Critical and Historical Essays
for fear, drifting further and further away from expressing the
actual thing, became words, and words were inadequate to express
and cause fear. In that vague groping for sound symbols which
would cause and express fear far better than mere words, we
have the beginning of what is gradually to develop into music.
We all know that savage nations accompany their dances by
striking one object with another, sometimes by a clanking of
stones, the pounding of wood, or perhaps the clashing of stone
spearheads against wooden shields (a custom which extended until
the time when shields and spears were discarded), meaning thus
to express something that words cannot. This meaning changed
naturally from its original one of being the simple expression
of fear to that of welcoming a chieftain; and, if one wishes
to push the theory to excess, we may still see a shadowy
reminiscence of it in the manner in which the violinists of
an orchestra applaud an honoured guest--perchance some famous
virtuoso--at one of our symphony concerts by striking the
backs of their violins with their bows.
To go back to the savages. While this clashing of one object
against another could not be called the beginning of music, and
while it could not be said to originate a musical instrument,
it did, nevertheless, bring into existence music's greatest
prop, rhythm, an ally without which music would seem to be
impossible. It is hardly necessary to go into this point in
detail. Suffice it to say that the sense of rhythm is highly
developed even among those savage tribes which stand the
lowest in the scale of civilization to-day, for instance,
the Andaman Islanders, of whom I shall speak later; the same
may be said of the Tierra del Fuegians and the now extinct
aborigines of Tasmania; it is the same with the Semangs of
the Malay Peninsula, the Ajitas of the Philippines, and the
savages inhabiting the interior of Borneo.
As I have said, this more or less rhythmic clanking of stones
together, the striking of wooden paddles against the side of
a canoe, or the clashing of stone spearheads against wooden
shields, could not constitute the first musical instrument. But
when some savage first struck a hollow tree and found that
it gave forth a sound peculiar to itself, when he found a
hollow log and filled up the open ends, first with wood,
and then--possibly getting the idea from his hide-covered
shield--stretched skins across the two open ends, then he had
completed the first musical instrument known to man, namely,
the drum. And such as it was then, so is it now, with but
few modifications.
Up to this point it is reasonable to assume that primeval man
looked upon the world purely subjectively. He considered himself
merely a unit in the world, and felt on a plane with the other
creatures inhabiting it. But from the moment he had invented the
first musical instrument, the drum, he had created something
outside of nature, a voice that to himself and to all other
living creatures was intangible, an idol that spoke when it
was touched, something that he could call into life, something
that shared the supernatural in common with the elements. A
God had come to live with man, and thus was unfolded the
first leaf in that noble tree of life which we call religion.
Man now began to feel himself something apart from the world,
and to look at it objectively instead of subjectively.
To treat primitive mankind as a type, to put it under one head,
to make one theorem cover all mankind, as it were, seems almost
an unwarranted boldness. But I think it is warranted when we
consider that, aside from language, music is the very first
sign of the dawn of civilization. There is even the most
convincingly direct testimony in its favour. For instance:
In the Bay of Bengal, about six hundred miles from the Hoogly
mouth of the Ganges, lie the Andaman Islands. The savages
inhabiting these islands have the unenviable reputation
of being, in common with several other tribes, the nearest
approach to primeval man in existence. These islands and their
inhabitants have been known and feared since time immemorial;
our old friend Sinbad the Sailor, of "Arabian Nights" fame,
undoubtedly touched there on one of his voyages. These savages
have no religion whatever, except the vaguest superstition,
in other words, fear, and they have no musical instruments
of any kind. They have reached only the _rhythm_ stage, and
accompany such dances as they have by clapping their hands
or by stamping on the ground. Let us now look to Patagonia,
some thousands of miles distant. The Tierra del Fuegians have
precisely the same characteristics, no religion, and no musical
instruments of any kind. Retracing our steps to the Antipodes
we find among the Weddahs or "wild hunters" of Ceylon exactly
the same state of things. The same description applies without
distinction equally well to the natives in the interior of
Borneo, to the Semangs of the Malay Peninsula, and to the now
extinct aborigines of Tasmania. According to Virchow their
dance is demon worship of a purely anthropomorphic character;
no musical instrument of any kind was known to them. Even
the simple expression of emotions by the voice, which we have
seen is its most primitive medium, has not been replaced to
any extent among these races since their discovery of speech,
for the Tierra del Fuegians, Andamans, and Weddahs have but
one sound to represent emotion, namely, a cry to express joy;
having no other means for the expression of sorrow, they paint
themselves when mourning.
It is granted that all this, in itself, is not conclusive;
but it will be found that no matter in what wilderness one
may hear of a savage beating a drum, there also will be a
well-defined religion.
