Critical and Historical Essays
sculpture now in the British Museum in London, "What can one
think of the musical delicacy of a nation the King of which,
dining alone with his queen, chooses to be regaled with the
sounds of a lyre and a big drum close at his elbow?" The
instruments represented in these bas-reliefs, aside from the
drum, are high-pitched: flutes, pipes, trumpets, cymbals, and
the smaller stringed instruments. These were all portable,
and some, such as drums and dulcimers, were strapped to the
body, all of which points to the eminently warlike character
of the people. Instead of clapping the hands to mark the time
as did the Egyptians, they stamped their feet. The dulcimer
was somewhat like a modern zither, and may be said to contain
the germ of our piano; for it was in the form of a flat case,
strapped to the body and held horizontally in front of the
player. The strings were struck with a kind of plectrum,
held in the right hand, and were touched with the left hand
immediately afterwards to stop the vibration, just as the
dampers in the pianoforte fall on the string the moment the
key is released. There existed among the Chaldeans a science
of music, which, of course, is a very different thing from
practical music, but it was so imbued with astronomical
symbolism that it seems hardly worth while to consider
it here. The art of Babylonia and Assyria culminated in
architecture and bas-relief sculpture, and it is chiefly
valuable as being the germ from which Greek art was developed.
In considering Chinese music one has somewhat the same feeling
as one would have in looking across a flat plain. There are no
mountains in Chinese music, and there is nothing in its history
to make us think that it was ever anything but a more or less
puerile playing with sound; therefore there is no separating
modern Chinese music from that of antiquity. To be sure,
Confucius (about 500 B.C.) said that to be well governed
a nation must possess good music. Pythagoras, Aristotle,
and Plato, in Greece, said the same thing, and their maxims
proved a very important factor in the music of ancient times,
for the simple reason that an art controlled by government can
have nothing very vital about it. Hebrew music was utterly
annihilated by laws, and the poetic imagination thus pent
up found its vent in poetry, the result being some of the
most wonderful works the world has ever known. In Egypt, this
current of inspiration from the very beginning was turned toward
architecture. In Greece, music became a mere stage accessory
or a subject for the dissecting table of mathematics; in China,
we have the dead level of an obstinate adherence to tradition,
thus proving Sir Thomas Browne's saying, "The mortallest enemy
unto knowledge, and that which hath done the greatest execution
upon truth, hath been a peremptory adhesion unto tradition,
and more especially the establishing of our own belief upon
the dictates of antiquity."
The Chinese theory is that there are eight different musical
sounds in nature, namely:
1. The sound of skin.
2. The sound of stone.
3. The sound of metal.
4. The sound of clay.
5. The sound of silk.
6. The sound of wood.
7. The sound of bamboo.
8. The sound of gourd.
The sound of skin has a number of varieties, all different
kinds of drums.
The sound of stone is held by the Chinese to be the most
beautiful among sounds, one between that of metal and of
wood. The principal instrument in this category is the _king_,
and in mythology it is the chosen instrument of Kouei, the
Chinese Orpheus. This instrument has a large framework on which
are hung sixteen stones of different sizes, which are struck,
like drums, with a kind of hammer. According to Amiot, only
a certain kind of stone found near the banks of the river
Tee will serve for the making of these instruments, and in
the year 2200 B.C. the Emperor Yu assessed the different
provinces so many stones each for the palace instruments,
in place of tribute.
The sound of metal is embodied in the various kinds of bells,
which are arranged in many different series, sometimes after
the patterns of the _king_, while sometimes they are played
separately.
The sound of clay, or baked earth, is given by a kind of round
egg made of porcelain--for that is what it amounts to--pierced
with five holes and a mouthpiece, upon blowing through which
the sound is produced--an instrument somewhat suggestive of
our ocarina.
The sound of silk is given by two instruments: one a kind of
flat harp with seven strings, called _che_, the other with
twenty-five strings, called _kin_, in size from seven to nine
feet long. The ancient form of this instrument is said to have
had fifty strings.
The sound of wood is a strange element in a Chinese orchestra,
for it is produced in three different ways: first, by an
instrument in the form of a square wooden box with a hole in one
of its sides through which the hand, holding a small mallet,
is inserted, the sound of wood being produced by hammering
with the mallet on the inside walls of the box, just as the
clapper strikes a bell. This box is placed at the northeast
corner of the orchestra, and begins every piece. Second, by a
set of strips of wood strung on a strap or cord, the sound of
which is obtained by beating the palm of the hand with them.
The third is the strangest of all, for the instrument consists
of a life-size wooden tiger. It has a number of teeth or pegs
along the ridge of its back, and it is "played" by stroking
these pegs rapidly with a wooden staff, and then striking the
tiger on the head. This is the prescribed end of every Chinese
orchestral composition, and is supposed to be a symbol of man's
supremacy over brute creation. The tiger has its place in the
northwest corner of the orchestra.
