I

As a foundation for all understanding and estimation of the so-called exotic systems of music we must bear in mind that beneath the differences from our own music in scale structure often as a matter of practice more apparent than real, in lack of harmony and in predominance of rhythm, lies the fundamental difference that music has never been cultivated for itself alone in China, in Hindustan, or among ancient nations to anything like the same extent as in the Occident. Though in the Mohammedan Orient, at the height of the Saracen civilization, it was highly esteemed as a social diversion, in general it figures, not as an independent art, but rather as an auxiliary one. This, of course, applies to art-music, not to popular or folk song, of which, just as in other lands, there is a rich literature in the East. On the rivers of China, in the bazaars of Hindoo cities, under the Bedouin tent-roof, the people sing their songs. But the art of music was developed by these peoples only in connection with dancing, sacred or secular, with ceremonial functions, plays or pantomimes. If this fact be borne in mind, it is perhaps easier to comprehend an art so strikingly different from our own.

Exotic music, or, broadly speaking, the music of the semi-civilized races, may be considered under four heads; that of the Aztecs and Peruvians (nations whose civilizations, though they have been destroyed, are of too recent date to be classed with those of the ancients, yet the scant musical record of which should not be overlooked); the music of India; the music of the Chinese, Japanese, and Indo-Chinese peoples, including the Siamese, Javabese, Cambodians, Annamites; and the music of the Mohammedan Orient.

There is but little known of the music of the Aztecs or Peruvians. The fact that the Aztec language was sweet and harmonious to the ear and had no sharp or nasal sounds justified the fondness with which both lyric and dramatic poetry were cultivated in ancient Mexico. But the music of the Aztecs seems to have been unworthy of so cultivated a people. It was the only art that remained in its infancy among them. Still, the mention of ballads sung by the people, court-odes and the chants of temple choirs, show that they must have cultivated a form of vocal music distinctly above that of drums and horns, pipes and whistles. Moreover, music played an important part in connection with religious and secular dancing, as it did also in India. It has been conjectured that the Aztec tonal system resembled that of the Arabs. Their songs generally began with deep sounds, rising in pitch and accelerating with the increase of pleasurable emotion on the part of the singer. De Solis speaks of the funeral processions in which the bodies of the dead were brought to the temples to be received by the priests swinging their censers of burning copal ‘to the hoarse sound of dissonant flutes and singing various hymns in a melancholy mode.’

Among the Peruvians the beautiful Quichua dialect, like the melodious language of the Aztecs, encouraged the haravecs or poets to compose the verses which were sung at religious festivals and at the table of the Inca. And, as in Mexico, music was intimately associated with religious dancing and ceremony. It played its part in the elaborate ritual of the Incas’ sun worship. However, little information is available concerning the development of the Inca music or that of the Aztecs before the Conquest. The Quichua and Aimara Indians of the present day are still passionately fond of music, singing and dancing to the accompaniment of the quena (Peruvian flute) and guitar; and phrases of the traditional minstrelsy of the Inca haravecs may ‘have been borne down the tide of rustic melody to these later generations.’ Their songs are in the ancient five-tone scale known as the pentatonic, which they have probably inherited from their proud ancestors, together with a fondness for triple rhythm, sole traces of the music of that brilliant state which sank before the power of Spain.

Concerning the music of China, of Hindustan, and of the Mohammedan Orient we have definite information. The people of these countries have not been, like the Aztecs of Mexico or the Incas of Peru, either swept from the face of the earth or thrown back into a drowsy barbarism. Their own civilizations live on beneath a surface decay. They have ideals of tradition, of permanence, of racial habit, quite different from those accepted by our standards of progress and original development, which have fenced in their music from all Occidental influences. Only a few hardly noticeable variations in instrumentation and choreography mark the touch of time. Notation, rhythm, and design have remained for ages immutably the same.

