evolved by the people, whilst its harmonization, in which lay one
of its most striking essentialities, had been bequeathed it by the
Church. From all that can be gathered concerning music in Muscovy
prior to the introduction of Christianity, it seems justifiable to
admit that harmony, or part singing, was already practised amongst
the inhabitants, in what manner it is impossible to conjecture.
At any rate, when the Church of Byzantium took root there, the
Sclav was sufficiently advanced musically to imbibe a new idea. We
know that the Byzantine Church modes were purely diatonic, so is
the harmonization of the Russian folk-song in its most elementary
and uncorrupted form. That the one produced the other is a most
natural conclusion. In the oldest of the Russian national melodies
Glinka discovered the most clearly defined type of the earliest
Christian songs on record.

A wonderful testimony this to the indwelling religious spirit of
the Russian people, who change but little and who are singularly
tenacious of their customs in spite of all their ready receptiveness.
In one sense the folk-song is as rude and hardy as its singer; from
another point of view it is a shy, delicate emanation shrinking
from all human intercourse outside its own small coterie of familiar
voices. In Russia, as in every other country, it has had to be
sought in the remote Steppes and far-off districts where foreign
influences had never penetrated, and by a curious inverse process
its harmonies, of course, transmitted orally, were the means of
preserving the Byzantine Church tonality long after this "first
cause" had accepted chromatic and enharmonic modulations. In the
chief Russian cities and more opened-up parts of the country, the
Italian, French, and later on German elements gradually formed
themselves into Church as well as secular music, and only within
the last sixty years have attempts been made to restore this to
its pristine and, perhaps it may be added, somewhat monotonous
purity. The minor key in which the Sclavonic folksong was usually
couched, together with its extraordinary variety of rhythm and
phrase, protected it from this monotony, the minor keys having
infinitely richer resources of colour, even when strictly diatonically
treated, than the major.

Sclavonic music figures so constantly upon every concert programme
in these days that we are probably most of us accustomed to its
vagaries of rhythm, or what may be styled irregula