Considered concretely, the change from the old to the new was a change which broke down completely all the old rules of musical harmony. The old harmony is represented at its purest in the chorales of Johann Sebastian Bach. It was a system of harmony based on pure (triad) chords, with dissonances properly prepared and resolved. In the old harmony each chord was like a chiselled block of stone, sharply differentiated from every other; the stones must fit well together, but they must always be distinct. The new system of harmony was founded upon the dissonance used for the sake of its effect on the ear. Queer mixtures of dissonance were used freely to produce an unusual impression on the ear, an impression which soon took on the name ‘color.’ Chords were now merged and confused, instead of being kept distinct. Tonalities and musical ‘keys’ were now becoming meaningless in a system whose notes rarely agreed with any tonality. The whole effect was that of being in a world of pure sensation, a world that seemed to be without reason and was therefore the better adapted to being _felt_. Along with the tendency toward vagueness in harmony came a tendency toward vagueness in melody. Various notes of the ordinary major scale would be altered at the whim of the composer and the surprises resulting were a fruitful source of sensuous effects. This freedom in the use of scales tended toward the now famous ‘whole-toned’ scale--a thing popularly supposed to have been invented by Wagner, but used, in reality, in the early days of Wagner by the Russian Dargomijsky. The whole-toned scale makes every interval a whole step, thus robbing the scale of all internal variety and of any tonic or central ‘pivotal’ point. This would seem to rob the scale of its possibilities for color. But curiously enough, it actually increased them. For as long as the scale is strange, our ears will inevitably compare it with the scale with which we are familiar. The result is a constant succession of surprises to our ears and senses--in short an increase in the sensuous element. The newer school also uses the chromatic element to a great extent. In this it was only continuing the work of Wagner in his ‘Tristan.’ But there was this difference: that whereas in Wagner’s procedure the chromatic element was chiefly in the movement of the individual voices, the chords being constituted much as before, in the new French school both the voice leading and the chord building make free use of the semitone. To sum up, the new tendency is characterized concretely by vagueness of chord and of scale (with a continual tendency toward the whole-toned scale); by a free use of unprepared dissonance chosen chiefly for its sensuous effect; and by its constant effort to rid itself of the domination of a set key.