he singing utterance differentiated
themselves into recitatives for the explanatory parts and arias for the
more impassioned moments; and then, very soon, there came ensemble
pieces, in which several performers sang together.

Thus all kinds of emotional situations were presented to music for
representation and comment, and thus, upon the expressive side, music
received the highest possible stimulation. At the same time, through
the competition of composers for pleasing the ear, there was an ever
increasing tendency toward symmetry and graceful forms. And so the
aria became, after a little, a piece of vocal display, often entirely
opposed to the action, and sometimes foreign to the genius of the
scene; still, it was heard for the sake of the pleasure which people
have in a skilfully managed voice. Toward the end of this century,
somebody, whose name I do not at this moment recall, began to introduce
into opera occasional moments of which the people's song was the type;
short movements which did not aim at display or at immense dramatic
expression, but sought to please by simplicity alone. In this way,
through the desire of the operatic composers to avail themselves as far
as possible of the technical resources of composition acquired by the
learned musicians of the contrapuntal schools, and to please their
hearers and to astonish them in various ways, all the different forces
in music began to exercise themselves and come to expression in opera;
but as yet nothing of the sort had made any great progress in
instrumental music.

Thus we come to the period of Bach and Haendel, both of whom began to
write shortly after 1700. In the working out of their respective
talents, both these composers show their well-schooled musicianship,
according to all the learning of the contrapuntal schools--but with
very important differences. Haendel had all his life a predilection for
diatonic tonality, and it is very rarely indeed that he deals with the
chromatic at all, and never with the enharmonic. All the music in
which he best expressed himself was written for voices, and as a master
of vocal effect he still holds a distinguished position, particularly
in the creation of compositions in which a large number of voices can
be effectively massed. He also had a distinct flavor of the folk-song
in many of his melodies, and in some instances the folk-song is the
entire work. Such, for instance, is the case in "See, the Conquering