SONG. All song, indeed all music, is based upon folk-song. Folk-song in Europe reached what may be considered its highest point of development in the 15th and i6th centuries. There is, to be sure, an antiquarian interest attaching to the melodic side of the songs of the troubadours, trouveres and minnesingers, who flour ished in the 12th and 13th centuries; but it may reasonably be said that till the 17th century, the only form of song of musical impor tance was the folk-song, and that the songs of the minstrels were most successful when they took their inspiration from it. They were in fact poets, who, whether musically gifted or not, were forced by tradition to provide their poems with a musical, i.e., melodic, counterpart. What the nature of their instrumental accompaniments was, is unknown.
From the musical standpoint, folk-song represents vocal melody evolved with no thought of harmony or an accompanying instru ment. Its poems are in stanzas, the same melody serving for each. The melodies are formed on certain natural scales or modes, which were the heritage of the Indo-European races, and were in common use in all music, till about the year 1600, when harmony established itself as the basis of music, bringing the era of vocal counterpoint to an end, and substituting for the old modes our present major and minor scales; lastly, the folk-song is instinctive music, arising from the necessity inherent in the human race to use the voices which nature has bestowed upon it, in order to give expression to feelings, for which speech alone is felt to be inadequate. From whatever rude beginnings it evolved, the final fruit of this instinct is the melody we find in folk-song, a natural product, an unconscious art, which stands in contrast with the creations of conscious art, i.e., songs by trained musicians, who invent their own melodies and provide them with instrumental accompaniments.
It is with these latter alone that this article is concerned, f olk song being dealt with in a separate article.
At the close of the i6th century the lute was the popular musical instrument of the educated classes. It was at this time that the first really important body of song was produced, espe cially in England. At first it may be described as a small satellite detached from the large planet of the madrigal, which had for about a century held the field as the favourite diversion of musical amateurs. There is little doubt that the idea of solo song arose
when in madrigal singing the parts of missing voices were taken by instruments ; it is plain that if all the voices but one were missing, the effect of a solo song with instrumental accompaniment was realized; a still nearer approach to artistic solo song was reached when the singer sang his own part of a madrigal, playing the other parts himself. In Dowland's First Book of Songs or Airs in four parts (published in 1597), the principal vocal melody has an alternative accompaniment for three additional voices or the lute. Most of the English madrigals were published "for voices or viols." In Italy Caccini published in 16o1 his famous collection of songs for the lute (Nuove Musiche). He claimed in his preface to be the first to invent songs "for a single voice to the accompani ment of a single instrument." It is true that his friends in Rome (his native city), at whose houses these new compositions were performed, assured him that they had never heard the like before, and that his style exhibited possibilities for the expression of feeling that were excluded when the voice sang merely one part in a contrapuntal work. But, about 3o years before Caccini, lutenists in France had anticipated his innovation, and composed solo songs with lute accompaniments in which is evidenced the struggle, not always successful, to break away from polyphonic traditions. Le Roy's Airs de Cour, published in 1571, may be cited in proof of this statement (see a book of French Ayres, Peter Warlock, 1928, in which the lute accompaniment has been transcribed for the piano). Of these airs "Je suis amour" is somewhat in the declama tory recitative style of Caccini's Nuove Musiche (see Siimmel bande Int. Musik Gesellschaft, article "Airs de Cours d'Adrien Le Roy," by Janet Dodge). Generally speaking, it may be said of early French songs that they were longer in shaking off the influence of the past than the songs of the Italians, many tricks of expressions, belonging to polyphonic times, surviving both in voice parts and accompaniments.