Bit by bit this vast musical structure was built. It did not grow quickly; each new idea took centuries to become a part of music, and as often the idea was not good, it took a long time to replace it. CHAPTER VIII Troubadours and Minnesingers Brought Music to Kings and People Except for the first few chapters in this book, we have told you of music made by men who wanted to improve it. You have seen how the fathers of the Church first reformed music, and gave it a shorthand called neumes; before that, the music laws of the Egyptians, the scales and modes of the Arab, the Greek scales which the churchmen used in the Ambrosian and the Gregorian modes. Then came the two-lined staff, and the beginnings of mensural or measured music by which they kept time. Then you saw how two melodies were fitted together and how they grew into four parts. All this we might call “on purpose” music. At the same time, in all the world, in every country, there was Song ... and never have the world and the common people (called so because they are neither of the nobility nor of the church) been without folk song which has come from the folks of the world, the farmers, the weavers, and the laborers. The best of these songs have what the great composers try to put into their music—a feeling of fresh free melody, design, balance, and climax, but more of this in the chapter on Folk Song. This chapter is to be about Troubadours, Trouvères, and Minnesingers, who have left over two thousand songs. In most of these, they made up both words and music, but sometimes they used new words made up for folk tunes that everyone knew, or for melodies from the plain-chants which they had heard in church; sometimes they used the same melody for several different poems, and often they set the same words to several melodies. Many of these troubadour songs and _minnelieder_ became the people’s own folk songs. But now you must hear of the folk who lived hundreds of years before these poet singers. Unknowingly, out of the heart and soul and soil of their native lands, they made songs and sang poetry and played sometimes other peoples’ song, scattering their own wherever they went. From these traveling singers and players, in all countries, came the professional musicians who were minstrels, bards, troubadours, etc., according to when, where and how they lived. THE WHY OF THE MINSTREL