IV

The variety of customs, of traditional observances and usages interwoven with exotic music is endless. Many religious chants, for instance, are fixed by tradition, and are undoubtedly of high antiquity. Such is the chanting of the sacred books in the Temple of the Sacred Tooth in Ceylon, where on each night of the full moon the whole text of the ‘Tripitakas,’ or ‘Three Baskets’ of wisdom, is recited by relays of yellow-robed priests, succeeding each other every two hours between the dark and the dawn. They are said to chant in deep resonant voices, as steady and continuous as the roar of the surf, without break, quaver, or pause. When we consider that Buddhist priests have repeated these sacred texts in this manner on every night of the full moon for twenty-eight centuries, the traditional cantillation of the Koran appears a thing of recent date. The following interesting ‘call to prayer’ of the muezzin has been traditionally handed down, and its chant is supposed to antedate the era of Mohammed:

[PNG] [[audio/mpeg]]

Al-la-ho ak-bar,
Al-la - - - - ho ak-bar,
ach ha-dou en-nâ la i-lah ell Al-lah.
Ach ha-dou en-nâ. Mo-ham-med
ra-soul Al-lah - - - - - Al-la-ho ak-
bar - - - - la i-lah ell Al-lah.

And the Hindoo ragas and mantranis offer further proof of the conserving examples of tradition.

A curious custom among the Chinese of immemorial antiquity is that of attaching whistles weighing only a few grams to the tails of pigeons soon after they emerge from the shell, by means of fine copper wire. The whistles are of two kinds; bamboo, with from two to five tubes, or gourds, with sometimes as many as twenty-five apertures. All the whistles in a flock are tuned to a different pitch. As they fly about Pekin and other cities they fill the air with a sort of wind-blown music. It is interesting as a commentary on the Chinese national love of sweet sounds.

A custom of the Mohammedan Orient is the use of the flute in services for the dead. Modern Arab mortuary hymns are sung to the accompaniment of the flute, and the employment of the instrument in this connection dates back to ancient times. It is customary in almost every occupation in the Orient to sing traditional songs while work is going on. The Arab camel-drivers have a melody of strange intonations and long-drawn-out sounds which may have come down from the days of Antar; the boatmen on the Nile, the fellahin toiling on its banks, the ambulant peddlers of Oriental cities, all have their traditional airs or cries. Some are very poetic; the water carriers of Mecca sing when they dispense their wares: ‘Paradise and forgiveness be the lot of him who gave you this water!’ When, in June, Arab boys offer bunches of fragrant pink jasmine buds, enclosed in fig-leaves, for sale in the streets of Kairowan, those who buy return to their work chanting in a quaint minor key: ‘We render thanks to Allah for sending rain to make the flowers bloom.’ The Burmese love to thresh rice to the sound of music, and the Buddhist nuns in Japan solicit contributions by striking small metal gongs attached to their belt with little wooden hammers carried in their hands. The Hindoo palanquin-bearers, the Japanese rickshaw-men, the Chinese coolies and sampan-men, all have their characteristic songs, most of them traditional, for the East is slow to change.

The art of music in the Orient and the art of music in Western Europe have little in common. It may be that Christian music in the first few centuries of its existence was vaguely similar to that music we have been discussing, but after harmony found its place in our music a comparison between the two arts is far to seek. In Oriental music the dominant feature is rhythm, insistent and often unvaried. This may be partly because rhythm is the most exciting element in music and the most immediate in its appeal, partly because in the Orient music was and is almost never dissociated from the dance or from some sort of regular movement such as rowing or reaping. In our music rhythm is constantly varied and subtly disguised. As for melody, the Orientals are bound to short phrases repeated again and again, lacking contrast and only primitively balanced; and most of their melodies are in scales different from ours. Of harmony they have relatively no idea, whereas the music of Western Europe has been subjected to the tremendously powerful influence of harmony in one form or another for nearly a thousand years. Hence, even though the rhythm and melody in both have come from the same instinct in the race of man, the Western and the Eastern arts of music seem almost radically different.

In general the difference between the two is only exaggerated by the few cases in modern music when composers have made use of Oriental themes or rhythms or instruments. Such cases by no means show a working together or an approach of the two systems; for the mere fact that a certain twist of melody, a certain insistence of rhythm, a beat of the tam-tam or the gong can give a strong Oriental color to music proves how foreign Oriental music still sounds to our ears. It may be said that European music has been influenced by Asiatic music hardly at all, unless, possibly, the prominent, almost barbaric rhythms of some Russian music have sprung from a mixture of the Oriental with the Slav.

F. H. M.

FOOTNOTES:

[12] Musical development of civilized races removed from European influence.

[13] Julien Tiersot: Notes d’ethnographie musicale (première séries), Paris, 1905.

[14] What we may call modern Chinese music probably reached China through Bactria, a Greek kingdom, founded by Diodotus 256 B. C. Jesuit missionaries jumped to the conclusion that the Greeks borrowed the Pythagorean scale from the Chinese, but the ‘Chinese’ scale did not exist in China until two centuries after its appearance in Greece. Chinese literature on music goes back no farther than the ninth century of the Christian era, to which date may be assigned the Chieh Ku Lu, a treatise on the deer-skin drum, introduced into China from Central Asia, and evidently of Scythian origin. There are several important works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which the history and theory of music are fully discussed.

[15] C. R. Day: ‘The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan,’ London, 1891.

[16] The music of a raga, which is very popular in Central India, is given in Tiersot, Notes d’ethnographie musicale, Plate 10.

[17] This finds a curious parallel in the music of the dance of the seis in the Cathedral of Seville—almost the only example of religious dancing in Christianity.

[18] In the ‘dance of Krishna,’ a three-day religious saturnalia in honor of the youthful god, and in the obscene rites of Kali, the black goddess, the devadhazis portray all the phases of physical passion.

[19] ‘A number of young girls slowly and gracefully sway and twist their lithe bodies in rhythm to the music of flageolets playing in minor mode. Most of the time they dance on their knees, bending and twisting, their hair sometimes standing out almost straight, then falling about their heads.’

CHAPTER III
THE MOST ANCIENT CIVILIZED NATIONS

Conjecture and authority—The Assyrians and Babylonians; instruments; scales—The Hebrews—The Egyptians; social aspects; Plato’s testimony; instruments—Egyptian influence on Greek culture and its musical significance.

The researches and discoveries of the past fifty years in the valley of the Nile and among the deeply buried ruins of Babylon and Nineveh have thrown light on much that was hitherto obscure in the history of the ancient cultured nations of the East. Yet, even to-day, our knowledge of that history is at best fragmentary and largely conjectural. Out of the mass of fragments and conjectures at our command we can pick very little that will fit into the structure of an authoritative musical history.

We know definitely that the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Hebrews possessed in their heyday an advanced civilization and a large amount of æsthetic culture. From analogy with other old civilizations of which we have more accurate knowledge, however, we have no reason to suppose that their musical culture kept pace with their advance in other arts. From the plastic to the pictorial and last to the musical seems to have been the historical order of advance in the evolution of artistic expression. Music, to quote John Addington Symonds, ‘is the essentially modern art.’ Nevertheless, even in default of any more specific evidence, we could safely assume that musical culture among the ancient civilized nations had advanced considerably beyond the stage reached by primitive peoples.