Critical and Historical Essays
but they have adopted European ideas in music and are rapidly
becoming occidentalized from a musical point of view. Their
principal instruments are the _koto_ and the _samisen_. The
former is similar to the Chinese _che_, and is a kind of large
zither with thirteen strings, each having a movable bridge by
means of which the pitch of the string may be raised or lowered.
The _samisen_ is a kind of small banjo, and probably originated
in the Chinese _kin_.
From Buddhism to sun worship, from China to Peru and Mexico,
is a marked change, but we find strange resemblances in the
music of these peoples, seeming almost to corroborate the
theory that the southern American races may be traced back to
the extreme Orient. We remember that in the Chinese sacred
chants--"official" music as one may call it--all the notes
were of exactly the same length. Now Garcilaso de la Vega
(1550), in his "Commentarios Reales," tells us that unequal
time was unknown in Peru, that all the notes in a song were
of exactly the same length. He further tells us that in his
time the voice was but seldom heard in singing, and that
all the songs were played on the flute, the words being so
well known that the melody of the flute immediately suggested
them. The Peruvians were essentially a pipe race, while, on the
other hand, the instruments of the Mexicans were of the other
extreme, all kinds of drums, copper gongs, rattles, musical
stones, cymbals, bells, etc., thus completing the resemblance
to Chinese art. In Prescott's "Conquest of Peru" we may read
of the beautiful festival of Raymi, or adoration of the sun,
held at the period of the summer solstice. It describes how the
Inca and his court, followed by the whole population of the
city, assembled at early dawn in the great square of Cuzco,
and how, at the appearance of the first rays of the sun,
a great shout would go up, and thousands of wind instruments
would break forth into a majestic song of adoration. That the
Peruvians were a gentler nation than the Mexicans can be seen
from their principal instrument, the pipe.
While it has been strenuously denied that on such occasions
human sacrifices were offered in Peru, the Mexicans, that race
whose principal instruments were drums and brass trumpets,
not only held such sacrifices, but, strange to say, held
them in honour of a kind of god of music, Tezcatlipoca. This
festival was the most important in Mexico, and took place
at the temple or "teocalli," a gigantic, pyramid-like mass
of stone, rising in terraces to a height of eighty-six feet
above the city, and culminating in a small summit platform
upon which the long procession of priests and victims could
be seen from all parts of the city. Once a year the sacrifice
was given additional importance, for then the most beautiful
youth in Mexico was chosen to represent the god himself. For
a year before the sacrifice he was dressed as Tezcatlipoca,
in royal robes and white linen, with a helmet-like crown of
sea shells with white cocks' plumes, and with an anklet hung
with twenty gold bells as a symbol of his power, and he was
married to the most beautiful maiden in Mexico. The priests
taught him to play the flute, and whenever the people heard
the sound of it they fell down and worshipped him.
The account may be found in Bancroft's great work on the
"Native Races of the Pacific," also Sahagun's "Nueva Espana
and Bernal Diaz," but perhaps the most dramatic description
is that by Rowbotham:
And when the morning of the day of sacrifice arrived,
he was taken by water to the Pyramid Temple where he
was to be sacrificed, and crowds lined the banks of the
river to see him in the barge, sitting in the midst of
his beautiful companions. When the barge touched the
shore, he was taken away from those companions of his
forever, and was delivered over to a band of priests,
exchanging the company of beautiful women for men
clothed in black mantles, with long hair matted with
blood--their ears also were mangled. These conducted
him to the steps of the pyramid, and he was driven
up amidst a crowd of priests, with drums beating and
trumpets blowing. As he went up he broke an earthen
flute on every step to show that his love, and his
delights were over. And when he reached the top, he was
sacrificed on an altar of jasper, and the signal that
the sacrifice was completed was given to the multitudes
below by the rolling of the great sacrificial drum.[04]
[02] _Kong_. His disciples called him _Fu Tsee_, or "the
master"; Jesuit missionaries Latinized this to Confucius.
[03] The Chinese theatre has been called an unconscious
parody of our old-fashioned Italian opera, and there
are certainly many resemblances. In a Chinese play,
when the situation becomes tragic, or when one of the
characters is seized with some strong emotion, it finds
vent in a kind of aria. The dialogue is generally given
in the most monotonous manner possible--using only
high throat and head tones, occasionally lowering or
raising the voice on a word, to express emotion. This
monotonous, and to European ears, strangely nonchalant,
nasal recitative, is being continually interrupted by
gong pounding and the shrill, high sound of discordant
reed instruments. When one or more of the characters
commits suicide (which as we know is an honoured custom
in China) he sings--or rather whines--a long chant before
he dies, just as his western operatic colleagues do, as,
for instance, Edgar in "Lucia di Lammermoor" and even,
to come nearer home, Siegfried in "Goetterdaemmerung."
[04] This drum was made of serpents' skins, and the sound of
it was so loud that it could be heard eight miles away.
