The Music of Hindostan c18.7

c18.7

In the first place, there is no such thing as natural harmony. Nature ‘gives’ a note, with its Fifth a good deal fainter, and its Third much fainter still. We make the three notes of equal loudness, and call them a chord. But Guido d’Arezzo did not get so far as that. Adam de la Hale did not hear the Third as a satisfactory note. Josquin des Prés could not endure the minor chord as final. Palestrina inserted the minor chord at that place, but surreptitiously altered it to major. Bach, in the first part of the forty-eight Fugues, prefers on the whole the *Tierce de Picardie*. Beethoven’s favourite ending is in the unison—like Guido’s—which, indeed, is all that can truly be called ‘natural’; and that is not a ‘chord’. Without wishing to press the word ‘natural’ too far, the argument goes to show that the employment of the very first chord is the knell of modal melody.