The tendency in the new music was to abandon the horizontal aspect.  Purcell, in his additions to Playford’s “Brief Introduction to the Skill of Musick,” remarks on the fact that musicians now composed “to the treble, when they make counterpoint 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 satisfactory harmonic ending: 

[Illustration]

It will be noticed that the top note of the chord marked with a star, the last note but one of the scale, is a semitone below the last note of the scale and rises to the last note.  That is a proper ending or full close; what was called a half-close was: