The clavichord and the harpsichord were the instruments upon which music was first shaped for the pianoforte during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Looming behind them and quite dominating them until the last quarter of the seventeenth, until even much later in Germany, was the organ. Instrumental music had a long road to travel before either of the two smaller instruments received the special attention of composers. The organ led this uncertain way, setting out milestones which mark the successive stages in the development of the great forms of instrumental music. Later bands of strings took this leadership away from her. Always the clavichord and the harpsichord followed submissively in the trail of the organ, or carried the impedimenta for the strings, until late in the seventeenth century. Considering the wilderness through which composers had to make their way, their progress was rapid. In the course of the seventeenth century they found forms and styles of music quite unknown when the march began. [Illustration] Top: the virginal and the gravicembalo. Bottom: the clavicord and the harpsichord. In the year 1600 there was no pure-blooded instrumental music. The sets of pieces for organ, lute, or groups of instruments which had appeared up to that time, and such sets had appeared as early as 1502, were almost strict copies of vocal forms, in which the vocal style was scarcely altered. Frequently they were simply arrangements of famous madrigals and _chansons_ of the day. The reason is obvious. For well over a century and a half, the best energy of musicians had gone into the perfecting of unaccompanied choral music, into masses and motets for the church, and into madrigals, the secular counterparts of the motets. Long years of labor had amassed a truly astonishing technique in writing this sort of music. The only art of music was the special art of vocal polyphony. Instruments were denied a style and almost a music of their own.[1] But improvements in sonority and mechanism brought instruments into prominence, and the spirit of the Renaissance stimulated composers to experiment with music for them. This was the beginning of a new art, fraught with difficulties and problems, to meet which composers had only the skill acquired in the old. By far the most serious of these was the problem of form. The new music was independent of words, and, in order to enjoy freedom from words of any sort and at the same time to exist and to walk abroad, it had to become articulate of itself; had, so to speak, to build a frame or a skeleton out of its proper stuff. It had to be firmly knit and well balanced.