But that combinations of harmony should sound absolutely false and nonsensical to the ear of one generation, which to the ear of another age sounded beautiful and natural—­this is a puzzling fact.  The shrill and unprepared dissonances which we now often consider very effective were thought to be ear-splitting a hundred years ago.  But let us go still further.  The awful succession of fourths in the diaphonies of Guido of Arezzo, in the eleventh century, are so incongruous to our ear that expert singers must exercise the utmost self-control in order even to give utterance to such combinations of harmony—­and yet they must have sounded beautiful and natural to the medieval ear!  Even dogs, which listen quietly to modern third and sixth passages, begin to howl lamentably if one plays before them on the violin the barbaric fourth passages of the Guido diaphonies!  This historically verified alternation of the musical ear is indeed incomprehensible.  It may serve, however, to help us to divine how horribly medieval dogs would have howled if one had been able to play to them—­well, let us say, modulations from Tannhaeuser.

The concert music of the first half of the eighteenth century was in its trivial entirety a “diversion of the mind and wit.”  In the same way that we now write “popular musical text-books,” they wrote, in that day, directions “how a galant homme could attain complete comprehension of and taste in music,” and Matheson says, not satirically, but in earnest:  “Formerly only two things were demanded of a composition, namely, melody and harmony; but nowadays one would come off badly if one did not add the third thing, namely, gallantry, which, however, can in no wise be learned or set down in rules but is acquired only by good taste and sound judgment.  If one wished for an example, and were the reader perhaps not gallant enough to understand what gallantry means in music, it might not come amiss to use that of a dress, in which the cloth could represent the so necessary harmony, the style; the suitable melody, and then perhaps the embroidery might represent the gallantry.”

With such tailor-like artistic taste prevalent in the gallant world of that day, it is all the more astonishing that a solitary great spirit like Sebastian Bach dared to develop his best thoughts and most peculiar forms also in concert music.  To be sure, as a natural consequence he had to remain solitary.

The above mentioned music “for the diversion of the mind and wit” loved short pieces, concise composition, minor measures, frequent repetitions of the same thought.  The intellectual ear grasps all that easily, and amuses itself with the comparison of themes which are repeated in the same or in changed forms.  We, on the contrary, nearly always listen to music with a dreamy, seldom with an intellectually comparative ear; therefore modern music is much more influential, but also much more dangerous, than the