Proofs of the theory that the drum antedates all other musical
instruments are to be found on every hand. For wherever in the
anthropological history of the world we hear of the trumpet,
horn, flute, or other instrument of the pipe species, it will
be found that the drum and its derivatives were already well
known. The same may be said of the lyre species of instrument,
the forerunner of our guitar (_kithara_), _tebuni_ or Egyptian
harp, and generally all stringed instruments, with this
difference, namely, that wherever the lyre species was known,
both pipe and drum had preceded it. We never find the lyre
without the drum, or the pipe without the drum; neither do we
find the lyre and the drum without the pipe. On the other hand,
we often find the drum alone, or the drum and pipe without
the lyre. This certainly proves the antiquity of the drum and
its derivatives.
I have spoken of the purely rhythmical nature of the pre-drum
period, and pointed out, in contrast, the musical quality of
the drum. This may seem somewhat strange, accustomed as we are
to think of the drum as a purely rhythmical instrument. The
sounds given out by it seem at best vague in tone and more
or less uniform in quality. We forget that all instruments
of percussion, as they are called, are direct descendants of
the drum. The bells that hang in our church towers are but
modifications of the drum; for what is a bell but a metal drum
with one end left open and the drum stick hung inside?
Strange to say, as showing the marvellous potency of primeval
instincts, bells placed in church towers were supposed to
have much of the supernatural power that the savage in his
wilderness ascribed to the drum. We all know something of the
bell legends of the Middle Ages, how the tolling of a bell was
supposed to clear the air of the plague, to calm the storm, and
to shed a blessing on all who heard it. And this superstition
was to a certain extent ratified by the religious ceremonies
attending the casting of church bells and the inscriptions
moulded in them. For instance, the mid-day bell of Strasburg,
taken down during the French Revolution, bore the motto
"I am the voice of life."
Another one in Strasburg:
"I ring out the bad, ring in the good."
Others read
"My voice on high dispels the storm."
"I am called Ave Maria
I drive away storms."
"I who call to thee am the Rose of the World and am called
Ave Maria."
The Egyptian _sistrum_, which in Roman times played an
important role in the worship of Isis, was shaped somewhat
like a tennis racquet, with four wire strings on which rattles
were strung. The sound of it must have been akin to that of our
modern tambourine, and it served much the same purpose as the
primitive drum, namely, to drive away Typhon or Set, the god
of evil. Dead kings were called "Osiris" when placed in their
tombs, and _sistri_ put with them in order to drive away Set.
Beside bells and rattles we must include all instruments of the
tambourine and gong species in the drum category. While there
are many different forms of the same instrument, there are
evidences of their all having at some time served the same
purpose, even down to that strange instrument about which
Du Chaillu tells us in his "Equatorial Africa", a bell of
leopard skin, with a clapper of fur, which was rung by the
wizard doctor when entering a hut where someone was ill or
dying. The leopard skin and fur clapper seem to have been
devised to make no noise, so as not to anger the demon that
was to be cast out. This reminds us strangely of the custom of
ringing a bell as the priest goes to administer the last rites.
It is said that first impressions are the strongest and most
lasting; certain it is that humanity, through all its social and
racial evolutions, has retained remnants of certain primitive
ideas to the present day. The army death reveille, the minute
gun, the tolling of bells for the dead, the tocsin, etc., all
have their roots in the attributes assigned to the primitive
drum; for, as I have already pointed out, the more civilized
a people becomes, the more the word-symbols degenerate. It
is this continual drifting away of the word-symbols from the
natural sounds which are occasioned by emotions that creates
the necessity for auxiliary means of expression, and thus
gives us instrumental music.
Since the advent of the drum a great stride toward civilization
had been made. Mankind no longer lived in caves but built huts
and even temples, and the conditions under which he lived
must have been similar to those of the natives of Central
Africa before travellers opened up the Dark Continent to the
caravan of the European trader. If we look up the subject in
the narratives of Livingstone or Stanley we find that these
people lived in groups of coarsely-thatched huts, the village
being almost invariably surrounded by a kind of stockade. Now
this manner of living is identically the same as that of all
savage tribes which have not passed beyond the drum state
of civilization, namely, a few huts huddled together and
surrounded by a palisade of bamboo or cane. Since the pith
would decompose in a short time, we should probably find that
the wind, whirling across such a palisade of pipes--for that is
what our bamboos would have turned to--would produce musical
sounds, in fact, exactly the sounds that a large set of Pan's
pipes would produce. For after all what we call Pan's pipes
are simply pieces of bamboo or cane of different lengths tied
together and made to sound by blowing across the open tops.
The theory may be objected to on the ground that it scarcely
proves the antiquity of the pipe to be less than that of the
drum; but the objection is hardly of importance when we consider
that the drum was known long before mankind had reached the
"hut" stage of civilization. Under the head of pipe, the
trumpet and all its derivatives must be accepted. On this point
there has been much controversy. But it seems reasonable to