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Haydn has been called "the father of instrumental music," and
although rigid critics may dispute his full right to that title,
on broad grounds he must be allowed to have sufficiently earned
it. He was practically the creator of more than one of our modern
forms, and there was hardly a department of instrumental music in
which he did not make his influence felt. This was emphatically
the case with the sonata, the symphony and the string quartet.
The latter he brought to its first perfection. Before his time
this particular form of chamber music was long neglected, and for
a very simple reason. Composers looked upon it as being too
slight in texture for the display of their genius. That, as has
often been demonstrated, was because they had not mastered the
art of "writing a four-part harmony with occasional transitions
into the pure polyphonic style--a method of writing which is
indispensable to quartet composition--and also because they did
not yet understand the scope and value of each individual
instrument."
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