[45] Ibid., p. 65.
[46] See Jules Combarieu, Les rapports de la musique et de la poésie, considerées au point de vue de l'expression (1894), wherein there is an elaborate and searching examination of Spencer's theory.
[47] To say nothing of the savage music which is either purely non-verbal, or linked to an almost meaningless refrain.
[48] No importance, I take it, need be attached to such sentences as that the Malays "rehearse in a kind of recitative at their bimbangs or feasts." The word recitative here affords no support for Spencer's theory. Travellers who have written of the music of primitive races have always been prone to use the term too loosely. Accustomed as they are to the highly developed music of Europe, with its fixity of scale and its wide range of instrumental tone, they use the term recitative as the easiest one to indicate, in a rough-and-ready way, a kind of music much less developed than our own in these respects. But such a use of the term is quite unscientific. There is no reason to believe that what we call their recitative is not really their music.
[49] Wallaschek, Primitive Music, pp. 173, 174.
[50] Of course Spencer might have rejoined that the songs in their present state represent the fully developed tree, which had to pass, in remoter times, through the previous stages he mentions. Apart from the general objections I have already urged against this theory, however, it is evident that Spencer cannot have the music of savage races under two categories—song and recitative—using the one or the other as suits the purpose of his argument at the time. It will be seen later that his theory rests, to a very large extent, on the supposition that the music of savages and of Orientals represents only the second or recitative stage of the development from speech.
[51] As Berlioz expressed it in the Grotesques de la musique, "Music exists by itself; it has no need of poetry, and if every human language were to perish, it would be none the less the most poetic, the grandest, and the freest of all the arts."
[52] See the chapters entitled "Orpheus at the Zoo," in Mr. Cornish's Life at the Zoo. Every one who has kept dogs or snakes must have noticed how vivid their musical perceptions are. My own dog has a decided musical faculty in him. He is exceedingly susceptible to the mezzo-soprano voice in the upper part of its middle register. Tones produced there—but no others in that or any other voice—he will try to imitate. It is not a howl, but a real attempt to hit the right pitch and to shape the sound with his mouth. "Excited speech" has nothing to do with his musical perceptions. The excited speech usually comes later, from the singer whom he is favouring with this sincerest form of flattery.
[53] Italics mine.
[54] It seems quite clear that the Greeks had distinct tunes like our melodies, that were passed about from one singer or player to another. "In later times," says Müller, "there existed tunes written by Terpander, of the kind called nomes.... These nomes of Terpander were arranged for singing and playing on the cithara." They were, he goes on to say, "finished compositions, in which a certain musical idea was systematically worked out, as is proved by the different parts which belonged to one of them." There were popular songs, and there were certain tunes that were sung at festivals. Nor was the music invariably associated with poetry; there was music that was purely instrumental. Olympus (B.C. 660-620) seems to have been a musician only. "Olympus is never, like Terpander, mentioned as a poet; he is simply a musician. His nomes, indeed, seem to have been originally executed on the flute alone, without singing." See K. O. Müller's History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Eng. trans.), vol. i. chap. 12. For an expert treatment of the whole subject, see Hugo Riemann's Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, Erster Teil (1904), especially Book I., chap. I., § 3, § 4, § 5.