ar with musical literature, could see
only four unrelated pieces of music in a symphony by Beethoven, we
need not marvel that hazy notions touching the nature of the form are
prevalent among the untaught public, and that people can be met in
concert-rooms to whom such words as "Symphony in C minor," and the
printed designations of the different portions of the work--the
"movements," as musicians call them--are utterly bewildering.

[Sidenote: _History of the term._]

[Sidenote: _Changes in meaning._]

[Sidenote: _Handel's "Pastoral Symphony."_]

The word symphony has itself a singularly variegated history. Like
many another term in music it was borrowed by the modern world from
the ancient Greek. To those who coined it, however, it had a much
narrower meaning than to us who use it, with only a conventional
change in transliteration, now. By [Greek: symphonia] the Greeks
simply expressed the concept of agreement, or consonance. Applied to
music it meant first such intervals as unisons; then the notion was
extended to include consonant harmonies, such as the fifth, fourth,
and octave. The study of the ancient theoreticians led the musicians
of the Middle Ages to apply the word to harmony in general. Then in
some inexplicable fashion it came to stand as a generic term for
instrumental compositions such as toccatas, sonatas, etc. Its name was
given to one of the precursors of the pianoforte, and in Germany in
the sixteenth century the word _Symphoney_ came to mean a town band.
In the last century and the beginning of this the term was used to
designate an instrumental introduction to a composition for voices,
such as a song or chorus, as also an instrumental piece introduced in
a choral work. The form, that is the extent and structure of the
composition, had nothing to do with the designation, as we see from
the Italian shepherds' tune which Handel set for strings in "The
Messiah;" he called it simply _pifa_, but his publishers called it a
"Pastoral symphony," and as such we still know it. It was about the
middle of the eighteenth century that the present signification
became crystallized in the word, and since the symphonies of Haydn, in
which the form first reached perfection, are still to be heard in our
concert-rooms, it may be said that all the masterpieces of symphonic
literature are current.

[Sidenote: _The allied forms._]

[Sidenote: _Sonata form._]

[Sidenote: _Symphony, sonata, and concerto._]

I have