The sound of bamboo is represented in the familiar form of
Pan's pipes, and various forms of flutes which hardly need
further description.
And finally the sound of the gourd. The gourd is a kind of
squash, hollowed out, in which from thirteen to twenty-four
pipes of bamboo or metal are inserted; each one of these
pipes contains a metal reed, the vibration of which causes
the sound. Below the reed are cut small holes in the pipes,
and there is a pipe with a mouthpiece to keep the gourd,
which is practically an air reservoir, full of air. The air
rushing out through the bamboo pipes will naturally escape
through the holes cut below the reeds, making no sound, but
if the finger stops one or more of these holes, the air is
forced up through the reeds, thus giving a musical sound,
the pitch of which will be dependent on the length of the
pipes and the force with which the air passes through the reed.
Other instruments of the Chinese are gongs of all sizes,
trumpets, and several stringed instruments somewhat akin to our
guitars and mandolins. Neither the Chinese nor the Japanese
have ever seemed to consider the voice as partaking of the
nature of music. This is strange, for the language of the
Chinese depends on flexibility of the voice to make it even
intelligible. As a matter of fact, singing, in our sense of
the word, is unknown to them.
V
THE MUSIC OF THE CHINESE (Continued)
Having described the musical instruments in use in China
we still have for consideration the music itself, and the
conditions which led up to it.
Among the Chinese instruments mentioned in the preceding
chapter, the preponderance of instruments of percussion, such
as drums, gongs, bells, etc., has probably been noticed. In
connection with the last named we meet with one of the two cases
in Chinese art in which we see the same undercurrent of feeling,
or rather superstition, as that found among western nations. We
read in the writings of Mencius, the Chinese philosopher (350
B.C.), the following bit of gossip about the king Senen of Tse.
"The king," said he, "was sitting aloft in the hall, when
a man appeared, leading an ox past the lower part of it.
The king saw him, and asked, 'Where is the ox going?'
"The man replied, 'We are going to consecrate a bell with
its blood.'
"The king said, 'Let it go. I cannot bear its frightened
appearance as if it were an innocent person going to the
place of death.'
"The man answered, 'Shall we then omit the consecration
of the bell?'
"The king said, 'How can that be omitted? Change the ox
for a sheep.'"
As stated before, this is one of the few cases in which Chinese
superstition coincides with that of the West; for our own church
bells were once consecrated in very much the same manner, a
survival of that ancient universal custom of sacrifice. With
the exception of this resemblance, which, however, has nothing
to do with actual music, everything in Chinese art is exactly
the opposite of our western ideas on the subject.
The Chinese orchestra is composed of about sixteen different
types of percussion instruments and four kinds of wind and
stringed instruments, whereas in our European orchestras the
ratio is exactly reversed. Their orchestras are placed at
the back of the stage, ours in front of it. The human voice
is not even mentioned in their list of musical sounds (sound
of metal, baked clay, wood, skin, bamboo, etc)., whereas we
consider it the most nearly perfect instrument existing. This
strange perversity once caused much discussion in days when
we knew less of China than we do at present, as to whether
the Chinese organs of hearing were not entirely different from
those of western nations. We now know that this contradiction
runs through all their habits of life. With them white is the
colour indicative of mourning; the place of honour is on the
left hand; the seat of intellect is in the stomach; to take off
one's hat is considered an insolent gesture; the magnetic needle
of the Chinese compass is reckoned as pointing south, instead of
north; even up to the middle of the nineteenth century the chief
weapon in war was the bow and arrow, although they were long
before acquainted with gunpowder--and so on, _ad infinitum_.
We are aware that the drum is the most primitive instrument
known to man. If all our knowledge of the Chinese were included
in a simple list of their orchestral instruments, we should
recognize at once that the possession of the gourd, mouth-organ,
and lute indicates a nation which has reached a high state of
civilization; on the other hand, the great preponderance of
bells, gongs, drums, etc., points unmistakably to the fact
that veneration of the laws and traditions of the past (a
past of savage barbarism), and a blind acquiescence in them,
must constitute the principal factor in that civilization. The
writings of Chinese philosophers are full of wise sayings
about music, but in practice the music itself becomes almost
unbearable. For instance, in the Confucian _Analects_ we read,
"The Master (Confucius)[02] said: 'How to play music may be
known. At the commencement of the piece, all the parts should
sound together. As it proceeds, they should be in harmony,
severally distinct, and flowing without a break, and thus on
to the conclusion.'" The definition is certainly remarkable
when one considers that it was given about five hundred
years before our era. In practice, however, the Chinese do
not distinguish between musical _combinations_ of sound and
_noise_; therefore the above definition must be taken in a very
different sense from that which ordinarily would be the case. By
harmony, Confucius evidently means similarity of noises, and by
"melody flowing without a break" he means absolute monotony of
rhythm. We know this from the hymns to the ancestors which,
with the hymns to the Deity, are the sacred songs of China,
songs which have come down from time immemorial.