The placing of the choral song of the church within the lips of the people had great religious and moral influence; it has had also its great effect upon art, shown in the productions of the North German musicians ever since the first days of the Reformation, which abound in exercises of scholarship and imagination wrought upon the tunes of established acceptance. Some of these are accompaniments to the tunes with interludes between the several strains, and some are compositions for the organ or for orchestral instruments that consist of such elaboration of the themes as is displayed in accompaniments to voices, but of far more complicated and extended character. A special art-form that was developed to a very high degree, but has passed into comparative disuse, was the structure of all varieties of counterpoint extemporaneously upon the known hymn-tunes (chorals), and several masters acquired great fame by success in its practice, of whom J. A. Reinken (1623-1722), Johann Pachelbel (1653-1706), Georg Boehm and the great J. S. Bach are specially memorable. The hymnody of North Germany has for artistic treatment a strong advantage which is unpossessed by that of England, in that for the most part the same verses are associated with the same tunes, so that, whenever the text or the music is heard, either prompts recollection of the other, whereas in England tunes were always and are now often composed to metres and not to poems; any tune in a given metre is available for every poem in the same, and hence there are various tunes to one poem, and various poems to one tune.[4] In England a tune is named generally after some place--as "York," "Windsor," "Dundee,"--or by some other unsignifying word; in North Germany a tune is mostly named by the initial words of the verses to which it is allied, and consequently, whenever it is heard, whether with words or without, it necessarily suggests to the hearer the whole subject of that hymn of which it is the musical moiety undivorceable from the literary half. Manifold as they are, knowledge of the choral tunes is included in the earliest schooling of every Lutheran and every Calvinist in Germany, which thus enables all to take part in performance of the tunes, and hence expressly the definition of "choral." Compositions grounded on the standard tune are then not merely school exercises, but works of art which link the sympathies of the writer and the listener, and aim at expressing the feeling prompted by the hymn under treatment.