Kuhnau's descriptive sonatas contain nothing confusing. They are cheerfully frank in their endeavor to paint externals. They do not probe either heart or brain. Not till the association of music with the drama in the opera of the Italians of 1600, do we find the tone art deliberately set to work to embody the inner life of man, and then feelings alone were set forth. The effort to embody feelings in vocal music was intelligible and natural. Song borrowed its inflections from speech, and speech took them from inarticulate cries. Peri's notion of using a smooth movement and a narrow range of intervals for unimpassioned song was taken from the instinctive practice of speech. We speak in two or three notes, and slowly and regularly when we are perfectly calm. When we become excited, our voices move through more intervals and the tempo is accelerated. In agitation the speech is in broken, spasmodic phrases; the voice rises and falls irregularly. In sadness the minor mode comes involuntarily into our tones, and in weeping we slide portamento through the chromatic scale. When Gluck revived the method of Peri and worked it out elaborately, he struck the deathblow to classicism, but his conservation of the musical principle is to be found in his continued employment of the purely musical forms. It was not for Gluck, a sculpturesque composer, a worshipper of melodic line and curve, to enter into the new paradise of operatic tone-speech. He pruned the old tree of many useless limbs; he swept from it a mass of noisome fungi; but he sat peacefully under its shade and knew not that its trunk pointed slantwise away from the zenith. Gluck faced the parting of the ways, but saw it not. With the young, ingenuous, unsophisticated, and absolutely musical symphony of Haydn staring him in the eyes, he failed to discover that its basic principles were not available for the construction of an art form embodying his dramatic ideals. The cyclic form of the plain song was predominant in the thought of Gluck, and it misled him from his own chosen path. Weber failed to become a writer of speculative music for the same reason. He utilized the Volkslied form in his operas, and thus kept music in her throne of rule over text. Yet the effort of these two men toward an intelligible expression of feeling in music was bound to affect the composers of purely instrumental works. There is no question in any mind that music can express feeling, or, at any rate, arouse it. From the earliest time there has been music for the feast and music for the funeral. Joy and sorrow have spoken their hearts in the accents of song. Practice in the employment of the elements of musical expression was bound to make the utterance clearer, and when the rule of the ecclesiastic scales had been broken and the modern major and minor modes had come into their own, it was but another step to the complete inheritance of the chromatic world which Cyprian di Rore strove to open up as far back as 1544.