the ballet was no
advance towards expressiveness in art. An air which accompanied
"Circe's" entrance, may be cited as being the original of the
well-known "Amaryllis," which is generally called _Air Louis
XV_. Baltazarini calls it _un son fort gai, nomme la clochette_.

Music remained inert in France until 1650, when the Italians
gained an ascendancy, which they retained until 1732,
when Rameau's first opera "Hyppolyte et Aricie" was given in
Paris. Rameau had already commenced his career by gaining great
success as a harpsichord player and instrumental composer,
mostly for the harpsichord. By his time, however, music,
that is to say, secular music, was already becoming a new art,
and the French merely improved upon what already existed.

Now this new art was first particularly evident in the dances of
these different peoples. These dances gave the music _form_, and
held it down to certain prescribed rhythms and duration. Little
by little the emotions, the natural expression of which is
music, could no longer be restricted to these dance forms
and rhythms; and gradually the latter were modified by each
daring innovator in turn. This "daring" of human beings, in
breaking through the trammels of the dance in order to express
what lay within their souls in the language that properly
belonged to it, would seem almost ludicrous to us, were we
not even to-day trying to get up courage to do the same thing.
The modifications of dance forms led up to our sonata, symphony,
and symphonic poem, as I hope to show. Opera was a thing apart,
and, being untrammelled either by dance rhythms or church laws,
developed gradually and normally. It cannot, however, be said to
have developed side by side with purely instrumental music, for
the latter is only just beginning to emancipate itself from its
dance clothes and to come forth as a language for the expression
of all that is divine in man. First we will consider the forms
and rhythms of these dances, then the awakening of the idea of
design in music, and its effect in modifying these forms and
laying the foundation for the sonata of the nineteenth century.

The following shows the structure of the different dance forms
up to about 1750.

OLD DANCE FORMS (1650-1750).

[ :Motive-|-Motive--|-Motive-----|--|-Motive---|--|-Motive----|---]
[2/4: 4 8 8 | 8. 16 4 | 8 8 8 8 | 4 4 | 4 8 8 | 4 4 | 8. 16 8 8 | 2 ]
[ :------Phrase-----|----Phrase-----|---Phrase----|----Phrase-----]