The ricercar was the most important of the early instrumental forms, if form it may be called which was at first but a style. The _canzona_, another form at first equally favored by composers, was destined to have but little effect upon the development of keyboard music. There was no real principle of construction underlying it. It was merely the instrumental counterpart of the famous French _chansons_ of the day. These were part-songs divided into several contrasting sections according to the stanzas of the poems to which they were set. Some of the sections were in simple chord style, like hymns of the present day; others in more or less elaborate polyphonic style. The instrumental _canzona_ followed the same plan. The sections were irregular in length, in number and in metre; and the piece as a whole lacked unity and balance. After the middle of the seventeenth century it was generally abandoned by organists. Other composers, however, took it up, and by regulating the length and number of the various sections, by expanding them, and, finally, by bringing each to a definite close, laid the foundations for the famous Italian _sonata da chiesa_, cousin germain to the better known Suite. Other names appear in the old collections, such as Toccata and Prelude, which even today have more or less vague meaning and then were vaguer still. Toccata was at first a general name for any keyboard music. All instrumental music was originally _sonata_ (from _sonare_, to sound), in distinction from _cantata_ (from _cantare_, to sing); and from _sonata_ keyboard music was specially distinguished by the appellation _toccata_ (from _toccare_, to touch). When a characteristic keyboard style had at last worked itself free of the old vocal style, the word toccata signified a piece of music which need have no particular form but must display the particular brilliance of the new style. The Prelude, too, was at first equally free of the limits of form. As the name plainly tells, it was a short bit of music preparatory to the greater piece to come. Not long ago it was still the fashion for concert pianists to preludize before beginning their programs, running scales and arpeggios over an improvised series of harmonies. The old preludes were essentially the same, very seriously limited, of course, by the childish condition of instrumental technique, and more or less aimless because harmonies were then undefined and unstable. Toward the middle of the seventeenth century organists built up definite schemes, if not forms, of preludizing before the singing of chorales in the Lutheran Church; but this art was naturally restricted to the organ. Preludes for the harpsichord and clavichord took on definite form only when the relatively modern system of major and minor keys had grown up out of the ruin of the ancient system of ecclesiastical modes.