Therefore we find in organ music, rapid scales, arpeggios rising from depths, falling from heights, new figures especially suited to the organ, such as the ‘rocking’ figure upon which Bach built his well-known organ fugue in D minor; deep pedal notes, which endure immutably while above them the artist builds a castle of sounds; interlinked chords marching up and down the keyboard, strong with dissonance. There are trills and ornamental turns, rapid thirds and sixths. And in all these things organ music displays what is its own, not what it has inherited from choral music. Yet, notwithstanding the magnificent chord passages so in keeping with the spirit of the instrument, in which only the beauty of harmonic sequence is considered, the treatment of musical material by the organists is prevailingly polyphonic. The sound of a given piece is the sound of many quasi-independent parts moving along together, in which definite phrases or motives constantly reappear. The harmony on which the whole rests is not supplied by an accompaniment, but by the movement of the several voice-parts themselves in their appointed courses. And it may be said as a generality that these parts progress by steps not wider than that distance the hand can stretch upon the keyboard. During the first half of the seventeenth century the harpsichord was but the echo of the organ. Even the collections of early English virginal music, which in some ways seem to offer a brilliant exception, are the work of men who as instrumentalists were primarily organists. In so far as they achieved an instrumental style at all it was usually a style fitting to a small organ. The few cases where John Bull’s cleverness displayed itself in almost a true virtuoso style are exceptions which prove the rule. Not until the time of Chambonnières and Froberger do we enter upon a second stage. About the middle of the seventeenth century Chambonnières was famous over Europe as a performer upon the harpsichord. As first clavicinist at the court of France, his manner of playing may be taken to represent the standard of excellence at that time. Constantine Huygens, a Dutch amateur exceedingly well-known in his day, mentions him many times in his letters with unqualified admiration, always as a player of the harpsichord, or as a composer for that instrument. Whatever skill he may have had as an organist did not contribute to his fame; and his two sets of pieces for harpsichord, published after his death in 1670, show the beginnings of a distinct differentiation between harpsichord and organ style. [Illustration] Title page of Kuhnan's "Neue Clavier-Übung".