While we are content with a scale divided into semitones, the more delicate oriental ear requires quarter tones. The Arab octave is divided into twenty-four intervals. A distinguished musician on a visit to Cairo wrote Helmholtz as follows: “This evening I have listened attentively to the song on the minarets, to try to appreciate the quarter-tones which I had not supposed to exist, as I had thought the Arabs sang out of tune. But today as I was with the dervishes I became certain that such quarter-tones existed.[56]
In discussing the development of our modern, equal temperament (adopted commercially in England for pianos not until 1846), Helmholtz says, “Amiot reports equal temperament from China long previously even to Pythagoras.”[57]
The Chinese are the only people who, thousands of years ago, possessed a system of octaves, a circle of fifths, and a normal tone. With this knowledge, however, their eighty-four scales, each of which has a special philosophical signification, appear all the more incomprehensible to us.[58]
“The Chinese believe their music to be the first in the world. European music they consider to be barbaric and horrible.”[59]
All this goes to show how hazardous it is to jump to the conclusion that what we don’t understand has no meaning.
To one ignorant of Chinese or Japanese or Hebrew handwriting it seems just as absurd and meaningless as a drawing by Picasso or a painting by Kandinsky, but to the earnest
and indefatigable searcher after hidden meanings the strange handwriting and the strange pictures both deliver up a message.
Of such paintings as Kandinsky’s improvisations it is often flippantly said, “They paint that way because they can’t draw.”