Such a statement as I have just made may be cried down as rank heresy, first by the book readers and then by the general public; but I doubt if anyone among that public would or could actually turn to the music itself and analyze it intelligently, from both an aesthetic and technical standpoint, in order to verify or disprove the assertion.

Once a statement is made it seems to be exceedingly difficult to keep it from obtaining the universal acceptance which it gains by unthinking reiteration in other works.  One of the strangest cases of this repetition of a careless statement may be found in the majority of histories of music, where we are told that musical expression (that is to say, the increasing and diminishing of a tone, crescendo and diminuendo) was first discovered at Mannheim, in Germany, about 1760.  This statement may be found in the works of Burney, Schubart, Reichardt, Sittard, Wasielewski, and even in Jahn’s celebrated “Life of Mozart.”  The story is that Jommelli, an Italian, first “invented” the crescendo and diminuendo, and that when they were first used, the people in the audience gradually rose from their seats at the crescendo, and as the music “diminuendoed” they sat down again.  The story is absurd, for the simple reason that even in 1705, Sperling, in his “Principae Musicae,” describes crescendos from ppp to fff, and we read in Plutarch of the same thing.

Shedlock, in his work “The Pianoforte Sonata,” quotes as the first sonatas for the clavier those of Kuhnau, and cites especially the six Bible sonatas.  Now Kuhnau, although he was Bach’s predecessor at St. Thomas’ Church in Leipzig, was certainly a composer of the very lowest rank.  The Bible sonatas, which Shedlock paints to us in such glowing colours, are the merest trash, and not to be compared with the works of his contemporaries.  I do not think that they have any place whatsoever in the history or development either of music or of that form called the sonata.

The development of the suite from dance forms has already been shown, and we will now trace the development of the sonata from the suite in Italy, Germany, and France.  As an example of this development in Italy, a so-called sonata by G.B.  Pescetti will serve (the sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti were not originally so named, and the sonatas before that were simply short pieces, so designated to distinguish them from dance music).  This sonata was published about 1730, and was one of nine.  The first movement is practically of the allemande type, and its first period ends in the dominant key.  There is but the slightest trace of a second theme in the first part; yet the improvement in contrapuntal design over the suites is evident.  The second movement is in the same key, and retains the characteristic rhythm of the sarabande; at the end, the improvement, so far as design is concerned, is very noticeable.  The last movement, still in the same key, is a gigue, thus keeping well in the shadow of the suite.