Critical and Historical Essays
or downward inflection. For instance, the word "kwai" with a
downward inflection means "honourable," but give it an upward
inflection "kwai" and it means "devil."
Just as a word was originally a sentence, so was a tone in
music something of a melody. One of the first things that
impresses us in studying examples of savage music is the
monotonic nature of the melodies; indeed some of the music
consists almost entirely of one oft-repeated sound. Those
who have heard this music say that the actual effect is not
one of a steady repetition of a single tone, but rather that
there seems to be an almost imperceptible rising and falling
of the voice. The primitive savage is unable to sing a tone
clearly and cleanly, the pitch invariably wavering. From
this almost imperceptible rising and falling of the voice
above and below one tone we are able to gauge more or less the
state of civilization of the nation to which the song belongs.
This phrase-tone corresponds, therefore, to the sentence-word,
and like it, gradually loses its meaning as a phrase and fades
into a tone which, in turn, will be used in new phrases as
mankind mounts the ladder of civilization.
At last then we have a single tone clearly uttered, and
recognizable as a musical tone. We can even make a plausible
guess as to what that tone was. Gardiner, in his "Music of
Nature," tells of experiments he made in order to determine the
normal pitch of the human voice. By going often to the gallery
of the London Stock Exchange he found that the roar of voices
invariably amalgamated into one long note, which was always
F. If we look over the various examples of monotonic savage
music quoted by Fletcher, Fillmore, Baker, Wilkes, Catlin,
and others, we find additional corroboration of the statement;
song after song, it will be noticed, is composed entirely of
F, G, and even F alone or G alone. Such songs are generally
ancient ones, and have been crystallized and held intact by
religion, in much the same way that the chanting heard in the
Roman Catholic service has been preserved.
Let us assume then that the normal tone of the human voice
in speaking is F or G [F: f g] for men, and for women the
octave higher. This tone does very well for our everyday life;
perhaps a pleasant impression may raise it somewhat, _ennui_ may
depress it slightly; but the average tone of our "commonplace"
talk, if I may call it that, will be about F. But let some
sudden emotion come, and we find monotone speech abandoned for
impassioned speech, as it has been called. Instead of keeping
the voice evenly on one or two notes, we speak much higher or
lower than our normal pitch.
And these sounds may be measured and classified to a certain
extent according to the emotions which cause them, although
it must be borne in mind that we are looking at the matter
collectively; that is to say, without reckoning on individual
idiosyncrasies of expression in speech. Of course we know that
joy is apt to make us raise the voice and sadness to lower
it. For instance, we have all heard gruesome stories, and
have noticed how naturally the voice sinks in the telling. A
ghost story told with an upward inflection might easily
become humourous, so instinctively do we associate the upward
inflection with a non-pessimistic trend of thought. Under stress
of emotion we emphasize words strongly, and with this emphasis
we almost invariably raise the voice a fifth or depress it a
fifth; with yet stronger emotion the interval of change will
be an octave. We raise the voice almost to a scream or drop it
to a whisper. Strangely enough these primitive notes of music
correspond to the first two of those harmonics which are part
and parcel of every musical sound. Generally speaking, we may
say that the ascending inflection carries something of joy
or hope with it, while the downward inflection has something
of the sinister and fearful. To be sure, we raise our voices
in anger and in pain, but even then the inflection is almost
always downward; in other words, we pitch our voices higher and
let them fall slightly. For instance, if we heard a person cry
"Ah/" we might doubt its being a cry of pain, but if it were
"Ah\" we should at once know that it was caused by pain,
either mental or physical.
The declamation at the end of Schubert's "Erlking" would have
been absolutely false if the penultimate note had ascended to
the tonic instead of descending a fifth. "The child lay dead."
How fatally hopeless would be the opening measures of "Tristan
and Isolde" without that upward inflection which comes like a
sunbeam through a rift in the cloud; with a downward inflection
the effect would be that of unrelieved gloom. In the Prelude to
"Lohengrin," Wagner pictures his angels in dazzling white. He
uses the highest vibrating sounds at his command. But for
the dwarfs who live in the gloom of Niebelheim he chooses
deep shades of red, the lowest vibrating colour of the solar
spectrum. For it is in the nature of the spiritual part
of mankind to shrink from the earth, to aspire to something
higher; a bird soaring in the blue above us has something of
the ethereal; we give wings to our angels. On the other hand,
a serpent impresses us as something sinister. Trees, with
their strange fight against all the laws of gravity, striving
upward unceasingly, bring us something of hope and faith; the
sight of them cheers us. A land without trees is depressing and
gloomy. As Ruskin says, "The sea wave, with all its beneficence,
is yet devouring and terrible; but the silent wave of the blue
mountain is lifted towards Heaven in a stillness of perpetual
mercy; and while the one surges unfathomable in its darkness,
the other is unshaken in its faithfulness."
And yet so strange is human nature that that which we
call civilization strives unceasingly to nullify emotion.
