=Early Instrumental Music=.—The history of pianoforte composition and playing really begins with that of the preceding keyed instruments with strings, to all of which the convenient name of “Claviers” will be given. As these early instruments were at first merely substitutes for the organ, which in turn was used simply to reduplicate voice parts, the music first played on them was in no wise different from the vocal and organ music of the day. When, moreover, music written for the organ had some features distinct from purely vocal music, it was frequently inscribed to be _played on the organ or clavier_, without discrimination. =Influence of the Renaissance=.—As most of the patterns of musical form have proceeded from Italy, so it was there, in Venice, that instrumental music seems to have emerged from its union with vocal music, and to have assumed the elements of a style of its own. This was directly the result of the general awakening of thought after the Dark Ages, known as the Renaissance, which, leading to independent investigation in the domains of science and art, brought in the once unheard-of inventions and the discovery of new worlds, and in the other a freedom of treatment fitted to express the new ideas surging throughout the civilized world. Thus, in the first part of the 16th century, while Raphael and Michael Angelo were voicing these thoughts in their immortal creations, in Venice, a school of musicians was turning its attention toward instrumental music, and striving to produce in music a richness of color, just as the great Venetian painters, like Titian and Giorgione, were producing similar effects upon canvas. Teachers and students were congregating there, enthusiastic over the new ideas in music; and the focal point of all this activity was the Church of St. Mark’s, whose magnificent double organ furnished an incentive to genius. =The First Sonata=.—Among these musicians were a number of apostles of the Netherlands school, of whom =Adrian Willaert= (1480-1562) was especially honored and beloved. He and his successors, as organists at St. Mark’s, wrote compositions for organ or clavier, which they taught to young ladies in the convents. Such compositions were made the more possible by the fact that into the old Church Modes, formed by using only the tones represented by the white keys of our piano, “chromatic” or _colored_ tones came to be inserted; so that, in the course of the 16th century, the modern scales, with their characteristic keynotes, or tonalities, came to vie with the old modes, and ultimately nearly to displace them, thus giving a chance for a variety and grouping of harmonies necessary in the elaboration of instrumental music. The name Sonata, or “sound” piece, was at first given indiscriminately to such instrumental works, in distinction from the Cantata, or vocal work.