It is supposed in China that Ling-Lenu, minister of the Emperor Honang-Ty, chosen to fix the laws of musical sound, retired to a bamboo-grove, near the source of the Yellow River, and there cut twelve bamboo tubes whose varying lengths yielded the sounds of our present-day chromatic scale. In reality, however, the pentatonic scale

is used. The tones b and e (omitted in this scale as we have written it), the fourth and seventh tones in our scale, which are not found in the normal pentatonic scale, are given a special name, pien; and the union of the five tones and the two pien constitute what the Chinese call the ‘Seven Principles’ in music. But the five-tone scale is the one commonly employed in practice and constitutes the basis of all music in the Indo-Chinese countries.[14] In Java, Siam, Burmah, and Cambodia, both five-tone and seven-tone (heptatonic) scales are in use; but the musical system of Japan, which was originally borrowed from China, is built up wholly on a five-tone scale, with the important difference from the Chinese that it has a minor third, and not a major:

. This difference gives Japanese music a certain individual character of its own.

The Hindoos have a system of seven-toned scales differentiated from each other by variable quarter-tone steps. But the theory of music is developed in India with an over-elaboration of subtleties, as it is in China, and of almost a thousand varieties of scale theoretically possible in the Hindoo system no more than twenty are in actual use. Many of these resemble our own.

What may be called Mohammedan music is a complex type. It has resulted from the spread of Mohammedanism along the Mediterranean coast and Northern Africa, and in Central Africa and Southern Asia. It includes features from many sources—Persian, Byzantine Greek, Mediæval Christian, and purely local—and is historically a puzzle. Like the Hindoo scales, the scales which are used in distinctly Mohammedan countries are heptatonic; but the theoretical division of the octave is into seventeen steps (each equal to about one-third of a whole step) instead of the twenty-two srutis of the Hindoos. There are some eighteen of these seven-tone scales in use, varying from each other in the location of their shorter steps.

The five and seven-tone scales on which these musical systems are based are analogous to our own. It is the manner in which they are employed and modified by other factors that makes their music strikingly different from ours. The Chinese, in the first place, have many melodies similar to old Scotch songs, but they are primarily interested, not in the flow of the melody, but in timbre, in the quality and character of sound. Whereas we, as soon as we have defined a sound, pass to the consideration of intonation, duration, etc., the Chinese theoreticians, with rare keenness of perception, have worked out an elaborate division of the quality of sound, according to the phenomena governing its production, classifying it according to eight sound-producing materials provided by Nature—skin, tone, metal, baked clay, silk, wood, bamboo, and gourd. Harmony means to the Chinese what it meant to the ancient Greeks, a purely æsthetic combination of sound and dance. Duple rhythm predominates. Both Chinese melodies and the melodies of the Indo-Chinese are continuous, admitting neither interruption nor repetition. The refrain is very rare, and occurs only in popular songs. Noisy, shrill, and harsh effects abound, disagreeable to our ears. Berlioz said: ‘The Chinese sing like dogs howling, like a cat screeching when it has swallowed a toad.’ But Berlioz could not listen with an understanding ear. No more can we. Such wholesale condemnation must be tempered with respect before the feeling of the illustrious Chinese musician, Konai, who said, ‘When I strike the sonorous stones, either softly or with force, savage beasts leap up with joy and concord reigns between high dignitaries.’

In ancient China music was a privileged amusement of the higher classes, and it has always been under imperial supervision. With the passing of the centuries it has been largely turned over to the vulgar, in street and theatre; and the ancient rules governing its production and performance (there are sixty volumes of classic works alone on the subject) have fallen into disuse. A letter notation is still employed.

