Those who, seeing the holes that are cut upon a common flute, or oboe, consider that in the origin of the instrument they were so done in order fitly to comport with a musical scale, are wrong in their supposition.
In the primitive making of a flute the holes were cut to suit the spread of the fingers, and the scales which followed as the result of the placing the holes, were accepted by primitive man; the ear got to like the sequence of sounds, and it so worked into the brain of the race, that ages after, it became an intellectually accepted musical scale, or relation of notes and was varied by evolution; the structure of the organ of hearing is the same in every race, so far as we can ascertain, and the same natural laws are obeyed in its exercise. Different races, however, have developed the hearing ear differently as to its choice, because primitively, in the setting out of their instruments there were differences of relation. The lengths of the strings, and the distances of the holes spaced for the convenience of the fingers, ordained the musical scales. Contrast the music of the European and the Asiatic races. Our so-called divine music is to the Chinese miserable, unscientific stuff; and the sounds which please Asiatics as entrancing music, are to us distracting din, positively painful to listen to. The liking of the ear in music is a liking by inheritance, transmitted as a facial type is.
The fingers are the fates of the musical art. Curiously enough, six fingers have been the chief arbiters of the nature of man’s music; and yet how long it was before that number was brought into use. Earliest pipe instruments seem to have employed only two fingers; then the thumb was made available, after that the third finger, and at last the little finger was brought into service; it was, however, the period of the ruling of the six fingers, three of each hand, in which the scales were laid, and the art of music developed. In the stringed instruments there is evidence of similar advance from one string to many. Men learnt slowly the marvellous capacities of the lissome fingers they possess.
We should see a meaning and a purpose in each change and variation in the shape and adaptation of instruments. It may strike you somewhat strangely that you should be set thinking of bits of wood, and pipes and strings, as being aforetime the actual music makers, moulding in fixed forms our musical tendencies. You fancy they are our servants, unaware that they have ruled us earlier than we have ruled them.
My conclusion, curious as it may seem, is put forth seriously, after much study and after long inquisitive looking into things, possibly worth thinking about. Very lately I found a pertinent yet undesigned confirmation of my views in a work by Dr. A. J. Ellis on the “Musical Scales of Various Nations.” As a result of his extensive investigation, he says “The final conclusion is, that the musical scale is not one, not ‘natural,’ nor even founded necessarily on the laws of the constitution of musical sound, but very diverse, very artificial, very captious.” He has actually, as it were, caught the scale in the act of changing by a caprice at the bidding of the finger. On the lute, in the very early Persian and Arabic scales, the middle finger had nothing to do, and to find employment for the lazy finger, a ligature was, on the neck of the lute, tied half way between two existing notes. One Zalzal, a celebrated lutist, who died eleven centuries ago, tied this ligature half way, and so added two notes to the scale. “These notes,” Dr. Ellis says, “became of great importance in Arab music, and effectually distinguished the older Arabic form from the later Greek.”
For the coherence of the views I express upon this question, it is to be implied that pipes and reeds have had an earlier development at the hands of man than strings had, although the latter furnished the first tangible means by which musical ratios were demonstrated by Greek philosophers. In China the first standards of sounds were pipes, and by them the degrees of the scale were fixed historically, yet too complete to have had their real origin elsewhere than in the land of Myth. There also must be placed the origin of the beautiful little “Sheng” to which the Chinese attribute an unknown antiquity.
The term flutes, it is necessary to remember, is in ancient usage of literature applied to include all pipes blown across and likewise those sounded by means of reeds that the breath sets vibrating.
All the world over men have found delight in fluting, and the flute as an instrument appears to be the common property of the human race. Either of bones of animals or birds, of reeds or alders, of stones or of clay, the art of man has fashioned flutes from the beginning of time’s records.
Seeking to trace man’s earliest musical instruments it will become plain to us that life moves very slowly. How little is really new; variation follows variation. See what a long process thought is. It takes a whole race many centuries to think a new thought, and embody it.
The Greeks as themselves acknowledged were indebted to the Egyptians for their chief instruments. The invention of the flute is attributed to the god Osiris, who lived when the world was young—ages ago; Osiris, the dead god of the blue river, the ancestor of history, the river known to all our race as oldest of rivers. When our thoughts dwell upon “old Nile,” how memory-haunting are the lines in which Leigh Hunt describes it;—read softly,