Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: m. THE BEGINNINGS OF POLYPHONIC MUSIC. Before we more closely consider the advances made in by the northern nations, we must make mention of another people, which during the centuries of mediaeval storm and stress exercised a fostering influence — if not specially upon music, at least — upon the development of culture in general, viz: the Arabians. The capacity of this race to participate in the intellectual labor of humanity is indicated even by the writers of antiquity. But these qualifications attained their full development only in conse- cpience of the religious and social reform brought about by Mahomet (A. D. 622); under its influence the Orient was able to lift itself cithin a short time to a plane of civilization to which Europe spas to attain only after centuries later. Nor did it suffice to the followers of Islam to establish only on their native soil sites which, like Bagdad and Damascus, spread over the world the fame of oriental culture and civilization; in the very next century they were impelled to propagate the doctrine of the prophet even beyond their own part of the globe. In a trice North-Africa as far as the Pillars of Hercules was subjugated, and after crossing the Straits of Gibraltar (A. D. 711) an end was put to the Gothic rule in Spain, which had already been strongly shaken by party quarrels. The kingdom of the Caliphs arose from the ruins and attained with surprising rapidity to a high political and intellectual prominence, and its capital city Cordova was soon able to take rank with the previously mentioned centres of culture of the Orient. The Arabians distinguished themselves pre-eminently by fostering the sciences, in which the numerous Jews residing in Spain could aid them all the more effectually on acconnt of notbeing, for their part, imped...