The music of Indo-China hardly differs in essentials from that of China, and presents much the same peculiarity in comparison with our own. On the other hand, the music of India is quite distinct, and presents only a few surface similarities to the Mongolian. Hindoo music, according to Captain Day,[15] has lost the primitive purity of Aryan times. The theoretical division of the octave into twenty-two quarter-tones, recorded in Sanscrit books, finds no practical application in modern usage. As in Chinese music, harmony is non-existent; for Hindoo music is purely melodic, and the Vina, the seven-stringed lute used as an accompanying instrument, merely doubles the voice part. But Hindoo music is built, as we have said, upon a system of seven-tone or heptatonic scales which offers far greater opportunity for effect than the pentatonic system of the Chinese. It has, moreover, infinitely more rhythmic variety and its rhythms are triple rather than duple, as is the case with the Chinese. They are capricious and elastic (this due, in part no doubt, to Mohammedan influences), and are usually strongly marked. One of the most characteristic features in Hindoo music, which has no counterpart in Chinese, is the Raga,[16] or traditional type-melody to which texts of varying character are sung. Some of the ragas are especially consecrated to gods and heroes. In general Hindoo airs are marked by long melodic passages, often of no definite design. There are three general divisions: gana (vocal music), vadya (instrumental music), and nytria (dance music). The Hindoos divide all instruments into four classes: quite unlike the Chinese classification: stringed instruments; those with membranes sounded by percussion; those struck in pairs; and those which sound when blown. A Sanscrit notation (characters for notes and signs or words for other details) indicates pitch and duration.

Music in Mohammedan countries has peculiarities which differentiate it quite distinctly from music in China and in India. In India music has always been largely associated with religion, especially in connection with the dance. Mohammedanism has never encouraged religious music. It is true that the chanting of the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer from the minarets; but except this the music which accompanies the dances of the whirling dervishes of Cairo, Bagdad, and Constantinople offers practically the only example of Mohammedan religious music.[17] Nevertheless in the brilliant days of the Abbaside caliphs and the Moorish kings of Spain music was a passion with the Saracens. Haroun-al-Raschid lavished rewards of gold and lands on his musicians and the ‘Thousand and One Nights’ proves in what esteem music was held throughout the Mohammedan Orient at the time of the Caliphate. There was a rich and elaborate musical literature, but the decadence of the Arab civilization brought with it entire oblivion of the many treatises and writings of these glorious days. The old science is forgotten, just as in China the musical wisdom of ancient times has fallen into neglect. Yet throughout the wide territories in which Mohammedanism established itself, that peculiar and distinctive type which more than any other represents Oriental music to us, a type resulting from a mixture of Persian and Arabian styles, complicated with Christian and other influences, has been traditionally handed down to the present day. As in the other systems we have discussed, harmony is practically non-existent. The scales are seven-toned and there are some eighteen theoretical modes. Both duple and triple rhythms are employed with greatest variety. In fact, one of the most striking characteristics of Mohammedan musical art is the variety and complexity of its sharp rhythms. The melodies are excessively adorned with every sort of flourish and ornament, slides, turns, grace-notes, shakes, and arabesques of every description not pleasing to our ears. Popular songs and professional musicians are to be found throughout all the Mohammedan Orient. The love song in particular is held in high esteem in all Mohammedan countries, and the following example may illustrate its charm:

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Villoteau mentions his regret at not having been able to note down ‘the accent of yielding abandonment with which the singers express the voluptuous melancholy which fills the majority of these songs.’ Some of the present-day Persian love-songs are said to be sung to poems of Hafiz. The occupational popular song is also found everywhere. In general, the standpoint taken by the Arab proverb, ‘Who does not hunt, does not love, is not moved by the sound of music nor raptured by the fragrance of blossoms is no man,’ is that of the Mohammedan Orient as regards the art of sound.

Though, strange to say, Arab music at the time of its greatest florescence possessed no system of notation, an elementary alphabetical notation has since been invented and is now in use.

In the main, the differences between Oriental music and our own may be summed up in the words of Saint-Saëns: ‘Oriental musical art is another art. The musical art of antiquity is founded on the combination of melody and rhythm. To these our art adds a third element—harmony.’ And, however much they differ from our own, it should always be borne in mind that ‘the subtly ingenious mathematical subdivisions of the Persians and Arabs, the excessive modal elaboration of the Hindoos, the narrow and constrained stiffness of the Chinese, the ambiguous elasticity of the Japanese, and the truly marvellous artificiality of the Javanese and Siamese systems are all the products of human artistic ingenuity working instinctively for artistic ends.’