n, an art or
a mechanism, having once been found satisfactory, should be made
official and never afterward changed. This principle, taken in
connection with the limited powers of their chief instrument, accounts
for the small progress they have made in music within the past 2000
years. It must be remembered, however, that our knowledge of the music
of this country is still far from perfect, the travelers and
missionaries from whom it has reached us not having been practical
musicians, nor having had sufficiently long opportunities for
mastering musical systems so different from what they had previously
known, and so contrary to all their inherited percepts of tone.

[Illustration: Fig. 18.]

The Japanese are a very musical people in their way. The chief
instrument of their culture is the ko-ko. (See Fig. 18.)

In structure it much resembles the Chinese ke. They have also many
other instruments, especially various kinds of imperfect guitars, a
few rude violins, and the usual outfit of trumpets, reed pipes and
instruments of percussion. Like all the other barbarous nations, they
have never had harmony until since they began to learn it from the
Europeans.

[Illustration]

Book Second.

THE

Apprentice Period of Modern Music.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF HARMONY, TONALITY, CANONIC IMITATION AND POLYPHONY.
THE GENERAL POPULARIZATION OF THE ART OF MUSIC IN EVERY DIRECTION.

CHAPTER V.

THE NATURE OF THE TRANSFORMATION, AND THE AGENCIES EFFECTING IT.

According to the division of the subject in the beginning of this
work, the period from the Christian era to that of Palestrina, A.D.
1600, is one of apprentice work, in which the details of art were
being mastered, but in which no music, according to our acceptation of
the term, was produced. The history of this period is somewhat
obscure, the writers who throw light on it averaging scarcely more
than one to a century, scattered about in different parts of Europe.
Nevertheless, the most important changes in the history of music took
place during this period. The monody and empyrical tonality of the
ancients gave place to polyphony and harmonized melodies resting upon
the relations of tones in key. New instruments came in, and the entire
practice of the art of music was deepened, ennobled and immeasurably
enlarged in every direction. There were four causes co-operating in
this transformation of the art, and it is not easy to say of any one
of them that t