pianoforte and orchestral schools. In all the realm of music there is nothing more superb than those Niagaras of impetuous sound which roll through such works as the F major and D minor toccatas and the G major fantasie,—to select examples out of scores of equally apt illustrations. But sound and fury are by no means their aim; Bach’s invention and science are never more resourceful than when apparently driven by the demon of unrest. In order to give the freest sweep to his fancy Bach, the supreme lord of form, often broke through form’s conventionalisms, so that even his fugues sometimes became, as they have been called, fantasies in the form of fugues, just as Beethoven, under a similar impulse, wrote _sonate quasi fantasie_. Witness the E minor fugue with the “wedge theme.” In Bach’s day and country there was no concert stage; the instrumental virtuoso was the organist. It is not necessary to suppose, therefore, that pieces so exciting to the nerves as those to which I have alluded were all composed strictly for the ordinary church worship. There were many occasions, such as the “opening” of a new organ or a civic festival, when the organist could “let himself go” without incurring the charge of introducing a profane or alien element. And yet, even as church music, these pieces were not altogether incongruous. We must always keep in mind that the question of appropriateness in church music depends very much upon association and custom. A style that would be execrated as blasphemous in a Calvinist assembly would be received as perfectly becoming in a Catholic or Lutheran ceremony. A style of music that has grown up in the very heart of a certain Church, identified for generations with the peculiar ritual and history of that Church, is proper ecclesiastical music so far as that particular institution is concerned. Those who condemn Bach’s music—organ works, cantatas, and Passions—as unchurchly ignore this vital point. Moreover, the conception of the function of music in the service of the German Evangelical Church was never so austere that brilliancy and grandeur were deemed incompatible with the theory of religious ceremony. It may be said that Bach’s grandest organ pieces are conceived as the expression of what may be called the religious passion—the rapture which may not unworthily come upon the believer when his soul opens to the reception of ideas the most penetrating and sublime. Certainly no other religious institution has come so near the solution of the problem of the proper use of the instrumental solo in public worship. Through the connection of the organ music with the people’s hymn in the choral prelude, and the conformity of its style to that of the choir music in motet and cantata, it became vitally blended with the whole office of praise and prayer; its effect was to gather up and merge all individual emotions into the projection of the mood of aspiration that was common to all.