expansion to include
progressively larger literary forms and devices for conveying more
and more complex meanings.
Musical grammar falls into three subdivisions: (1) the study of
tones as they function in scales, keys, and modes, and their relation-
ships in simple melodic patterns; (2) the study of harmony, begin-
ning with triads and moving to 7th chords, the treatment of har-
monic dissonance, modulation, cadences, and chromaticism; and
(3) musical prosody, or the structures derived from rhythm, includ-
ing the use of accents, meters, phrases. In the earlier projection of
his system (Uber die Theorie der Musik, 1777) Forkel included
three other elements within the scope of grammar; namely, acous-
286 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES

tics, number theory, and notation, but he ended by removing them

and placing them in a category of auxilliary disciplines.
Forkel's systematic approach is most revealing in his discussion
of musical rhetoric (see the outline on pp. 289-290). What he
offers here is nothing less than a complete apparatus for the analysis
of eighteenth-century musical style as an eighteenth-century musi-
cian would see it. The outline presents an odd mixture of analytical
devices, some based on abstract musical structures, others derived
from literary models. There are categories founded on existing
forms such as the chorale, sonata, concerto, etc.; on the sociological
conditions under which music was employed (church, chamber,
theater); and on psychological factors residing in the nature of
human responses to music (the affections, aesthetic modes, and
the rhetorical figures).
His treatment of the rhetorical figures seems a curious anachro-
nism in a late eighteenth-century document. What the Germans
call "Figurenlehre" is a doctrine associated primarily with seven-
teenth-century and early eighteenth-century practice, exemplified
in the work of such theorists as Christoph Bernhard and J. G.
Walther. It has also been employed as a means of understanding
the symbolic content of the music of J. S. Bach. But by 1790 it can
hardly have been regarded as a flourishing approach either to com-
position or analysis. Briefly, "Figurenlehre" is the attempt to iden-
tify musical structures with formulae taken from the realm of ora-
tory: "elipse," "hyperbolie," "antithisis," "epistrophe," etc. Forkel's
account of this practice is certainly one of the last in the literature. It
demonstrates not only the conservatism of his taste but also the
power that the concept of music-as-language exercised over his
thinking. Yet his application of the doctrine is, generally speaking,
a flexible one. He subdivides the figures into three types: ( 1) those
directed to the intellect, (2) those directed to the imagination, and
( 3 ) those designed to capture the attention. Much overlapping is
admitted between the three kinds. The intellectual figures are
the various devices used in counterpoint: canons of all kinds,
invertible counterpoint, double and triple counterpoint. These
techniques, he warns, must be used with care because they make
one forget that music is, after all, a language of the emotions, not a
dry and empty manipulation of tones. By far the most significant
figures are those that appeal to the imagination. These may consist
 JOHANN NICOLAUS FORKEL 287

of pictorial devices in which the actual sounds and motions of nat-

ural objects are imitated, or, on a much higher plane, they can imi-
tate the inner quality of human feeling. This last mode of imitation
is music's unique function, one that distinguishes it from all other
arts. As for the attention-arousing figures, these are employed to
lend an element of surprise, to upset expectation for the sake of
interest.
The short section on musical criticism at the end of Forkel's dis-
cussion of rhetoric does not do full justice to his concepts of musical
value. There is hardly a page in the essay that does not bear the
imprint of his critical standards. The sublime, the orderly, the ele-
vated rank at the top in his scale of aesthetic values. These are
qualities that are to be found in sacred music at its best, and he
devotes considerable space in the second volume of his history to
the celebration of the ideal role of the music of the church. But
whether sacred or secular, the music that appeals to him is pre-
dominantly serious in nature. There is little room in his taste for
the charms of simplicity, spontaneity, artlessness. The highest enjoy-
ment of music is reserved for highly cultivated men; the appreciation
of a work of musical art depends upon deep learning and a knowl-
edge of the rules. He had a sublime confidence in the effectiveness
of theory. Far from subscribing to the usual view that theory lags
a generation or so behind practice, Forkel believed it was the func-
tion of good theory to correct bad practice.
It would be a mistake to overlook in Forkel's rationalistic system
those elements that point to a world beyond rationalism. They are
clearly present although he was temperamentally alien to the Ro-
mantic point of view. He kept himself aloof from the turmoil of the
Sturm und Drang, but certain of his views anticipate the situation
in aesthetics that emerged long after that turmoil had subsided.
For example, he was highly critical of the reforms of Gluck, but
not so much as a defender of the old operatic conventions as a
champion of the belief that music must move by its own inner laws,
laws which are more compelling than the dictates of music drama.
There is a distinct foreshadowing of the Hanslick-Wagner contro-
versy here.
His deep-seated faith in the power of reason, however, stamps
Forkel as a true man of the Enlightenment, and, at the same time,
it suggests that side of his mentality that is most vulnerable to criti-
288 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES

