He was the first German composer to write “program music,” that is the kind which tries to tell a story, or to imitate the actual sounds of natural objects, such as the crash of thunder, the motion of a windmill, the rocking of a cradle, and the cackling of a hen. You can see how long a list one might make and how easy it would be for anyone with a vivid imagination to make up all sorts of pictures in music. This is just the opposite from music for music’s sake which we described to you as “Absolute Music,” and most of it which follows this period when music comes of age can be put into one of the two camps,—the Program Music Camp, or the Absolute Music Camp. Kuhnau’s program music took a queer turn! He was living at a time when religion was uppermost in every one’s thoughts, when the Bible stories were bedtime stories and when the leading compositions were the sonatas written for organ. So in 1700 he published six Biblical-history Sonatas. In _David and Goliath_, he attempts to put into music the rude defiance and bravado of the giant; the fear of the Hebrews; David’s courage and fearlessness, and the battle and fall of the giant; the flight of the Philistines (can’t you imagine how the composer would represent this with all kinds of runs and scales?); the joy of the Hebrews; the celebration of the women who probably came out to meet David “with timbrels and harps”; and general jubilation. At the end of the 17th century, Germany was strongly under the influence of France and Italy, especially in opera. In Dresden, Berlin, Munich and Vienna, one heard only opera in Italian sung by Italian singers, but Hamburg tried to develop a national music by giving German opera sung by German singers, and attracted many serious musicians. Johann Mattheson (1681–1764) a singer, conductor and composer, is remembered chiefly for a book called _A German Roll of Honor_, in which he gathered up all the information he could find about German composers up to his time. He asked all the living composers to write accounts of themselves for his book, so we take it for granted that it must be truthful! Music had changed more in the 17th century than in any that had gone before. If we tried to sum it all up in one word we should say that it was a century of _transition_ or the passage from one condition to another. It began with the old Ecclesiastical, or Church, modes, and ended with the major and minor scales which we still use today; the reign of counterpoint was over, and now had to share the throne on equal terms with harmony. SONATA-FORM