The almost childlike faith which made our church spires
point heavenward also gave us Gothic architecture, that
emblem of frail humanity striving towards the ideal. It is
a long leap from that childlike faith to the present day of
skyscrapers. For so is the world constituted. A great truth
too often becomes gradually a truism, then a merely tolerated
and uninteresting theory; gradually it becomes obsolete
and sometimes even degenerates into a symbol of sarcasm or a
servant of utilitarianism. This we are illustrating every day
of our lives. We speak of a person's being "silly," and yet
the word comes from "saelig," old English for "blessed"; to act
"sheepishly" once had reference to divine resignation, "even
as a sheep led to the slaughter," and so on _ad infinitum_.
We build but few great cathedrals now. Our tall buildings
generally point to utilitarianism and the almighty dollar.
But in the new art, music, we have found a new domain in which
impulses have retained their freshness and warmth, in which,
to quote Goethe, "first comes the act, then the word"; first
the expression of emotion, then the theory that classifies it;
a domain in which words cannot lose their original meanings
entirely, as in speech. For in spite of the strange twistings
of ultra modern music, a simple melody still embodies the
same pathos for us that it did for our grandparents. To be
sure the poignancy of harmony in our day has been heightened
to an incredible degree. We deal in gorgeous colouring and
mighty sound masses which would have been amazing in the last
century; but still through it all we find in Haendel, Beethoven,
and Schubert, up to Wagner, the same great truths of declamation
that I have tried to explain to you.
Herbert Spencer, in an essay on "The Origin and Functions of
Music," speaks of speech as the parent of music. He says,
"utterance, which when languaged is speech, gave rise to
music." The definition is incomplete, for "languaged utterance,"
as he calls it, which is speech, is a duality, is either an
expression of emotion or a mere symbol of emotion, and as such
has gradually sunk to the level of the commonplace. As Rowbotham
points out, impassioned speech is the parent of music, while
unimpassioned speech has remained the vehicle for the smaller
emotions of life, the everyday expression of everyday emotions.
In studying the music of different nations we are confronted
by one fact which seems to be part and parcel of almost every
nationality, namely, the constant recurrence of what is called
the five tone (pentatonic) scale. We find it in primitive
forms of music all the world over, in China and in Scotland,
among the Burmese, and again in North America. Why it is so
seems almost doomed to remain a mystery. The following theory
may nevertheless be advanced as being at least plausible:
Vocal music, as we understand it, and as I have already
explained, began when the first tone could be given clearly;
that is to say, when the sound sentence had amalgamated into the
single musical tone. The pitch being sometimes F, sometimes G,
sudden emotion gives us the fifth, C or D, and the strongest
emotion the octave, F or G. Thus we have already the following
sounds in our first musical scale.
[G: f' g' c'' d'' f'']
We know how singers slur from one tone to another. It is a
fault that caused the fathers of harmony to prohibit what
are called hidden fifths in vocal music. The jump from G to
C in the above scale fragment would be slurred, for we must
remember that the intoning of clear individual sounds was
still a novelty to the savage. Now the distance from G to
C is too small to admit two tones such as the savage knew;
consequently, for the sake of uniformity, he would try to
put but one tone between, singing a mixture of A and B[flat],
which sound in time fell definitely to A, leaving the mystery
of the half-tone unsolved. This addition of the third would
thus fall in with the law of harmonics again. First we have the
keynote; next in importance comes the fifth; and last of all
the third. Thus again is the absence of the major seventh in
our primitive scale perfectly logical; we may search in vain
in our list of harmonics for the tone which forms that interval.
Now that we have traced the influence of passionate utterance
on music, it still remains for us to consider the influence
of something very different. The dance played an important
role in the shaping of the art of music; for to it music owes
periodicity, form, the shaping of phrases into measures,
even its rests. And in this music is not the only debtor,
for poetry owes its very "feet" to the dance.
Now the dance was, and is, an irresponsible thing. It had no
_raison d'etre_ except purely physical enjoyment. This rhythmic
swaying of the body and light tapping of the feet have always
had a mysterious attraction and fascination for mankind,
and music and poetry were caught in its swaying measures
early in the dawn of art. When a man walks, he takes either
long steps or short steps, he walks fast or slow. But when
he takes one long step and one short one, when one step is
slow and the other fast, he no longer walks, he dances. Thus
we may say with reasonable certainty that triple time arose
directly from the dance, for triple time is simply one strong,
long beat followed by a short, light one, viz.: [2 4] or
[- '], the "trochee" in our poetry. [4 2] [' -], Iambic.
The spondee [2 2] or [- -], which is the rhythm of prose,
we already possessed; for when we walk it is in spondees,
namely, in groups of two equal steps. Now imagine dancing
to spondees! At first the steps will be equal, but the body
rests on the first beat; little by little the second beat,
being thus relegated to a position of relative unimportance,
becomes shorter and shorter, and we rest longer on the first
beat. The result is the trochaic rhythm. We can see that this
result is inevitable, even if only the question of physical