point or basses to tunes or songs."
Music became, broadly speaking, tunes with an accompaniment. The fugue
was no contradiction of this. Even in its heyday, though the parts were
ever so independent of one another, the mass of tone forms a great
melody, or _melos_, moving on a firm harmonic foundation in the lowest
part. The great choral fugues of Bach and Handel have often in the
accompaniment a bass moving independently of the bass voice part, and
this instrumental bass was figured so that the harmonies could be filled
in, on the organ.

2. _Melody_.--There was fine melody enough in the old music, but its
rhythm was very subtle, and there was no suggestion of catchiness in it.
Melody of a familiar folk-song or dance type now came in, divided into
regular periods with strongly-marked rhythms. This may be seen clearly
in, for example, Morley's "ballets"--part-songs that could be danced to.
Clear, easily understood, when once it came in it, never went out again.
Its shaping power may be felt in the fugue subjects of Bach and Handel,
as well as in their songs. This folk-song type of melody was modified
during the search after expressive declamation. The ideal was to get
tunes which were beautiful as tunes, and at the same time did full
justice to the composer's words, to preserve the accent and full meaning
of the poetry. Henry Lawes won Milton's approbation by his success in
doing this, and Milton wrote:

"Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured notes First taught our
English music how to span Words with just note and accent."

Lawes was not always successful: when his tunes do not disregard the
words they are apt to be angular.

3. _Harmony_.--- When a modern person first hears a piece of accompanied
plainsong sung, he is generally bewildered. The beginning may trouble
him and the middle worry him--the ending invariably confounds him. The
thing ends in no key recognised by the modern ear. In the old days there
were no keys, but modes, each with its dominant, its tonic, and proper
and appropriate ending. Until comparatively recent times musicians
understood this quite well; to Purcell, and to composers much later than
him, the old endings were perfectly satisfactory. This, for instance,
left no sense of the unfinished:

[Illustration]

Gradually two keys swamped and swept away the modes--our major and
minor; then our modern feeling for key relationships was born. Here is
the major scale of C with a satisfact