The art of music, Vol. 05 (of 14)

by Unknown

IV

In the beginning, as we have said, it is probable that everybody made songs for himself. Helen Vacaresco noted a long song improvised by a Roumanian peasant woman who was going mad; the woman was suffering under a great sorrow and was trying to express it. Being simple and without knowledge or fear of artistic forms and laws, she was able to express it. And each day she wandered in the fields singing the song she had composed, changing it little by little. It was not made for the sake of making a song, but for the sake of expressing her sorrow. It was, of course, only half a song and a half a mechanical repetition of her troubles. But it had its beauty of word and something like a set melody; it was an emotion objectified, put into a work of art where it could be looked at and known.

Here was song at its very earliest beginning. It was spontaneous, it was personal, it was utterly sincere. And, because it sought some objective form, it was a primitive work of art. We may imagine the earliest songs starting in just this way. Perhaps this Roumanian peasant woman had her counterpart thousands of years ago. Her song, or part of it, was heard and imitated by others who felt the same sorrow. It was changed in passing from mouth to mouth. Needless words were dropped, weak expressions were strengthened. As men became able to look more clearly at their trouble the essential things in the song were emphasized or put in a more emphatic position. Everything was dropped from it that did not express the very heart of the emotion. The lines perhaps became more rhythmical; the verses began to balance and contrast with each other; the metaphors became more brilliant or more precise. Soon all members of the tribe knew it, and when the young men wandered away to other lands they took the song with them.

At the same time a similar perfecting process was going on in the music. The original melody was perhaps little more than a chant of two or three notes, the tune rising when the emotional pitch was raised and dropping when the movement became more calm. The tune was at first not thought of as a thing in itself. But gradually people became conscious of the two or three notes in their relation and succession. And they began to make them more varied, to express the changes of emotion more accurately. The melody became divided into stanzas and lines corresponding with the words and showed in itself where the thought came to a partial stop and where it began again. Then people began to notice peculiar figures which they had unconsciously put into the melody. They made use of these, balancing or contrasting them to add beauty to the tune. And gradually the melody came to have beauty and meaning of its own.

This series of changes perhaps occupied centuries, for the artistic power of primitive men advances very slowly. The singers had not yet thought of putting this song in rhythm; and it was yet many centuries before they would feel anything like a musical scale. Rhythm had probably developed among people as a thing in itself, not directly connected with musical tones. Rhythmic movement is common to all men—in walking, in running, and in the beating of the heart. Dancing must have arisen spontaneously from an excess of emotion. Such dancing was perhaps accompanied by the clapping of hands, the beating of sticks, or the pounding of some primitive drum. Then with the invention of some primitive musical instrument the tribal musician began to play a simple dance tune in rhythm, a tune of two notes, at first an aimless shifting from one note to another, and later an organized melody with tonal figures and balances and contrasts.

It is probable that these two elements—rhythm and melody—were developed separately and were at first regarded as separate arts. At least it seems certain that singing was at first without rhythm. It must have been a wonderful day when somebody thought of combining the two—of singing the old song with metre and accents. But this, too, must have developed very slowly, being at first no more than an accenting of each alternative note. At the same time the song had probably been divided into line divisions. The singer then probably developed his rhythm from both ends, so to speak, building a more complex series of accents from the single group of two notes, and at the same time subdividing the line into sections. After several more centuries, perhaps, the tribe possessed a song that was fairly metrical and regular.

All this time the notion of a scale—a set succession of notes from which the notes of the tune were to be chosen—was entirely lacking. It came comparatively late in musical development, though it is the first incident in musical history. At first each melody was its own scale. Then, as people began to observe similarities in the tone relations between several melodies, they began to have a conception of the regular succession of tones which was common to all of them. Such a succession, a mode or primitive scale, was of but three or four notes. By arranging the semi-tones several new scales could be formed. And by here and there adding a note above or below the scales could be enlarged.

With the enlargement of the scales melodies became enlarged in range. More opportunities arose for the balancing and contrasting of melodic devices. The tune became more complex, more regular, and more beautiful.

It was now several centuries since the song had first come into existence. Since that time it had undergone perhaps a dozen transformations, each so unlike the other that nobody would have suspected they had any relation. But they were different forms of one and the same song. For songs have ancestors and descendants just as men do. Our song may have had a numerous progeny. As it passed from one province to another certain phrases of the melody lingered in people’s minds and found their way into other songs. Perhaps a line or two of its words became common property and were used as the refrain for a new song. Certainly as people made other songs they perforce made them somewhat in the image of the great ancestor.

Thus for centuries—ten, twenty, or thirty, likely as not—the song was growing and changing, or at least giving birth to children before dying by the wayside. And folk-songs are still alive, growing and changing. It seems possible that the years of their natural life may be numbered, for it is becoming harder every year for them to live in their new environment. But they are still in the land of the living and may continue for centuries to come, and if so they are bound to continue to grow and change. Thirty centuries of growth have not taken place that songs may stop growing right here. Perhaps the songs of to-day may seem as crude to people five hundred years hence as the songs of five hundred years ago seem to us now.