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As a termination to a piece of music made up of the notes of the scale of C, and therefore said to be in the key of C, this was not satisfactory.  To set the ear and the mind at ease, to get a feeling that the music has settled down on a secure resting-place, the first chord had to be repeated.  And in these chords

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lies the germ of the whole of the later music.  Only two more steps were needed.  By adding an F, or writing an F instead of the upper G in the middle chord, the chord of the dominant seventh was obtained: 

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And anyone can try for himself on a piano, and find out that this chord makes the longing for the tonic chord—­the chord of C—­more imperious and the feeling of rest satisfying in proportion when the last chord is reached.  That was one step:  the next was to convert the dominant, G, of the key of C into a tonic for the time being, to get a sense of having reached the key of G. That was done by regarding G as a tonic, and on its dominant, D, writing a chord, either a dominant seventh or a simple major common chord, leading to a chord of G—­thus: 

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But if after this a seventh on the dominant is played, followed by the original key-chord

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then we are home once more in the original key.  If the reader will imagine, instead of a few simple chords, a passage of music in the key of C, followed by a passage in the dominant key of G, and ending with a passage in the key of C, he will perceive that here is the deep underlying principle of modern music:  that after a certain length of time spent in one key the ear wearies, and the modulation to the new key is grateful; but after a time the ear craves for the original key again, so after getting to that, and spending a certain time there, a piece closes with perfectly satisfying effect.  Haydn was the first to get that principle in an iron grasp and use it, with numberless other devices, to get unity in variety.  Not till nearly a hundred years after Purcell’s day did that come to pass; but the music of Purcell and of others in his period, showing a sense of key relationships and key values, is a vast step from the music written in the old modes.  Let me beg everyone not to be so foolish as to believe the nonsense of the academic text-books when they speak of the new type and structure of the newer music as an “improvement” on the old.  The older were perfect for the things that had to be expressed; the newer became necessary only when other things had to be expressed.  By the substitution of the two scales, the major and the minor, with the dominant always on the same degree of the scale, the fifth, and the order of the tones and semitones fixed immovably, for the numerous modes with the dominants and the order of the tones and semitones here, there and everywhere, the problems of harmony could be grappled with, and its resources exploited in a methodical way that had been impossible.  But melodically the loss was enormous.  We of this generation have by study to win back some small sense of the value and beauty of the intervals of the ancient scales, varying in each scale, a sense that was once free and common to everyone who knew anything of music at all.