The Kings of old had a pride in the number of their trained musicians, as in the number of their horsemen and war-chariots. Music added to the pomp of ceremonial days; it testified to greatness, the throne and the temple alike demanded its aid. In the intervals when wars had ceased, the court had to be provided with music for pastime, and the people to be gratified with spectacles and feastings. The priesthood seem to have been the managers of the shows and to have held control of the music to be played, they being the men of learning; yet so far as I am aware, no record remains to tell what that music was, no indication exists, no hint even that it ever was written down, or a method of notation devised for the guidance of the multitude of players. Surmises there have been that some unexplained markings occurring in Egyptian writings have reference to musical usages, but later authorities do not favour the guesses, which have led to nothing. The temple being the focus of the musical life the music would have been chiefly of the processional kind, and the wonder to us is how it was managed unless there had been an Art of Music in force in those days, remote though they were. How did King Solomon manage his four thousand musicians?
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THE CANE HARP from Borneo, with Tamburine Bells. | Fig. 59 (described page [302]-4.) |
Babylon and Nineveh have left a few slabs with pictures of musicians—that is all. In Egypt we come into the possession of a knowledge considerably wider in range than other ancient lands together have yielded. Through the sacrilege of Time we have been admitted to Tombs and Temples, have shared the prerogative of the gods, seeing the hidden things and life-stories meant for their gaze only, in the darkness that to them was light. A marvellous faith. Those harps were supposed to play though no hand touched them, those pipes to pipe sweet tones that lost themselves in the silence.
Egypt bred men of great genius in the art of war, of great genius in the art of architecture, surely she must have had men great in the art of music. How were these musicians ruled? The beneficent conductor had not then been invented. In truth one would have been of little avail in their grand festival processions, would have been lost amidst the lofty columns of their vast temples. Not a hieroglyph anywhere to tell us how the master musician controlled his hosts “of harpers harping with their harps.”
These old-world pictures speak no words; they shew us six or eight men following in a line, clapping their hands to regulate the accents and rhythm of the musicians; thus they were led, and that is all we know—may be indeed all that we are likely to know. Thus as Keats tells us, the past—
————“doth tease us out of thought,
As doth eternity.”