cism. The stream of history has carried us far enough from the
eighteenth-century to make it easy for us to detect its short-sighted-
ness, its provincialism, its over-confidence in the power of the
human mind to control and clarify experience. Perhaps from the
standpoint of a less secure age, we resent the security of its convic-
tions. But in any case, if we look closely at Forkel's historiography
it becomes apparent that his concept of historical change stops short
at the very point where history begins to be significant, at the thresh-
old of the modern world. He can project his imagination into the
distant past and sketch broad hypotheses suggesting the way in
which prehistoric or ancient man learned to express himself in the
language of tone, but once that lesson had been learned, once ma-
turity had been achieved, historical motion seems to come to a halt.
What remains of Forkel's system is a didactic framework for treat-
ing things as they are, circa 1780. The dynamic of history has been
lost; the pedagogue has displaced the music historian. This was
the dilemma in which most of the music historians of the Enlighten-
ment found themselves. Although they believed in progress, they
could not account for the process by which perfection was to be
attained, apart from an appeal to personal taste.
It has been said with some justice that the Enlightenment was
not an historical age. Its genius lay in its power to organize and
systematize knowledge; it excelled in making maps of learning.
From this point of view, Johann Nicolaus Forkel was without doubt
one of the greatest musical cartographers of his time. In his Allge-
meine Literatur der Musik (1792) he produced a bibliography that
encompassed the total resources in musical learning available to
eighteenth-century scholarship, bringing order into a collection of
more than 3,000 items. The influence of his classification system
can be traced to the present day. The Allgemeine Geschichte der
Musik remained a fragment, but if he failed in the completion of
his great historical design it cannot be said that he lacked a vision of
what the task involved.
University of California, Berkeley
 JOHANN NICOLAUS FORKEL 289

Johann Nicolaus Forkel's Outline for Musical Rhetoric *

I. Musical period structures (Periodology) derived from-
a ) Rhythmic

b) Logical, and further

c) Homophonic, or

d) Polyphonic [forms]

11. Musical styles (Schreibarten) as distinguished by their function:

a ) In the church
b) In the chamber
C) In the theater. And, further, by their affections:
1) In the style of the sad affections
a) Combined, or in the abstract
b ) Concrete, in so far as such affections are manifest in
high, low, cultivated or polished individuals; further ac-
cording to the importance of their object, and the differ-
ent degrees of sadness.
2) In the style of the happy affections

3) In the elevated, quiet, self-contained style

4) In the style of the morose, heavy affections

111. The musical species distinguished, like the styles, according to

function :
1) In the church
2) In the chamber
3) In the theater; further according to texture:
1) Homophonic
2) Polyphonic. Likewise the following species of composition
in current use :
a ) Chorale
b) Recitative (accompanied or free)
C) Aria
d) Duet
e) Trio
f ) Quartet, Quintet, Sextet, etc.
g) Chorus (fugal or non-fugal)
h) The sonata for all instruments
i) The concerto for all instruments
k) The symphony
1) The overture
m) The instrumental fugue
n) Characteristic French dances: (1) Minuet. (2) BourCe.
(3) Gavotte. (4) Rigaudon. (5) March. (6) EntrCe.
(7) Gigue. (8) Polonaise. (9) Angloise. (10) Pas-
sepied. (1 1) Rondeau. (12) Sarabande. ( 13) Courante.
* Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik,I , pp. 66-68.
 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES

( 14) Allemande. (1 5) Chaconne. ( 16) Passacaglia.

( 17) Musette, etc.
o) The fantasia
Composite forms derived from the above in combina-
tion :
1) Opera and Operetta
2) Oratorio
3) Cantata (sacred and secular)
IV. The ordering of musical ideas in terms of their content and
character:
1) Aesthetic organization:
a) Exordium (beginning)
b) Principal theme
c) Neighboring theme
d) Contrasting theme
e ) Dissolution
f) Refutation
g) Affirmation
h ) Conclusion
2) R hetorical figures, as directed to-
a) The understanding
b) The powers of the imagination
c) The attention. Further sub-divisions under all three: ( 1)
Contrapuntal and canonic devices. (2) Elipse. (3) Hyper-
bolie. (4) Repetition of various kinds. (5) Paronomasia.
( 6 ) Antithisis. (7) Suspension. (8) Epistrophe. (9) Grada-
tion. ( 10) Deception or interruption.
V. The performance, or declamation, of a composition:

1 ) Vocal

2) Instrumental, or

3) A mixture of the two

VI. Musical criticism:

1) The necessity and foundation of the rules
2) The beautiful
a) Absolute beauty
b) Relative beauty (national or individual)
3) Musical taste:

a) National

b) Individual (taste determined by temperament)