The attempt to emancipate music from the dance commenced very early; in fact, most of the earliest secular music we know already shows the tendency towards programme music, for, from an emotional standpoint, secular music began at the very bottom of the ladder. It was made to express _things_ at first, just as in learning any new language we naturally first acquire a vocabulary of nouns to express things we see, such as table, chair, etc., in the same way that in _written_ language the symbols first take the shape of animals or other things they are meant to represent. This same characteristic naturally showed itself in music before the words for _emotion_ came, the common, everyday nouns were sought for in this new language. The madrigals of Weelkes and their word painting show this, and the same occur in instrumental music, as in Byrd's "Carman's Whistle," one of the earliest English instrumental works contemporaneous to the madrigals of Morley and others. In France, many of the earliest clavichord pieces were of the programme type, and even in Germany, where instrumental music ran practically in the same groove with church music, the same tendency showed itself. I have given the forms of most of the old dances, and also the elements of melodic structure (motive, phrase, etc.). I must, however, add the caution that this material is to be accepted in a general way, and as representing the rhythms and forms most frequently used. A French courante differed from the Italian, and certain dances were taken at different _tempi_ in different countries. Poor, or at least careless construction, is often the cause of much confusion. Scarlatti, for instance, is especially loose in melodic structure. It was only with Beethoven that the art of musical design showed anything like complete comprehension by the composer. Until then, with occasional almost haphazard successes, the art of pushing a thought to its logical conclusion was seemingly unknown. An emotional passage now and then would often betray deep feeling, but the thought would almost invariably be lost in the telling, for the simple reason that the musical sentences were put together almost at random, mere stress of momentary emotion being seemingly the only guiding influence. Bach stands alone; his sense of design was inherent, but, owing to the contrapuntal tendency of his time, his feeling for _melodic_ design is often overshadowed, and even rendered impossible by the complex web of his music. With a number of melodies sounding together, their individual emotional development becomes necessarily difficult to emphasize.