Remarkable, in the first place, is the development the mere material medium of music underwent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The sensuous fact at the bottom of all music being the tone, the sensuous value of music depends on the kind of tones employed and on the modes of their combination, just as the sensuous value of a painting depends on the purity and richness of the pigments used and on the harmoniousness of their arrangement. So long as composers dealt either with choirs of human voices alone, or with a few crude instruments like the organs of Bach’s predecessors, the violins of the early sixteenth century, and the spinets and clavichords of the same period, they could get little variety or sonority of tonal color. But in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was made a wonderful mechanical advance. The violin, the most important of all instruments, not only because of its inimitable beauty and expressiveness of tone but because it is the nucleus of the orchestra and of the string quartet, was brought, by the Amatis, Giuseppe Guarneri, and Antonio Stradivari, the famous Cremonese violin-makers who flourished from about 1550 to 1737, to a degree of perfection which the utmost modern ingenuity has been unable to exceed. The organ, which in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was so cumbersome that each key had to be struck by the entire fist, came by 1600 to something like its modern condition, as may be seen by looking at the pieces written for it by Frescobaldi (1583-1644) and Buxtehude (1637-1707). The prototypes of the modern piano were rather slower to develop. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the clavichord was a smallish oblong box without legs, placed on a table when played; its compass was somewhat over four octaves; one set of strings had to suffice for several keys, each key being provided with a metal tangent or tongue that not only sounded the string, but at the same time “stopped” it at the requisite point for producing the desired tone. The “damping” or silencing of the strings, entrusted in the modern piano to the felt dampers, was often done by the left hand of the player. The spinet differed from the clavichord in that its tones were produced by a hard piece of quill that plucked the string. Both instruments gave but weak, short, and rather characterless sounds. But all through the period we are considering they were being experimented upon and slowly improved in sonority, variety, and color of tone.