Before coming to Bach, however, we must bridge over the time when music was still in its youth in the 16th and 17th centuries, to when it became full grown and mature in the 18th. Music has now come of age: it has perfected scales, notation, and developed form and instruments; it is ready to go into the world and take its place with painting, sculpture, poetry, drama and architecture as a full grown art! Nothing through which music has passed has been lost, but it has been built like the great Egyptian Pyramids by adding one huge block on top of another. It has gone from the noise of primitive man with his drum, to the attempts of the savage to sing and to make crude instruments, to the music of the ancient nations in their religious ceremonies and entertainments, to the Arab singer who handed his art to the western world through the troubadours, to the people of all times and nations who danced and sang for the joy of it. It passed from the Greek drama and music schools where definite scales and modes were formed, to the early Christian Church which kept it alive during the Dark Ages and gradually invented ways to write it, and later to the “Golden Age” of the Catholic Church. It had seen the rise of schools and the perfection of the polyphonic system give way to the recitative and the aria, which in turn brought about opera, oratorio, and instrumental music. It has seen counterpoint give way to harmony, and yet the growth of music is not complete and never will be, but constantly new forms will blossom out of the old. The 15th and 16th centuries were vocal. The 17th was instrumental and opened the way for so-called modern music, that is, for Bach’s compositions and all that followed. BIRTH OF CHAMBER MUSIC Gabrieli in the 16th century in Venice, sometimes wrote madrigals for instruments instead of for voices, and he added instruments to accompany the motets and masses (page 157); this led to composing works for groups of instruments instead of playing madrigals that had been composed for voices. The English often wrote on their compositions, “fit for voices and for viols.” After they once started playing the part songs on viols, the composers soon found out that they could write more interesting and more difficult things for instruments than they could for voices; this led to the writing of very florid music for instruments alone. This florid part-writing, not unlike the Gloss of the Arabs, and the improvisations of the soloists in the early Catholic Church, soon became so overloaded with trills, fancy turns and runs that it had to be reformed again.