VI
THE MUSIC OF GREECE
The first name of significance in Greek music is that of
Homer. The hexameters of "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" were
quite probably chanted, but the four-stringed lyre which we
associate with the ancient Greek singers was only used for
a few preluding notes--possibly to pitch the voice of the
bard--and not during the chant itself. For whatever melody
this chant possessed, it depended entirely upon the raising
and lowering of the voice according to the accent of the words
and the dramatic feeling of the narrative. For its rhythm
it depended upon that of the hexameter, which consists of
a line of six dactyls and spondees, the line always ending
with a spondee. Really the line should end with a dactyl
([- ' ']) and a spondee ([- -]). If a line ends with two
spondees it is a spondaic hexameter.
From this it would seem that while the pitch of the chant would
be very difficult to gauge, owing to the diversity of opinion as
to how to measure in actual sounds the effect of emotions upon
the human voice, at least the _rhythm_ of the chants would be
well defined, owing to the hexameter in which the latter were
written. Here again, however, we are cast adrift by theory,
for in practice nothing could be more misleading than such a
deduction. For instance, the following lines from Longfellow's
"Evangeline" are both in this metre, although the rhythm of
one differs greatly from that of the other.
Wearing her Norman cap, and her kirtle of blue, and the earrings
and
Shielding the house from storms, on the north were the barns
and the farm-yard.
Now if we think that these lines can be sung to the same
musical rhythm we are very far from the truth, although both
are hexameters, namely,
[- ' ' - ' - ' ' - ' ' - ' ' - -]
[- ' ' - ' - ' ' - ' ' - ' ' - -]
dactyls, ending with spondee.
Thus we see that metre in verse and rhythm in music are two
different things, although of course they both had the same
origin.
After all has been said, it is perhaps best to admit that, so
far as Greek music is concerned, its better part certainly lay
in poetry. In ancient times all poetry was sung or chanted; it
was what I have called impassioned speech. The declamation of
"The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" constituted what was really the
"vocal" music of the poems. With the Greeks the word "music"
(_mousike_) included all the aesthetic culture that formed part
of the education of youth; in the same general way a poet was
called a singer, and even in Roman times we find Terence, in
his "Phormio," alluding to poets as musicians. That Aeschylus
and Sophocles were not musicians, as we understand the term,
is very evident in spite of the controversies on the subject.
Impassioned speech, then, was all that existed of vocal music,
and as such was in every way merely the audible expression of
poetry. I have no doubt that this is the explanation of the
statement that Aeschylus and Sophocles wrote what has been
termed the _music_ to their tragedies. What they really did
was to teach the chorus the proper declamation and stage
action. It is well known that at the Dionysian Festival
it was to the poet as "chorus master" that the prize was
awarded, so entirely were the arts identified one with the
other. That declamation may often reach the power of music,
it is hardly necessary to say. Among modern poets, let any
one, for instance, look at Tennyson's "Passing of Arthur" for
an example of this kind of music; the mere sound of the words
completes the picture. For instance, when Arthur is dying and
gives his sword, Excalibur, to Sir Bedivere with the command
to throw it into the mere, the latter twice fails to do so,
and returns to Arthur telling him that all he saw was
"The water lapping on the crag
And the long ripple washing in the reeds."
But when at last he throws it, the magic sword
"Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon
And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an arch
Shot like a streamer of the northern morn.
So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur."
Again, when Sir Bedivere, carrying the dying king, stumbles
up over the icy rocks to the shore, his armour clashing
and clanking, the verse uses all the clangour of cr--ck, the
slipping s's too, and the vowel _a_ is used in all its changes;
when the shore is finally reached, the verse suddenly turns
into smoothness, the long _o_'s giving the same feeling of
breadth and calm that modern music would attempt if it treated
the same subject.
Here are the lines:
Dry clash'd his harness in the icy caves
And barren chasms, and all to left and right
The bare, black cliff clang'd round him as he based
His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels.
And on a sudden, lo! the level lake
And the long glories of the winter moon.
When we think of the earlier Greek plays, we must imagine
the music of the words themselves, the cadenced voices of
the protagonist or solitary performer, and the chorus, the
latter keeping up a rhythmic motion with the words. This,
I am convinced, was the extent of Greek music, so far as that
which was ascribed to the older poets is concerned.
Instrumental music was another thing, and although we possess
no authentic examples of it, we know what its scales consisted
of and what instruments were in use. It would be interesting
to pass in review the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles,
the odes of Sappho and Pindar, those of the latter having a
novel periodicity of form which gives force to the suggestion
that these choric dances were the forerunners of our modern
instrumental forms.
Such matters, however, take us from our actual subject, and we
will therefore turn to Pythagoras, at Crotona, in Italy (about
500 B.C.), whom we find already laying down the rules forming
a mathematical and scientific basis for the Greek musical scale.