of whom Bach was easily chief, sufficed to push it toward maturity, outlining for it forms and principles that needed but little to make them permanently satisfactory. The freedom of this whole type of music made it peculiarly attractive. Into it might go the exactest contrapuntal learning, the extreme of concertistic spirit and brilliance, and any degree of personal imagination and ingenuity besides. While the tendency of the age to formality held it back for a time, its accomplishments presaged the later glory of the piano and the orchestra as vehicles for monumental expression.
But the 18th century in all its activities drifted toward formalism and mannerism. This was apparent in its literature, its philosophy and its ethics, and was bound to affect its art. By the middle of the century all musical art showed tendencies toward routine conventions of various sorts. Thus much polyphonic writing became to a surprising degree a knack or trick, as it had been in the time of Okeghem at the opening of the l6th century. Thus even the opera became for too many writers a matter of rule and formula, manneristic and mechanical. Thus there was a constant search for regular ways of writing instrumental music that could be applied without inspiration or real invention. The greater geniuses, who mostly escaped these tendencies, were outnumbered and often hidden by the host of lesser workers who conceived of their art as mere artisans. Hence the scornful epithets 'pigtail music' and 'capellmeister music' that are often given to much 18th-century composition. It was the prevalence of this superficiality and heartlessness that constituted the call and the opportunity for the great masters of the next two periods.
In the domain of theory and criticism the period was significant for the opening up of several new lines of thought. For the first time harmony begins to get down to basal physical principles, and thus to take on the aspect of a true science. It was really not until this time that harmonic coherence and drift began to be controlling influences in the lay-out of extended works, thus bringing actually to bear the innovations begun in the 16th century. And the whole literary side of musicianship now begins to be cultivated, though without much system, with considerable oddity and partisan bias, and so without producing works of permanent influence. But the mere fact that writers
